San Joaquin Valley - Brian Jensen

home

I'm interested in helping solve the air quality problem in the San Joaquin Valley in California. This is a personal interest of mine in that I grew up there, seen the air quality deteriorate over my life time and have loved ones that suffer the affect of bad air quality there. The valley has some of the worst air quality in the county second in the country for smog forming pollution, first in the country for particulate pollution. The health effects are serious.
Not taking health effects into consideration, it is almost always cheaper to pollute than it is to consider less polluting air solutions. The economics around air pollution have to be looked at as a whole, taking into account the costs related of increased health care and lower quality of life.

There are many actions that can be taken to improve the air quality. Most of these come at a cost through incentivizing and/or regulation:

Stop all in-field agricultural and forest waste burning. Shift to grinding into small enough particles to be used for a soil amendments or haul waste to wood burning power plant (much cleaner than field burning) and run the plant to meet peak electricity needs.
Require better pollution controls on oil and gas industry. Oil and gas facilities are the largest stationary sources of direct PM2.5 in the San Joaquin Valley. Bakersfield is one of the most polluted cities in the country.
Install cleaner burning fireplaces/wood stoves.
Greatly reduce small gas engine use, I'm working on a solution for this.
Install workplace electric vehicle charging to incentivize EV driving and charging off-peak.
Greatly reduce harvest dust generation, almond and other harvesting, by requiring new harvesting equipment include dust reduction technologies and to follow dust reduction guidelines with existing equipment.

There are many many more solutions to clean the air, we need to be creative about it.

Photo to right are tree piles ready to be burned in-field.

Some Links:

Forest waste to energy

Most polluted cities

Current air quality

Another current air quality

SJVAir real-time PM2.5 data

USDA/Forest Service report

City of Fresno report

City of Visalia report

Fertilizer source of NOx emissions