ASUCD Senate meetings are scheduled to begin Thursdays at 6:10 p.m. Times listed are according to the reporter’s watch during the May 8 public meeting location, the Memorial Union’s Coffee House.

Meeting started at 6:15 p.m.

Ivan Carrillo, ASUCD president, arrived 6:46 p.m., left at 6:55 p.m.

Molly Fluet, ASUCD vice-president, present

Rebecca Schwartz, ASUCD senator pro tempore, present

Andrew Bianchi, ASUCD senator, present

Sergio Blanco, ASUCD senator, present

Chris Dietrich, ASUCD senator, present

Erica Oropeza, ASUCD senator, present

Ramneek Saini, ASUCD senator, present

Lula Ahmed-Falol, ASUCD senator, present

Chad Roberts, ASUCD senator, absent

Rebecca Lovell, ASUCD senator, present

Jesse Rosales, ASUCD senator, present

Joe Chatham, ASUCD senator, present

Tracy Zeng, ASUCD senator, absent

Presentations

Representatives of the University Centennial Plans presented upcoming plans beginning fall of 2008 for the UC Davis Centennial celebration.

Representatives from Lobby Corps made a presentation on their program and what they have been doing for capitol advocacy.

Consideration of old legislation

Senate Bill 53, seen as urgent, authored by Fluet, coauthored by Sam Hardie, introduced by Ahmed-Falol, to allocate $800 from Senate Reserves to Safeboats 2008 to ensure student health and safety on this year’s houseboats trip to Lake Shasta, passed unanimously.

Senate Bill 52, authored and introduced by Lovell, to prohibit note passing of the ASUCD Senate during Unit Director Reports, presentations, and Appointments and Confirmations, failed 3-7-1.

Senate Bill 49, authored by the Environmental Policy and Planning Commission, co-authored and introduced by Zeng, to amend the ASUCD Bylaws to include a zero-waste policy for environmental sustainability, passed unanimously.

Public announcements

Jay Lytton, junior neurobiology, physiology, and behavior major and president of the Autism Awareness Club applauded ASUCD for having a public meeting and announced a May 21 meeting at Lamppost Pizza from 4 to 9 p.m.

Appointments and confirmations

Business and Finance Commission

Greg Webb, commissioner

Meeting adjourned at 10:30 p.m.

ANGELA RUGGIERO compiles the senate briefs and can be reached at campus@californiaaggie.com.

Rising food prices around the world are forcing people to think twice about what they buy at the grocery store.

Among the factors are high oil prices, which have in turn increased production costs on the farm, marketing and processing aspects. Weather changes that have affected harvests, increased use of corn for biofuels and imports – which are more expensive due to the weak U.S. dollar – are also to blame, said Daniel Sumner in an e-mail interview. Sumner is the director of the UC Davis-based University of California Agricultural Issues Center.

“In a nutshell, the commodity crisis across the board has risen very sharply over the last four months,” said Colin Carter, professor of agricultural and resource economics. “Some of the prices increase started before that. There will be an impact on California agriculture to the extent that some farmers will alter their production decisions to take advantage of high prices like expanded production of corn and wheat.”

While incomes of poor people in countries like China and India are experiencing steady growth, they have stopped growing their own food because they now have enough money to buy food.

Retail food prices went up by about 5 percent or so over the past year, which is slightly more than general inflation. Some products, like milk and eggs, went up more, Sumner said.

Where the rise in food prices may be an inconvenience for some people, it has a greater effect on poorer households.

“The average American spends 10 percent or some of their income on food, so this is not a major income item for most people,” Sumner said. “Any increase in living costs matters to the poor, and higher prices for some items will affect government programs to help the poor – food stamps, school lunch program budgets, and the Women Infants and Children program that provides supplementary support for food for pregnant women and families with small children.”

A few types of specialty rice, like basmati rice, may be more expensive, but general consumer impacts will be moderate.

“Crop farmers have been doing well with high prices despite higher input costs,” Sumner said. “That is true in California and elsewhere.”

The crisis, however, lies among the poor in developing countries, who are now suffering even more.

“They have seen prices of farm-based commodities that they buy as bulk items [like] rice, wheat and corn jump by 50 percent or 100 percent,” Sumner said. “We need to assure that food markets continue to be flexible and to facilitate trade. We can also drop our wasteful and distorting policy in the U.S. to shift food to fuel with huge subsidies and trade barriers. That makes no sense on any economic criterion and is helping to make food more costly around the globe.”

Pam Ronald, a professor in UC Davis’ department of plant pathology, sees genetic engineering and organic farming as important tools for the future of food production.

“Genetic engineering is a way to generate modified seeds,” Ronald said. “The process is different from conventional breeding, but the result is the same. You can take that seed and put it into any farming system because a seed is a seed. When you think about using genetic engineered seed in an organic farming system you benefit from the seed and from using those productive farming systems that are ecologically favorable.”

Organic farming eliminates pesticides and harmful fertilizer, which have negative consequences on the environment.

“They are both very important tools that [we] need to be considering if you look at some of the land use issues that we have,” Ronald said. “Looking into the future, we are going to have to use twice as much land in the next 30 years. We need to produce more food on less land. Seed and farming practices are only parts of the solution.”

POOJA KUMAR can be reached at city@californiaaggie.com XXX.

Esparto, Yolo County’s largest rural unincorporated community, recently received two EPA Brownfields Assessment grants to help with its downtown revitalization project.

The two grants are for $200,000 each and will evaluate the presence of hazardous substances and petroleum, respectively, at certain locations within the community.

According to the Brownfields 2008 Grant Fact Sheet by the EPA, “A brownfield site is real property, the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant or contaminant.”

The grants were given to Esparto because the city is already known to have these particular hazardous materials and a number of brownfields in prime downtown areas.

“We’ve already been assessed, and we have hazardous substances,” said executive director of the Esparto Regional Chamber of Commerce Elizabeth Campbell. “We know there’s petroleum and other hazardous substances seeping, and we know that it’s a lengthy process to get rid of this stuff.”

Although the assessment process and actually cleaning up the hazardous material in the city will take a long time, it is a necessary step toward city self-improvement, said Yolo County manager of economic development Wes Ervin. Esparto has undergone a 20-year decline where the city lost its pharmacy, gas station, bank and other downtown amenities.

“The community is working very hard to revitalize its downtown revitalization project,” Ervin said.

Now that the grants have been given to Esparto, there will be a three-phase approach for how they will be utilized in finding the brownfield sites.

The first phase is the communitywide screening of all potential sites that have a historical or industrial history of contamination, Ervin said. After the initial survey, Yolo County will submit a work plan by June 2 of which areas to investigate further, and will receive funds for further investigation in October.

After the areas are surveyed, there will be an environmental assessment site inspection where, with the permission of the owner, the consultant expert will go to the site and conduct a more thorough examination of the land. The third phase will occur when and if the expert finds the worst cases of contamination. Then measures will be taken to get rid of the contamination by moving piles of material and taking samples of the soil to see if the water supply was contaminated.

Although the city’s economy has been affected by the hazardous waste, due to the closing of buildings because of contamination, the health of the community members has not been affected by the presence of the hazardous material.

“We’re not aware of any health hazards,” Ervin said. “The county’s environmental health department inspects all existing operations.”

Even though the downtown revitalization plans will have to wait until the hazardous wastes have been taken care of, Esparto has already planned different ways to build up the city.

“We’ve already set aside money for streetscape improvements, and we are finding funds so a nonprofit can acquire one or more of the buildings downtown to renovate them and lease them to other businesses so they won’t be vacant anymore,” Ervin said.

ALEX BULLER can be reached at city@californiaaggie.com.XXX

It may sound too strange to be true, but engineers are about to begin work on a project that would keep carbon dioxide out of the air by injecting it into the ground.

A pilot project will equip a Kern County power plant with the ability to capture 1 million tons of carbon dioxide byproduct and inject it into geologic formations 7,000 feet below the Earth’s surface.

“These are underground formations where oil and gas have been pumped out before, so there’s space in there where you can put the carbon dioxide,” said Joan Ogden, an environmental science and policy professor at UC Davis. “Normally, it would be released into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change.”

Most power plants in California, including the test plant, use natural gas to generate electricity. Carbon dioxide is a byproduct of the process and is normally released into the atmosphere or bottled in small amounts for other uses.

As with any new technology, there are health and safety concerns.

“The question is will it stay down there,” said Ogden. “There’s a lot of work going on right now to make sure that what you put down there stays.”

Carbon dioxide is not flammable but is an asphyxiant in large quantities, she said.

“Carbon dioxide is heavier than air, so it tends to stay near ground level,” she said. “If you had a big leak all of a sudden … you’d want to put it where the wind could disperse the CO2.”

Ogden said this is not difficult to achieve, and a plant would never be sited in an area where a leak would present a lethal danger.

The project is being supported by a new $65.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to the California Energy Commission. An additional $24.9 million is being provided by the partners of the West Coast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership.

The test plant will be constructed by Clean Energy Systems of Rancho Cordova and will have a 50 megawatt capacity, enough to power 50,000 homes, CEO Keith Pronske said in an e-mail interview.

Pronske, who graduated from UC Davis with a degree in mechanical engineering, said the technology is based on hardware developed and tested at UC Davis in 2001. A 500-megawatt natural gas power plant produces about 2 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, he said, but he doesn’t expect to run out of underground storage space anytime soon.

“Studies show there are sufficient geological structures to store quantities of CO2 for several centuries,” Pronske said. “Presumably, we’ll be on to other fuel sources before we run out of storage space.”

The results of the pilot project will be analyzed and the lessons from this will be applied to future uses, said California Energy Commission spokesperson Adam Gottlieb. Carbon sequestration works better in some locations than in others, he said.

“The central valley is geologically perfect for this type of research because of the way the earth is structured, the way the strata are configured,” he said. “Other regions are using different versions of the application.”

The pilot project is a step toward a sustainable future, he said.

“We are clearly stepping through the 21st century to make California’s carbon footprint noticeably smaller,” he said. “California has always been a pioneer…. When it comes to this type of technology, California will be both an industry leader and an environmental leader.”

The technology could have serious implications for electric vehicles. Although electric vehicles don’t burn fossil fuels, some critics say they don’t help climate change because emissions still happen at the power plant where the electricity is generated. With a zero-emissions power plant, however, this would not be a concern.

“If you combine zero-emissions power plants with electric cars, you’ve got a home run, as there would be no carbon emissions from stationary or mobile sources,” Pronske said.

For more information on carbon sequestration technology or the pilot project, go to westcarb.org.

JEREMY OGUL can be reached at city@californiaaggie.com. XXX