[Michelle Levinson, ERG Graduate Student]

Image Source: East Bay Times

This has been a terrifying year. Earthquakes, hurricanes, heat waves, and floods — the news sounds like a chapter from the Book of Revelation, or a scene from the dystopian future that Octavia Butler envisioned 25 years ago. We know that these traumas and calamities are experienced first and worst by those with the fewest resources and means for resilience, and this truth has played out in the varied impacts of storm flooding in Houston, Puerto Rico, and Bangladesh.

I have read articles and “reacted” to posts on social media; I have donated (grad-school-budget-sized amounts) to causes; I’ve traded updates and insights with family, friends, and random strangers. Yet while these disasters have caught my attention, I have primarily managed them on the rational side of my mind — acknowledging all of this loss, but also wondering what I would have for lunch and whether the 6-bus would be running on time. This is to say, the remote traumas of others stayed emotionally remote to me, and I think to many others as well.

Disaster elicited a very different and emotional reaction this week, after landing so much closer to home. On Sunday morning, I woke up to a string of texts among my family. My aunt and uncle had been evacuated from their home at 2 AM the night before. They awoke to a loud banging on the door and saw the hills above them glowing orange. Now they are with my family in Oakland, still waiting to learn the fate of their home. Many have not been so lucky.

This tragedy reaches deep into the ERG and Berkeley communities, though the fires rage two counties away. It is not just the immediate loss of life, home, and community that we mourn, but also the little things we take for granted. For me, this is my bicycle commute.

Wednesday morning I checked the air quality and decided that 73 AQI was good enough to ride my bike to school. Maybe I would go a bit more slowly than usual, but I had my inhaler in my backpack (as always) and was desperate for some exercise to release some of the stress of midterm season. After all, I make this ride multiple times a week and am in pretty good shape. On a normal day, I don’t even need to puff my inhaler before going on a jog.

But five minutes into my forty-minute ride, I knew something was wrong. There weren’t many other cyclists on the street, which was abnormal. I pedaled past an unusual number of babies and children waiting with their guardians to cross the street to the pediatrics unit of Kaiser Permanente. By the time I was two miles into my five-and-a-half-mile ride, I was very short of breath.

For me, an asthmatic episode comes on slowly, straining my breathing and then constricting my chest in the way you might feel right before you start to cry. Yet the instinct to take a deep breath to calm myself and reset leaves me even more scarce for air. In these moments, it is hard not to let your thoughts rush and fear mount, but nerves are far more hurtful than helpful. In fact, it is because my asthma is so well managed that I am unfamiliar with handling the symptoms when they do arise. I am privileged to always have had access to quality healthcare, but my experience is common among children that grew up in Oakland.

I would rather that experiences like this stay rare, but I am not deluded. The effects of climate change are projected to increase prevalence of asthma triggers, like longer pollination seasons and ground-level ozone. As this week’s tragic events in the North Bay attest, fires are another awful face of these threats, driven in part by climate change. Whether it is the asthma attack of a cyclist in Oakland or the tragedy of losing your home in Santa Rosa, the havoc of climate change has come home.

I am proud to be a member of the ERG community. We have the opportunity, and the obligation, to apply our training, knowledge, and skills to this great challenge whose consequences are known too well, both near and far. Today, we also urge you to consider volunteering or donating to support the communities in the North Bay, and throughout California, that have been ravaged by fire this October.

Thanks to Jesse Strecker for his thoughtful comments on an early draft of this post.

Note: The views expressed here belong solely to the author of each entry and are not representative of the position of the Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley.

[Rachel Golden, ERG graduate student]

My alarm goes off at 4:30 on Saturday morning in a hotel room in Chowchilla, a small city (under 20,000) in the San Joaquin Valley, that feels like a deserted rural town. Unsure if I have slept at all, I slip quietly out of the hotel and slowly drive through a thick darkness. Silently freaking out and cursing Siri, I drive for 20 minutes in the wrong direction on the I-99. My counterparts later teased me that “you city folk don’t know how to drive in the Valley.”  It’s true, I’ve gotten lost twice in 24 hours.

Once I reorient and backtrack, I begin to see cars lined up like a silent train along the side of the road, about a mile from the Chowchilla fairground. The fairground parking lot is where Valley Clean Air Now (ValleyCAN) will be hosting the “Tune In and Tune Up” event in a few hours.  Hundreds of people spent Friday night in their cars alone, with loyal friends, or with their families to get a place near the front of the line. Several people even arrived at noon the day before in order to ensure entrance to the event. The lined-up cars are old. Really old. Most are “pre-OBDIIs,” (made before 1996) and are classified as some of the most polluting cars on California’s roadways.  It is said that cars are born in California’s coastal cities (like the Bay Area) and come to die in the Central Valley. Only, they don’t die. These cars clunk around for well beyond their expected lifespan on expensive life-support, because people have few options for transportation and depend on these wheels for groceries, work, and taking kids to school.

Jose in the early morning directing cars into the parking lot from where they were parked (and slept in) overnight

The people in line aren’t sleeping in their cars to get Taylor Swift tickets. Or a selfie with Barak Obama. They are there for a free smog screening and a $500 voucher to get the needed car repairs for passing the smog test—a prerequisite in California for keeping your car registered. Wait, this is a story about SMOG TESTS? No! Okay, yes. Well, sort of. It’s really a story about much more. This is a story about community groups coming together from all parts of life to make living a bit easier and healthier.

Some quick stats to set the context:

• Smog (i.e. ground level ozone), which is just one of the forms of air pollution caused by cars, can cause asthma, hurt the linings of lungs, aggravate chronic lung diseases such as emphysema and bronchitis, and reduce the immune system’s ability to fight off bacterial infections in the respiratory system.
• The San Joaquin Valley is home to the worst air quality in the country and has some of the highest rates of childhood asthma in California.
• Those most impacted by smog are children, adults who exercise or engage in outdoor physical labor (think agricultural and construction workers), and those with continued exposure (think everyone who lives in the Valley).
• Smog’s not all. These nearly 2-decade old cars also produce considerable hazardous air pollution, contributing to increased risk of cancer, heart and lung diseases, and diabetes.

I pull up to the fairground gates at 5:45am to see Tom Knox standing in the dark wearing his white ValleyCAN t-shirt and holding a bottomless cup of black coffee. Tom seems to be in a long-term relationship with caffeine, and this event, “Tune In and Tune Up,” is their baby. Tom is the executive director of ValleyCAN and has generously met with me weekly for my research. I spend the next hour discussing the day’s logistics with him and the event manager Jose Martin, a community organizer from outside of Guadalajara, Mexico. Jose tirelessly travels up and down the Valley, building support from community groups for these events, which occur every other weekend as far north as San Joaquin County and as far south as Kern County.

At 6:30am the sun starts to rise and Jose opens the gates to the fairground parking lot. We see the silent train come to life as over 500 cars turn on their engines one by one and roll into the lot, which is lined with orange cones and tents staffed by people in orange vests. Many of the cars are without license plates, about half are unregistered, yet most people are smiling because they are a few feet closer to getting that voucher to clean up their cars. 

Lideres Campesinas, the women who cook lunch for all participants and provide community education for farmworkers about sexual assault and abuse

To a bird in the sky, this event just looks like a parking lot. But on the ground, there is more than meets the eye. The traffic is directed and the event managed by local community groups, like gang prevention groups, who get a modest payment and work experience. The cars are screened by local, top smog testers and students from community colleges across the Valley. In school, the students only see one car a day, but out here they see up to 550 in a day. The students soon become experts, able to open up their own local smog test shops and return here as teachers. Women from the group Lideres Campesinas get paid to cook a free lunch for all participants and set up their table of educational flyers for agricultural workers about sexual assault and violence. Three radio stations set up their tents to blast music and broadcast live from the fairground parking lot to cover the event.

Veronica, who manages a pilot program funded by the San Joaquin Valley Air District that gives qualifying low-income Valley residents up to $5,000 to retire their old car and purchase and lease a new cleaner model

And in a small tent off to the side sits Veronica, who manages a pilot program funded by the San Joaquin Valley Air District that gives qualifying low-income Valley residents up to $5,000 to retire their old car and purchase and lease a new cleaner model. Paired with California’s Clean Vehicle Rebate Program, low-income drivers can get up to $12,000 to purchase or lease an advanced car like a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEVs). Since there are no PHEVs in dealerships in the Central Valley and inadequate chargers to keep these cars moving, most drivers opt for a smaller rebate for a less advanced vehicle, like a used minivan or occasionally maybe even an early-model Prius.

I can’t help wondering if some Berkeley environmentalists’ eyes are rolling. Cars are evil. Why aren’t they getting electric vehicles? What about public transit? We shouldn’t even be farming in the Valley anyway.

Yes, I know. Maybe I’m just sleep deprived, but the way I see it:  People live here, in the Valley. For their livelihood they need to drive long distances.

• Until we can make major system-wide changes so we can live in balance with the natural environment…
• Until state regulators (CPUC and CEC), utilities, and industry groups get EV charging stations installed at scale…
• Until the California Air Resources Board deploys hundreds of millions of dollars of cap-and-trade revenue to counties and community groups to increase low-income people’s access to EV cars, buses, and trucks…

Until any of this happens, simply retiring the oldest fleet and getting people into cleaner cars is the best game in town.

Until any of this happens, simply retiring the oldest fleet and getting people into cleaner cars is the best game in town.

Although it may make many environmentalists queasy, getting cars built in 1995 and earlier off the road for good, and replacing them with LEVIIs (cars made since 2008) will bring considerable air quality benefits to the Valley (i.e. reduced NOx, SOx, smog, particulate matter), improve fuel efficiency, and ease the financial burden for low-income people who are car dependent. This is just one first step in a longer-term game plan towards turning over the fleet and making way for near-zero emission vehicles.

In the meantime while the low carbon solution is being simmered and seasoned in state agencies and prodded by green groups, an under-the-radar smog event — which under most circumstances sounds like the last place to spend a Saturday afternoon — actually feels like a community party with music trumpeting, free food sizzling on the grill, and a team of unlikely partners bonding over a job well done.


Note: The views expressed here belong solely to the author of each entry and are not representative of the position of the Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley.