Green Collars

Reporting from Sacramento -- If swimmers in Santa Monica Bay bump into trash or bacteria this summer, one culprit will be California's budget impasse. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of voter-approved projects have been halted because of the state's financial problems. That includes $12 million that the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission was counting on to prevent dirty storm water and filthy runoff from draining into the bay.

"People expect to be able to enjoy the beach and not come home sick," said state Sen. Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills), chairwoman of the state Senate Water and Natural Resources Committee.


I am particularly insulted by this statement by Mrs. Pavely. What she fails to account for are the several million vehicle miles traveled each year to get to the beach from inland suburbia; the massive stormwater runoff caused by dozens of square miles of roadway asphalt required to service the private transport of each suburban weekender; the hundreds of cubic hectares of trash Angelinos generate through the wasteful packaging of all that heedless consumer junk they buy; and the billions in taxes they fail to pay for the state services they are "expected to enjoy."

The California budget problem is easy to solve; it's as easy as living within your means. The real problem is, we don't want to. We want services such as bacteria-proof recreational venues while we refuse to tax ourselves for that privilege. Or we refuse to charge thirteen bucks per beach visitor. Or, most importantly, we refuse to change our lifestyles so that trash and bacteria never get into the fucking bay to begin with.

These are green jobs at stake, folks. That's what you're being led to believe. Just like calling landfill methane gas a "green energy source" while ignoring the thousands of tons of burnt fossil fuels needed to create the trash and to haul it to the landfill, cleaning up a bay that should have never been polluted to begin with is somehow, now, a green enterprise.

And it produces GDP! Yep, our economy is "stimulated" when a bloom of bacteria chokes off all the oxygen and humans come in to clean it up. Our economy "grows" when a container ship rams the SF Bay Bridge pier, loses 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel, and humans come in to clean it up. Those are green jobs, folks. We need more green jobs according to our administrators...what better way to "stimulate" our economy than to hire thirty million Californians to pollute our environment and hire thirty thousand more to come it to clean up after them.

This is what we're gonna do. Hire several tens of thousands of roadworkers, make believe they're wearing green collars, have them build several hundred HOV lane miles with several hundred thousand tons of concrete and asphalt, employ them as 'high efficiency' lanes and tell ourselves this is gonna save our planet, while hiring another few thousand people to clean up after all the air pollutants, traffic deaths, and automobile disposals those new commuters create.

Real green, eh?