The act basically calls for federal research on the on the impact of trace amounts of pharmaceuticals and consumer products in treated drinking water.
One goal of the act is to get the president to establish a National Water Initiative Coordination Office to provide technical and administrative support. What’s more, the act is expected to help facilitate technology transfer, communication and opportunities for information exchange with various parties through this National Water Initiative Coordination Office.
It’s not a big step but it takes baby steps to get priorities for a crisis in water management and quality set into motion. Let’s hope this will help spur further investment water research. –Lee Bruno

No doubt, cleantech companies were upbeat when the White House stimulus package allocated 13 percent of the total $104 billion stimulus package for green technology. Much of the economic stimulus will flow to cleantech infrastructure, but exactly where will it go?
Cleantech sectors, which were big winners, include smart grid technology with $4.5 billion, energy efficiency for federal buildings with $4.5 billion and wind and solar with $6 billion for new loan guarantees.
It’s an unheard of sum for cleantech. And a recent survey of technology experts by Changewave Research sheds some light on where the impact will be felt most. Changewave surveyed 409 members of the Changewave Research Network, people who work for companies involved in infrastructure projects. The March 12-17 survey covered infrastructure spending in the transportation, electricity/smart grid and broadband sectors. But for this blog I’m going to focus on the results for the smart grid.

Industry respondents were asked which infrastructure areas they think will benefit most from the U.S. economic stimulus package in the next 12 months. Not surprisingly, transportation infrastructure (62 percent) was the winner, followed by alternative energy (44 percent). Electricity/smart grid (29 percent) and water infrastructure (11 percent) also stood out.
In terms of outlook on areas expected to experience the most growth over the next 12 months, electric powerline projects were viewed by surveyed experts as being strong, accounting for 36 percent of the growth. Control systems like generators, switches and circuit breakers registered only 22 percent. On the smart grid side, the investment in smart meters or meter infrastructure registered 37 percent.
What are the companies most likely to benefit from the uptick in spending on the electric grid infrastructure? The survey identifies General Electric and Siemens AG as well-positioned grid infrastructure suppliers. ABB and EMCOR are seen as the prime beneficiaries in the area of powerline infrastructure.
How about the downsides? Those surveyed indicated the biggest barrier to the upgrading of the electric power grid as not-in-my-backyard issues (NIMBY, 43 percent). The other barriers cited included too much bureaucracy (41 percent) and not enough funding (37 percent).
Those barriers will be challenging but the need for an overhaul to the 40-year-old infrastructure is long overdue. –Lee Bruno

Probably the most significant concept that we have unwittingly gone along with is the definition of the word “renewable.” Giving some critical thought to this moniker is no academic matter, as the majority members of the US Senate’s Energy Committee is currently pushing for a national Renewable Portfolio Standard (see: “Title VIII - Renewable Portfolio Standard” to view a draft). Their decision as to what is a “renewable” will have profound technical, economic and environmental consequences on the United States.

To my knowledge there is no official definition of this bandied about term. When asked, the meanings proffered vary quite a bit, but the key difference between a renewable and non-renewable is usually the rate of replenishment. Consider this typical definition: “Renewable is an energy resource that is replaced in a reasonable amount of time (our lifetime, our children’s lifetime)…”

Such a word as “reasonable” is subjective — not scientific. Who determines what is a reasonable amount of time, and what is it: 20 years? 100 years? 500 years? The reason the definition of renewable is focused on time, derives from the concern that we may exhaust some electrical energy sources, relatively soon.

But how much is enough to have? For instance, if we have 100 years of some fuel, would the replenishment rate really be that important? Clearly, within the next 100 years of use, there will be some profound changes made regarding the efficiency and applications of said fuel’s implementation — in ways we have little understanding of today.

Look at the well-reasoned expectations that were had in 1950 about what would happen in 2000 from this article published in Popular Mechanics in February 1950 entitled “Miracles You’ll See.” The message is that almost ALL of the best guesses were wrong.

In the same vein, prior technology predictions by experts (like Einstein) have also proven to be significantly off the mark. From Listverse, take a look at this list of “Top 30 Failed Technology Predictions.” Who among us will stand to say that we have a better understanding of technology than did Einstein?

In that light, consider the case for nuclear being “renewable.” First we should answer how much longer will our nuclear fuel supply last. Consider:

a) The Nuclear Energy Institute’s website, on a page entitled “How It [Nuclear Power] Works,” says: “The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2008 jointly produced a report saying that uranium resources are adequate to meet nuclear energy needs for at least the next 100 years at present consumption levels. More efficient fast reactors could extend that period to more than 2,500 years.” It is absurd to say that a 2500 year supply doesn’t qualify this as renewable.

b) In addition, there are several proven alternatives to uranium as a source. One example is Thorium, which is much more plentiful than uranium. For a superior discussion about “The Sustainability of Mineral Resources” (and specifically uranium) read the end of this analysis entitled “Supply of Uranium” from the World Nuclear Association.

c) Bernard Cohen (Professor Emeritus of Physics at Pittsburgh University) has stated in an analysis entitled “How Long Will Nuclear Energy Last“ that breeder reactors have enough raw material energy source to last us over a Billion years. That’s Billion with a “B.” When considering these sample facts, an important thing to keep in mind is this quote from some scientists at an excellent University of Michigan site: “Only 40 years ago, nuclear energy was an exotic, futuristic technology, the subject of experimentation and far fetched ideas.” (ref. Nuclear Energy & Society, by Ilan Lipper and Jon Stone).

Hard as it might seem to believe, but most of this nuclear development has occurred in just the tiny space of 40± years — so having any fuel supply that lasts 100± years could cover an enormous amount of new development.

Secondly, some definitions of “Renewable” include a reference to “power derived from natural sources” (e.g. this opinion piece in the business section of the Arizona Star, published last month, entitled “Don’t Reclassify Nuclear Power as Renewable“). Of course ”natural sources” is amusingly non-descriptive since essentially all sources of electrical power are based on natural materials, and that includes nuclear.

To read more about this I’d strongly recommend Bill Tucker’s excellent book Terrestrial Energy, or a more condensed discussion he wrote here entitled “The Case for Terrestrial Energy.”

CONTRIBUTION TO CO2 EMISSIONS REDUCTIONS

A University of Michigan study calculated that since 1973, the overwhelming majority of emissions reductions in the U.S. have been the result of nuclear power generation.

A third factor sometimes appearing in the definition of “Renewable” is a reference to a power source’s ability to reduce CO2 (e.g. “clean”). That same University of Michigan site (above) has this very informative graph about how (worldwide) we have been able to reduce CO2 since 1973.

Now, for the sake of comparison, let’s quickly look at the flip side of this question, at the poster child for renewables: wind power. The indisputable fact is that an indispensable part of wind power electricity production is the requirement of LARGE amounts of land.

For instance, best estimates are that wind power requires more than a thousand times the land that nuclear does, to generate the equivalent amount of 24/7 power. BUT, that essential element of wind power generation (land) is NOT ”replaced in a reasonable amount of time.”

Before a source is labeled as “renewable” shouldn’t ALL of its major components be renewable? Otherwise, it would be like having all the materials to assemble a car, but no tires. The evidence says that we will run out of appropriate US land for industrial wind power before we run out of fossil fuel for electrical power sources. So considering this information, which is the true renewable: wind power or nuclear energy?

About the Author:  John Droz received undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics from Boston College, and a graduate degree in physics from Syracuse University. He subsequently worked for GE/AESD (Utica, NY), Mohawk Data Sciences (Herkimer, NY), and Monolithic Memories (Cupertino, CA). For over 25 years Droz has been an environmental activist and is a participating member of several environmental organizations including the Adirondack Council, Association for Protection of the Adirondacks, Residents Committee to Protect the Adirondacks, Sierra Club, and the NYS Federation of Lakes.

Previous studies estimated that a gallon of corn-based bioethanol requires 263 gallons to 784 gallons of water from the farm to the fuel pump. Trouble was, those estimates were calculated without considering regional irrigation practices.
No doubt water usage needs to be weighed in policy discussions involving the location of ethanol plants. If not, there’s a good chance we’ll see ethanol plants about as sensible as an ice factory in the Mojave Desert. It’s important for policymakers to scratch from their lists those regions that have high water-usage ratios. Let’s instead steer them to places like Idaho, to encourage a smarter and more sustainable approach to biofuels. By Lee Bruno

Two recent R&D surveys, one from the Wall Street Journal and the other from McKinsey were released recently and both confirm that many companies are still spending on R&D (for now).

(Photo: Battelle Institute)

So what about green investment? Are companies spending on cleantech? They should be, since transforming energy markets (which is critical) will require an unprecedented level of R&D.

But the challenges are enormous. The energy industry is the largest on the planet, with sales of more than $2 trillion a year, and industrial labs and government have scaled back R&D drastically over the past 20 to 30 years.

Still, the Obama administration seems at least to recognize the need. It has outlined an ambitious policy to invest in energy R&D, a big reversal from previous years of shrinking energy R&D budgets. Whether the government can sustain the investment is unclear (R&D is expensive) but the gains from R&D today will far exceed the up-front cost 20 years down the road.

Encouragingly, the Battelle Institute, which tracks R&D investment, predicts cumulative spending by companies, government and universities will rise 3 percent this year, although it predicts a decline in 2010. Battelle notes that R&D cuts during the downturns of the 1980s and 1990s took more than five years to return to prior spending levels.

Companies keeping up R&D funding include Microsoft, which spent 21 percent more in fourth quarter 2008 over 2007, while revenue was virtually flat. IBM is also spending on R&D, partly because of government-stimulus money. IBM says it plans to keep its R&D spending at the same level it was last year. Corning claims it will cut everything else possible before cutting R&D. Corning executives devised a strategy last summer called “rings of defense” to put into play during this downturn. In this strategy, R&D is in the innermost ring.

On the flip side, McKinsey cites evidence that some companies are pondering reductions in R&D spending. In its survey, 40 percent of respondents say their companies are actively seeking to reduce R&D costs. Some 34 percent of executives surveyed said R&D budgets are lower in 2009 than they were in 2008. The majority also said they’re taking a new approach to R&D in the current economic circumstances, with many turning to shorter-term, lower-risk projects.

That’s a little alarming, considering the historical benefits of investing in long-term innovation. But at least some realize that slowing R&D amounts to gradual self-destruction. “Companies by and large realize that large reductions in R&D are suicidal,” said Jim Andrew, senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group, in the WSJ story. “It is the last shoe to drop.” –Lee Bruno

Innovative water technology startup Crystal Clear Technologies has developed a novel approach to separate out toxic contaminants such as arsenic, copper, uranium and selenium. The technology is specifically relevant to industrial smelters, power plants and mining operations.

“We’re the first company doing this kind of approach,” says James Harris, CEO of Crystal Clear Technologies.

The company uses a low-cost biopolymer with absorbents called Chitosan to separate out contaminants. It works as a sponge that binds to specific toxic elements. At the core of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company’s technology is bifunctional ligands, which bind to toxic metals on the order of eight times more effectively than existing reverse-osmosis systems.

Alberta has over 1.0 trillion barrels of oil reserves, only recoverable with massive amounts of water. (Photo: NASA)

The original technology was developed at the University of Oregon. Crystal Clear has used a variety of Small Business Innovation Research Grants funds over the past several years to refine and perfect the technology.

Today two methods are used to filter out unwanted contaminants: flocculation and reverse osmosis. The predominant approach today is RO. But it typically has greater energy costs and there’s a disposal problem, with residue left over. Crystal Clear’s technology has a much smaller byproduct of sludge by comparison to flocculation and RO.

In terms of cost, here’s how the technologies stack up. Flocculation costs about $.80 per 1,000 gallons of water and reverse osmosis costs $.58 per 1,000 gallons, according to data from Crystal Clear. The company’s approach with Chitosan costs $.03 to $0.15 per 1,000 gallons.

Some mining operations using RO run at $150 per 1,000 liters. Crystal Clear claims it can deliver the same purification at $25 per 1,000 liters. Over the next six to nine months, Harris says the company is going to be focusing on scaling its system and experimenting with other elements like lead and selenium.

In terms of how the filtration system can be paired with renewable energy sources like solar or wind, Harris says any of those systems could be used to drive the pumps and filtration process. The company is in the process of a fundraising round for the next phase of its operations. By Lee Bruno

Anyone in the GreenTech business universe ought to recognize the following R&D categories being funded by various federal agencies, i.e. the EPA, DOE, DOD and NSF to name a few. Some of these free money R&D categories may be the exact same areas of research you are about to commit to, or have been thinking – or dreaming - about doing.

Clean air - innovations to ensure healthy air are just beginning. (Photo: US EPA)

The 2010 EPA-SBIR Broad Area Topics are: Green Building Materials and Systems, Innovation in Manufacturing, Nanotechnology, Greenhouse Gases, Drinking Water and Water Monitoring, Water Infrastructure, Air Pollution, Biofuels and Vehicle Emissions Reduction, Waste Management and Monitoring, Homeland Security.

The 2010 NSF Broad Area Topics are: Biotech and Chemical Technologies (BC); Education Applications (EA); Information and Communication Technologies (IC) and Nanotechnology, Advanced Materials and Manufacturing (NM).

There are specific sub-categories for each of these broad area topics. To see if your companies R&D interests and that of our governments are aligned click into these links:

EPA-SBIR Program Solicitation: http://es.epa.gov/ncer/rfa/2009/2009_sbir_phase1.html

More information is available on the EPA-SBIR web site at: http://es.epa.gov/ncer/sbir/

NSF/SBIR Program Solicitation: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2009/nsf09541/nsf09541.htm#pgm_desc_txt

More information is available on the NSF-SBIR web site at: www.nsf.gov/eng/iip/sbir/stop.jsp

The closing dates for the EPA-SBIR are May 20th. This means for this funding year, applicants only have 45 days left to get that EPA-SBIR proposal in. For NSF-SBIR the close date is June 9th. Companies are eligible to apply to both of these and others, like STTR (http://www.zyn.com/sbir/)

The NSF Phase I limits have gone up to $150,000 because of a surge of “reinvestment” monies from the Obama administration. Also, NSF allows for a maximum of 4 proposals from any one private company. As with most business endeavors, there are many “optimizing strategies” that can be applied and the federal grant money-making environment for small businesses is no exception.

Federal research “grants” are just that, grants. They are not loans, i.e., you don’t have to pay anything back. You will to do some periodic reporting and invoice the government to get your money, but that is well worth the time and effort expended to perform these grant maintenance tasks if you win an award. In many cases, if you win the money then the maintenance efforts which can be an administrative burden for small or even mid-size companies, can be paid for from grant monies you’ve won. For example, the EPA/SBIR allows for up to $4,000 of the Phase I grant winnings (won through a separate but conjoined proposal) for what is referred to as “Technical Assistance.”

Don’t be intimidated by the grant writing task. Most all SBIR type grants are written by the chief scientist or the engineer as CEO/President of small, private companies. You will not be competing with professional grant writers. That said, it is important to know there is a “style” to grant writing, and there is certain marketing or “pitching” in the grant writing space. You have to have a certain marketing sensibility in writing to the agency and program you are writing to. In this sense I suggest you check out last years winners and get a sense of who won and read their abstracts, or better yet, give the “chief investigator” at the company a phone call and ask them if they are willing to share their grant proposal. Having a winning proposal in hand is a beautiful thing. Also the agency itself can assist you in assessing the “alignment” of your research with that agencies specific funding objectives. First, do your homework before you call or write as they will remember your name and the name of your company especially if your waste their time.

These often overlooked grant programs can provide a decisive financial edge to greentech startups and greentech entrepreneurs who are looking for cash and have a “novel” GreenTech (or other) R&D idea.

Brian Hennessy provides proven expert, hands-on assistance to start-up company founders and executive management. He has worked on 12 start-ups and with 9 Founders or CEO’s of start-ups over the last 25 years. www.maxroix.com

One of the major threats to water supplies is contamination, from saltwater from industrial waste, from pesticides.

New sensors would help. Research labs are working on sensors specially designed to deal with monitoring and purification problems.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have synthesized DNA to detect trace amounts of lead, mercury, arsenic and other contaminants in water. The DNA sensors can be produced in the form of sophisticated testing instruments suitable for metropolitan water districts or in the form of strips — like a home pregnancy test — for households and other direct-source water users.
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The Water Cycle (Photo: USGS)

And once you know your water is bad, what do you do about it? Urbana-Champaign is helping there as well. Mark Shannon, director of the Center of Advanced Materials for Purification of Water with Systems at the university, and his team have synthesized chemically activated fibers and granules of carbon to remove heavy metals and pesticides like atrazine.

Hudson River Project
A recent report from IBM called Water: A Global Innovation Outlook Report says there is a severe lack of data on water even in the world’s capital.

The report cites the Hudson River, one of the most dynamic and diverse bodies of water in the world. It courses 315 miles from the Adirondacks to the western shoreline of Manhattan. It’s used for drinking, heavy industry, fishing, navigation and recreation. And its watershed is home to 5 percent of the people in the U.S.

But study of this vital river system has been limited. That’s a problem. “If you’re trying to manage a system that’s changing dynamically you need to work with data that is equally dynamic,” says John Cronin, director of the Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries. “You need to be able to monitor and observe the system in real time.”

To that end, the Beacon Institute is working with IBM to develop the River and Estuary Observation Network, a system of sensors and observation platforms that will feed a constant stream of data to scientists and analysts. REON will measure and monitor chemical, biological and physical data throughout the Hudson ecosystem using a combination of floating platforms, submerged buoys, even semiautonomous underwater robots.

The goal is to understand the river in real time and how it responds to everything from storms to droughts to humans. With that information, a new level of ecomanagement could be done. And that would be one small step in putting sensor technology to work in ways that will help society and businesses better understand the long-term challenges and benefits of managing the Hudson — and water everywhere. –Lee Bruno

Researchers at Duke University have come to respect the power of nano-engineered buckyballs.

In one project, the engineers found that ultrafine mesh coatings made of carbon buckyballs can hinder the ability of bacteria and other microorganisms to colonize the membranes that filter impurities from water. This is one of the major problems - and costs - in treating H2O.

The bacteria builds up and attracts other organic matter. In time, a film of biological material accumulates. A reduction in membrane-replacement cost, even of 50 percent, would translate to huge savings.

“Biofouling is viewed as one of the biggest costs associated with membrane-based water-treatment systems,” said Claudia Gunsch, assistant professor of civil engineering at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering and senior member of the research team.

A buckyball is one shape within the family of nano-carbon shapes known as fullerenes. They’re both named after Richard Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome, because their shapes resemble his famous structure.

When water-filtering membranes are treated with buckyballs, the researchers discovered that only a very small number of bacteria (20 units) are able to colonize on the surface material.

The Duke researchers plan to study other species of bacteria that would be encountered in the same kind of water treatment environments. And they plan to scale their system to simulate application in a full-scale treatment plant.

“Just as plaque can build up inside arteries and reduce the flow of blood, bacteria and other microorganisms can over time attach and accumulate on water treatment membranes and along water pipes,” said So-Ryong Chae, post-doctoral fellow in Duke’s environmental and civil engineering department in a release. Experimental results were published March 5, 2009 in the Journal of Membrane Sciences.

In a separate research effort, scientists at the University of Leeds are working on a way to use bacteria to help clean foul water.

Harmful chromium compounds are commonly found in groundwater at sites receiving waste from former textile factories, smelters and tanneries. This wastewater has been linked to cancer.

Dr. Doug Stewart heads the research team from the school of civil engineering and has discovered that adding dilute acetic acid (vinegar) can stimulate bacteria strains capable of converting chromium into a harmless substance.

Researchers plan to further study the bacteria and conditions under which it can operate. This environmentally sensitive approach to cleanup should be welcome. But we’ll have to wait a few years to see if these systems become widespread. –Lee Bruno ]]> http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/editor/guest/2009/03/20/nano-coatings-stem-water-pipe-clogs/feed/ http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/editor/guest/2009/03/18/death-of-the-california-dream/ http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/editor/guest/2009/03/18/death-of-the-california-dream/#comments Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:28:25 +0000 Joel Kotkin http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/editor/guest/?p=448 For decades, California has epitomized America’s economic strengths: technological excellence, artistic creativity, agricultural fecundity and an intrepid entrepreneurial spirit. Yet lately California has projected a grimmer vision of a politically divided, economically stagnant state.

California has returned from the dead before, most recently in the mid-1990s. But the odds that the Golden State can reinvent itself again seem long. The buffoonish current governor and a legislature divided between hysterical greens, public-employee lackeys and Neanderthal Republicans have turned the state into a fiscal laughingstock. Meanwhile, more of its middle class migrates out while a large and undereducated underclass (much of it Latino) faces dim prospects. It sometimes seems the people running the state have little feel for the very things that constitute its essence — and could allow California to reinvent itself, and the American future, once again.
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California’s beautiful Salinas Valley. Can the dream survive? (Photo: EcoWorld)

The facts at hand are pretty dreary. California entered the recession early last year, according to the Forecast Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is expected to lag behind the nation well into 2011. Unemployment stands at roughly 10 percent, ahead only of Rust Belt basket cases like Michigan and East Coast calamity Rhode Island. Not surprisingly, people are fleeing this mounting disaster. Net outmigration has been growing every year since about 2003 and should reach well over 200,000 by 2011. This outflow would be far greater, notes demographer Wendell Cox, if not for the fact that many residents can’t sell their homes and are essentially held prisoner by their mortgages.

For Californians, this recession has been driven by different elements than the early-1990s downturn, which was largely caused by external forces. The end of the Cold War stripped away hundreds of thousands of well-paid defense-related jobs. Meanwhile, the Japanese economy went into a tailspin, leading to a massive disinvestment here. In South L.A., the huge employment losses helped create the conditions conducive to social unrest. The 1992 Rodney King verdict may have provided the match, but the kindling was dry and plentiful.

This time around, the recession feels like a self-inflicted wound, the result of “bubble dependency.” First came the dotcom bubble, centered largely in the Bay Area. The fortunes made there created an enormous surge in wealth, but by 2001 that bust had punched a huge hole in the California budget. Voters, disgusted by the legislature’s inability to cope with the crisis, recalled the governor, Gray Davis, and replaced him with a megastar B-grade actor from Austria.

Yet almost as soon as the Internet bubble had evaporated, a new one emerged in housing. As prices soared in coastal enclaves, people fled to the periphery, often buying homes far from traditional suburban job centers. At first, it seemed like a miraculous development: people cheered as their home’s “value” increased 20 percent annually. But even against the backdrop of the national housing bubble, California soon became home to gargantuan imbalances between incomes and property prices. The state was also home to such mortgage hawkers as New Century Financial Corp., Countrywide and IndyMac. For a time the whole California economy seemed to revolve around real-estate speculation, with upwards of 50 percent of all new jobs coming from growth in fields like real estate, construction and mortgage brokering.

As a result, when the housing bubble burst, the state’s huge real-estate economy evaporated almost overnight. Both parties in the legislature and the governor failed miserably to anticipate the impending fiscal deluge they should have known was all but inevitable.

To many longtime California observers, the inability of the political, business and academic elites to adequately anticipate and address the state’s persistent problems has been a source of consternation and wonderment. In my view, the key to understanding California’s precipitous decline transcends terms like liberal or conservative, Democratic and Republican. The real culprit lies in the politics of narcissism.

California, like any gorgeously endowed person, has a natural inclination toward self-absorption. It has always been a place of unsurpassed splendor; it has inspired and attracted writers, artists, dreamers, savants and philosophers. That’s especially true of the Bay Area—ground zero for California narcissism and arguably the most attractive urban expanse on the continent; Neil Morgan in 1960 described San Francisco as “the narcissus of the West,” a place whose fundamental asset was first its own beauty, followed by its own culture of self-regard.

At first this high self-regard inspired some remarkable public achievements. California rebuilt San Francisco from the ashes of the great 1906 fire, and constructed in Los Angeles the world’s most far-reaching transit system. These achievements reached a pinnacle under Gov. Pat Brown, who in the 1960s oversaw the expansion of the freeways, the construction of new university, state- and community-college campuses, and the creation of water projects that allowed farming in dry but fertile landscapes.

Yet success also spoiled the state, incubating an ever more inward-looking form of narcissism. Even as the middle class enjoyed “the good life” — high-paying jobs, single-family homes (often with pools), vacations at the beach — there was a growing, palpable sense of threats from rising taxes, a restless youth population and a growing nonwhite demographic. One early expression of this was the late-1970s antitax movement led by Howard Jarvis. The rising cost of government was placing too much of a burden on middle-class homeowners, and the legislature refused to address the problem with reasonable reforms. The result, however, was unreasonable reform, with new and inflexible limits on property and income taxes that made holding the budget together far more difficult.

Middle-class Californians also began to feel inundated by a racial tide. This was not totally based on prejudice; Californians seemed to accept legal immigration. But millions of undocumented newcomers provoked fear that there were no limits on how many people would move into the state, filling emergency rooms with the uninsured and crowding schools with children whose parents neither spoke English nor had the time to prepare their children for school. By 1994, under Gov. Pete Wilson, the anti-immigrant narcissism fueled Proposition 187. It was now OK to deny school and medical services to people because, at the end, they looked different.

Today the politics of narcissism is most evident among “progressives.” Although the Republicans can still block massive tax increases, the predominant force in California politics lies with two groups — the gentry liberals and the public sector. The public-sector unions, once relatively poorly paid, now enjoy wages and benefits unavailable to most middle-class Californians, and do so with little regard to the fiscal and overall economic impact. Currently barely 3 percent of the state budget goes to building roads or water systems, compared with nearly 20 percent in the Pat Brown era; instead we’re funding gilt-edged pensions and lifetime guaranteed health care. It’s often a case of I’m all right, Jack — and the hell with everyone else.

The most recent ascendant group are the gentry liberals, whose base lies in the priciest precincts of San Francisco, the Silicon Valley and the west side of Los Angeles. Gentry liberalism reflects the narcissistic values of successful boomers and their offspring; their politics are all about them. In the past this was tied as much to cultural issues, like gay rights (itself a noble cause) and public support for the arts. More recently, the dominant issue revolves around environmentalism.

Green politics came early to California and for understandable reasons: protecting the resources and beauty of the nation’s loveliest landscapes. Yet in recent years, the green agenda has expanded well beyond that of the old conservationists like Theodore Roosevelt, who battled to preserve wilderness but also cared deeply about boosting productivity and living standards for the working classes. In contrast, the modern environmental movement often adopts a largely misanthropic view of humans as a “cancer” that needs to be contained. By their very nature, the greens tend to regard growth as an unalloyed evil, gobbling up resources and spewing planet-heating greenhouse gases.

You can see the effects of the gentry’s green politics up close in places like the Salinas Valley, a lovely agricultural region south of San Jose. As community leaders there have tried to construct policies to create new higher-wage jobs in the area (a project on which I’ve worked as a consultant), local progressives — largely wealthy people living on the Monterey coast — have opposed, for example, the expansion of wineries that might bring new jobs to a predominantly Latino area with persistent double-digit unemployment. As one winegrower told me last year: “They don’t want a facility that interferes with their viewshed.” For such people, the crusade against global warming makes a convenient foil in arguing against anything that might bring industrial or any other kind of middle-wage growth to the state. Greens here often speak movingly about the earth — but also about their personal redemption. They have engaged a legal and regulatory process that provides the wealthy and their progeny an opportunity to act out their desire to “make a difference” — often without real concern for the outcome. Environmentalism becomes a theater in which the privileged act out their narcissism.

It’s even more disturbing that many of the primary apostles of this kind of politics are themselves wealthy high-livers like Hollywood magnates, Silicon Valley billionaires and well-heeled politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown. They might imagine that driving a Prius or blocking a new water system or new suburban housing development serves the planet, but this usually comes at no cost to themselves or their lifestyles.

The best great hope for California’s future does not lie with the narcissists of left or right but with the newcomers, largely from abroad. These groups still appreciate the nation of opportunity and aspire to make the California — and American — Dream their own.

Of course, companies like Google and industries like Hollywood remain critical components, but both Silicon Valley and the entertainment complex are now mature, and increasingly dominated by people with access to money or the most elite educations. Neither is likely to produce large numbers of new jobs, particularly for working- and middle-class Californians.

In contrast, the newcomers, who often lack both money and education, continue in the hierarchy-breaking tradition that made California great in the first place. Many of them live and build their businesses not in places like San Francisco or West L.A., but in the increasingly multicultural suburbs on the periphery, places like the San Gabriel Valley, Riverside and Cupertino. Immigrants played a similar role in the recovery from the early-1990s doldrums. In the ’90s, for example, the number of Latino-owned businesses already was expanding at four times the rate of Anglo ones, growing from 177,000 to 440,000. Today we see signs of much the same thing, though it often involves immigrants from the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, Mexico or South Korea. One developer, Alethea Hsu, just opened a new shopping center in the San Gabriel Valley this January — and it’s fully leased. “We have a great trust in the future,” says the Cornell-trained physician.

You see some of the same thing among other California immigrants. More than three decades ago the Cardenas family started slaughtering and selling pigs grown on their two-acre farm near Corona. From there, Jesús Sr. and his wife, Luz, expanded. “We would shoot the hogs through the head and sell them off the truck,” says José, their son. “We’d sell the meat to people who liked it fresh: Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans and Hispanics…We would sell to anyone.” Their first store, predominantly a carnicería, or meat shop, took advantage of the soaring Latino population. By 2008, they had 20 stores with more than $400 million in sales. In 2005 they started to produce Mexican food, including some inspired by Luz’s recipes to distribute through such chains as Costco. Mexican food, notes Jesús Jr., is no longer a niche. “It’s a crossover product now.”

Despite the current mess in Sacramento, this suggests some hope for the future. Perhaps the gubernatorial candidacy of Silicon Valley folks like former eBay CEO Meg Whitman (a Republican), or her former eBay employee Steve Wesley (a Democrat), could bring some degree of competence and common sense to the farce now taking place in Sacramento. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who’s said to be considering the race, would also be preferable to a green zealot like Jerry Brown or empty suits like Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa or San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom.

But if I am looking for hope and inspiration, for California or the country, I would look first and foremost at people like the Cardenas family. They create jobs for people who didn’t go to Stanford or whose parents lack a trust fund. They constitute what any place needs to survive: risk takers who are self-confident but rarely selfish. These are people who look at the future, not in the mirror.

This article originally appeared earlier this month in Newsweek magazine and is republished here with permission from the author. Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.