Take a look…

The Cycle of Insanity: The Real Story of Water – TRAILER 1 from Surfrider Foundation San Diego C on Vimeo.

Photo credit sevendamron, flickr.

Tonight, July 27, the Dana Point City Council will consider a resolution about the use of plastic bags at businesses in Dana Point. As drafted, the proposal is for VOLUNTARY restrictions on plastic bags.

As a Board member of the Dana Point Earth/Ocean Society, I would like to ask YOU for a show of support to invite the City Council to take a bolder stand in favor of a clean ocean.

We (The Dana Point Earth/Ocean Society) are asking the Dana Point City Council to adopt a MANDATORY program (voluntary programs don’t work) with these features:

1. Set a mandatory date for retailers and businesses to adopt the program.  We suggest March 1, 2010.  This date will especially allow retailers to use any Holiday related wrappings.
2. Allow business to apply for a hardship exemption for a certain period of time, say 6 months or the City could provide some form of funding to ease any financial burden retailers might face (waste or higher costs for non-plastic bags) and get the retailer/business to comply.
3. Ask businesses to encourage customers to bring their own reusable bags and require all retail establishments to provide only recyclable paper bags, biodegradable bags or reusable bags at the checkout.

Click here or on the image below to see the full text of a letter the Earth/Ocean Society will present to the City Council tonight in PDF form.

Earth/Ocean Society Request to Dana Point City Council. Click to view PDF of letter.

Here’s the Call to Action, people…

If you agree with this proposal to improve the Ocean water quality by banning those ecologically harmful plastic shopping bags from Dana Point, a highly traveled ocean-side community,

please add your name and city of residence in the comments section below.

We will add your support to this letter when submitted to the city council.

I made the personal decision to transition to biodiesel four years ago and very quickly learned that in Southern California, that is unusually difficult to accomplish.

In all of Southern California (I’m talking from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border), there are less than 20 stations where a regular-Joe consumer can pump biodiesel into your tank.

Because of a new piece of legislation, now there are almost none. Consider this map:

Retail Biodiesel Stations

Notice that Southern California is extremely sparse. 20 stations for a population of 18 million. Look at the mid-west. (There are some good reasons for this, but even factoring those reasons into consideration, Southern California has a hugely disproportionate dearth of available retail biodiesel, no matter how you cut the data.)

A recent ruling by the California State Water Resources Control Board has eliminated underground storage of biodiesel. You can easily imagine, all typical retail gas stations store the fuel underground.

The result? Biodiesel is even harder to acquire, which leaves those of us with diesel vehicles and a desire to burn vegitable oil (biodiesel) no choice but to buy the regular, old petro-diesel, which redirects our fuel dollars from largely American farmers and small businesses to far-flung, oil-rich countries.

Check out this editorial from the LA Times on the subject here: