California Moves to Revoke Carbon Credits After Inquiry

Responding to the first of your two questions:
“a. Why is CA shipping hazardous material halfway across the continent to a facility not under its jurisdiction when it could be taking care of its own waste?”
There is the CA that imposes these regulations and benefits from them by shipping “its own waste” to the part of CA (and US) that pays the price. Try a web search for “Duroville”, for example, in chronological order:
http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/~hfairchi/News/psychology/SouthlandsSlumsFarmworkersLAT032607.htm
The Southland’s hidden Third World slums
In the Coachella Valley, hundreds of trailer parks house desperately poor Latino workers amid burning trash, mud, contaminated water. By David Kelly
Times Staff Writer
March 26, 2007
THERMAL, CALIF. — Like most of their neighbors in the sprawling, ramshackle Oasis Mobile Home Park, the Aguilars have no heat, no hot water. On cold nights, the family of eight stays warm by bundling up in layers of sweaters and sleeps packed together in two tiny rooms.
Bathing is a luxury that requires using valuable propane to boil gallons of water. So the farmworker clan spends a lot of time dirty.
Jose Aguilar, a wiry 9-year-old, has found a way around the bath problem. He just waits until dinner. “My mom makes frijoles ,” he said, “then I take a bath in that water.”
Jose and his family live in a world few ever see, a vast poverty born in hundreds of trailer parks strung like a shabby necklace across the eastern Coachella Valley.
Out here — just a few miles from world-class golf resorts, private hunting clubs and polo fields — half-naked children toddle barefoot through mud and filth while packs of feral dogs prowl piles of garbage nearby.
Thick smoke from mountains of burning trash drifts through broken windows. People — sometimes 30 or more — are crammed into trailers with no heat, no air-conditioning, undrinkable water, flickering power and plumbing that breaks down for weeks or months at a time.
“I was speechless,” said Haider Quintero, a Colombian training for the priesthood who recently visited the parks as part of his studies. “I never expected to see this in America.”
http://health.universityofcalifornia.edu/category/spotlight/page/19/
Bringing hope and health to Duroville
March 9, 2010. Tags: Medical education, Students
uch_uci_durovillestoryA dusty trailer-home park near the Salton Sea may seem like an unconventional venue for medical education, but to a group of UC Irvine students, it’s ideal.
At Duroville — a 40-acre tract in the Coachella Valley that’s home to some 4,000 mostly Latino farmworkers and laborers — they’re providing essential healthcare to an impoverished community while gaining real-life experience.
“This is my mission,” says Tatianne Velo, a third-year student. “This is why I’m going to medical school.”
Duroville is a California few ever see. Officially, it doesn’t even exist. A shantytown erected on the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indian Reservation, it’s named after the landowner, Harvey Duro.
Here, an open body of water serves as a sewage lagoon, and children play on a dioxin-contaminated landfill. Most residents speak only Spanish or the native language Mixtec and work all day in the blast-furnace heat of the desert. Injury and illness are often overlooked if a day’s pay is at stake. Few have health insurance.
http://www.river-of-hope.org/duroville/wp1/lawmakers-visit-mecca-and-thermal/
June, 2011
California lawmakers, holding an oversight hearing in a rural school in Thermal, heard impassioned testimony from residents Friday as well as the concession from a state official that her agency’s mishandling of toxic waste permitting at a Mecca processing plant was “embarrassing.”
The hearing, held by the state Assembly’s Committee on Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials, also explored why, in a state with some of the nation’s strictest hazardous waste standards, investigators failed to enforce against the soil-recycling facility believed responsible for a foul odor that until recently drifted through the area. The facility, Western Environmental Inc., has operated for more than seven years without the required state permits.
http://www.scpr.org/programs/madeleine-brand/2012/06/04/26799/illegal-trash-dumping-impacts-eastern-coachella-va/
In the first of a three-part series on what happens to our trash, KPCC’s Ruxandra Guidi takes us to the Lawson Dump, located on tribal land in the small town of Mecca in the Eastern Coachella Valley. About 150 miles east of Los Angeles, the dump is home to 40 acres of garbage that rises two stories high — a toxic collection of electronic waste, household chemicals and construction debris.
There’s ash, residue from nearby grape fields that have been treated with pesticides. Years ago, this pile of trash was incinerated — today, it’s still smouldering.
“That’s burning underground,” says Environmental activist, Luis Olmedo, from Comite Civico del Valle, or Civic Committee of the Valley. “And you know, that stench is of chemicals? Look how creepy that looks, coming from under the ground. Who knows how deep this fire is?”
The fact that it’s still burning at all is a problem. That’s because the dump was shut down by the Environmental Protection Agency six years ago.
http://www.pe.com/articles/duroville-678572-park-mobile.html
BY DAVID OLSON / STAFF WRITER
Published: June 28, 2013 Updated: June 26, 2014 5:39 p.m.
The rivers of raw sewage no longer flow through Duroville, the ramshackle mobile home park near the Salton Sea where more than 4,000 people once lived in squalor.
The tangled electrical wiring is gone. The garbage dump next door is closed, no longer spewing toxic ashes into residents’ yards. Brown water doesn’t come out of trailers’ faucets.
After a decade of legal battles to shut it down, Duroville is finally scheduled to close Sunday, June 30, by court order. Only the mobile-home park’s namesake and owner, Harvey Duro, and his family members will be allowed to stay.
Tom Flynn, appointed by a federal judge as a receiver to oversee Duroville for the past four years, said the scale of misery was overwhelming.
“A lot of the issues we dealt with were Third World safety and health issues,” said Flynn, who previously worked at the U.S. mission to the United Nations. “I’d never seen that in the United States.”
Many of the former residents are now settled in Mountain View Estates, a 181-unit mobile home park six miles away that was built as replacement housing for Duroville.
Others moved over the past several months into subsidized or market-rate apartments, houses or mobile homes. The last few Duroville families were scheduled to move out by Sunday.
Most of the adults who lived at Duroville are farmworkers who earn the $8 minimum wage or just above for the often backbreaking work of picking grapes, lettuce and lemons that end up on Inland kitchen tables. A space in a decrepit mobile-home park was all many of them could afford.
Advocates for residents celebrated the demise of Duroville.
But Ilene Jacobs, director of litigation, advocacy and training for the nonprofit California Rural Legal Assistance, which represented four Duroville tenants in the court case, said Duroville never should have been allowed to fester for so long.
“There’s no excuse for our clients to have had to live in the unbelievably substandard and dangerous conditions at Duroville,” Jacobs said.