The Megacities project “will show that there is a significant impact in what we do,” says Romel Pascual, Los Angeles’ deputy mayor for the environment. “When we talk about L.A. being green, people roll their eyes. They won’t believe it, right? That’s because of the history of L.A. But when you look at the numbers of us hitting major milestones, L.A. is near the top.”
One morning in January, I pile into a Toyota Prius with Duren and Megacities colleagues Stan Sander and Eric Kort and take a spin up the rock-strewn roads of Mount Wilson. The trees are all scorched and leafless from the last forest fire, so there’s an excellent view of the smog. It looks like a volcano vomited up an ocean of brown foulness that spread over the L.A. Basin and now is lapping against the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
In many ways, Los Angeles is an excellent place to kick off a new campaign to heal our feverish atmosphere. The city’s terrible air quality has long cried out for intervention. When the first major smog crisis appeared during World War II, it was so bad that people thought the Japanese were bombarding them with poison gas. “Your lungs would completely ache. It would take hours for the pain to go away,” remembers Sander, who grew up nearby. “It was so bad that rubber tires would crack, because ozone attacks rubber.”
The greater Los Angeles area of the 21st century is home to 19 million people living among 34,000 square miles of clunky concrete buildings, griddle-hot parking lots and sad spits of green space. It’s not only America’s smoggiest region, but also a breeder reactor for greenhouse gases. Prodigious plumes of carbon dioxide waft up from car-clotted highways and belch from factory smokestacks. Methane pours from landfills, sewage treatment plants and large dairies to the east (a contented cow can produce hundreds of liters of methane daily). And although they’ve cut emissions greatly, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are still powerful emitters, with their bunker fuel-burning cargo ships, bulky loading cranes and busy dockside traffic.
On a typical morning, ocean breezes blow this noxious chemical gumbo into the mountains to the east. There, at the pinnacle of Mount Wilson, the vapors seethe at the doorstep of a curious object called the California Laboratory for Atmospheric Remote Sensing, or CLARS.
In its constant roving, CLARS is building a map of how emissions move throughout the city. Its efficiency is hard to fault. “The advantage is, I can point to anywhere and get a map of the whole basin essentially in an hour and a half,” says Sander, who oversees the machine, “whereas if you had a network of ground monitoring stations, you’d have to have 50 or some large number of them to get similar information.”
The observatory is a big white dome with a furry black fringe running around its base, like a mustachioed R2-D2, sitting atop a shipping container. The container was dropped onto the mountaintop several years ago by helicopter, and today, it’s outfitted with scads of high-priced equipment and a technician who lurks in the gloom. Every couple of minutes, the dome whirs and spins to point at a distant target below. A mirror in its curvature reflects a sliver of sunlight downward, where a spectrometer dissects it into different elements. The dome then whirs to the next point in its 27-spot rotation around the basin.
Scientists had expected emissions to be fairly uniform, given the region’s flat topography. But CLARS picked up a number of hot spots with abnormally high concentrations of methane – an incredibly potent climate change agent – in north Orange County and the City of Industry. The Megacities people are just beginning to identify the vapor sources for these anomalous zones.
“The L.A. Basin is very geologically active,” Sander says. “You’ve probably heard of the La Brea tar pits? That’s an area where there are a lot of organisms that anaerobically produce methane.” Methane escaping through these ground seeps is one theory, anyway. Sander also suspects the labyrinthine network of tubes that ferries natural gas through town. “There are millions of miles of little pipes that go from distribution stations to people’s houses,” he says. A lot of them leak, and “the leaks can be very substantial.”
Emissions of questionable origin are called fugitive emissions, and they account for a decent-sized hunk of any city’s overall greenhouse gas output. L.A. officials estimate that the city’s yearly carbon footprint weighs 39 million tons, with this breakdown: 43 percent vehicle emissions, 21 percent commercial buildings, 19 percent municipal energy use, 16 percent “industrial fugitive or other” and 1 percent wastewater.
That 16 percent is a little fuzzy because, again, emitters are judging their output using models. “That’s the best they can do,” Duren says. “Then we might come along with atmospheric measurements and go, ‘Oh, actually you’re underestimating it by a factor of two.’ ”
Behind the CLARS facility is a rattling, wheezing shed that houses a Picarro, an air-sampling device that displays real-time readings of ambient gases. Sander looks concerned over a sudden spike in CO2 on the machine’s monitor, then realizes it’s simply us, exhaling.
This is another component of Megacities’ full-court press: a network of a dozen or so Picarros going up this year in different L.A. neighborhoods, where they will ceaselessly inspect the air for greenhouse gas. A planned satellite component adds another layer of detection.
Only one spacecraft in orbit right now is monitoring greenhouse gases, Japan’s Gosat (Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite), and its resolution isn’t good enough to give an accurate picture of a city’s emissions. But in the next few years, NASA plans to launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) satellite and install a new instrument (OCO-3) on the International Space Station. Both devices will periodically take snapshots of the “chemical weather” over population centers. “OCO-3 will have a ‘city mode’ where it rapidly starts sweeping back and forth like a whisk broom,” Duren says. He expects the satellite to take some 3,000 samples over a city in just a few seconds.