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Life & Times Transcript

07/22/05

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Is it a solution to the energy problem or a target for terrorists? We look at the pros and cons of a natural gas terminal in Long Beach.

Frank Colonna>> The area, if we were to have an explosion, it would set us back to the Flintstone era.

Tom Giles>> It's not a very good target because it's not very easy to damage. These tanks and these ships are not easy to damage at all.

Val>> And then, you won't find this food on any menu, but the chefs share their cooking secrets with the world. Inside the Los Angeles Times test kitchen.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Virtually everyone agrees that, sooner or later, we Americans are going to have to overcome our addiction to oil, and one of the alternatives is natural gas. In fact, experts predict that, over the next twenty years, natural gas will rival oil as the world's leading fossil fuel. So you would think that a liquefied natural gas terminal would be a welcome idea. Well, not for everyone. Sam Louie goes to Long Beach where that proposal has sparked a major controversy.

Sam Louie>> Long Beach, California is known for its marina, waterfront, Aquarium and the Queen Mary. Commercially, the city also boasts the second busiest port in the nation and the gateway for trade with Asia. Long Beach could have another distinction if a proposal is approved. It could become the first city on the west coast to have a liquefied natural gas terminal.

So what is liquefied natural gas? It's the same gas that you use for cooking, heating, fuel for some vehicles, and is an energy source for many electrical power plants. But you may not realize this. Natural gas can be liquefied when cooled to minus two hundred sixty degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, the gas turns into a clear, colorless and odorless liquid, thus liquefied natural gas, or LNG.

The chilling shrinks its volume by six hundred times, so six hundred cubic feet of gas is reduced to a single cubic foot of liquid. That allows the gas to be transported much more efficiently by ship and imported to an LNG terminal like this one. Supporters say natural gas is more plentiful and less polluting than oil. Demand for natural gas has grown steadily over the last decade. They believe it will become the world's leading fossil fuel, rivaling oil.

Tom Giles>> Most of it is used by industry to produce power. It's widely believed that the need for power in California will increase, which means the need for natural gas will increase.

Sam Louie>> Tom Giles is President and CEO of Sound Energy Solutions, the company that is proposing the LNG terminal.

Tom Giles>> This is safer than the tanks on the east coast that have been around for thirty years.

Sam Louie>> Giles showed a model of the company's twenty-five acre, four hundred fifty million dollar liquefied natural gas facility. It would be a joint project between two corporate giants, Mitsubishi and ConocoPhillips. Giles says the plant would be especially beneficial to California.

Tom Giles>> California uses the most natural gas of any state in the country and it produces fifteen percent of the natural gas that it uses, so the natural gas has always had to come in from, you know, the southwest part of the United States, the Rocky Mountains or Canada or somewhere.

Sam Louie>> He believes having an LNG terminal here would lower the cost by increasing the supply.

Tom Giles>> California could go from being disadvantaged to advantaged. They could have natural gas coming in from two sides. They could have it coming in by pipeline and they could have it coming in by ship through LNG.

Sam Louie>> Currently, there are only four LNG terminals in the United States, all on the Atlantic or Gulf coast, built during the 1960's and 1970's. Long Beach Harbor Commissioner, Mario Cordero, says natural gas is the energy of the future.

Mario Cordero>> In the nineteenth century, the energy of choice was coal. The twentieth century, oil. I think the twenty-first century clearly we've seen that natural gas is something that we're looking to now as the significant energy source.

Sam Louie>> Cordero is one of five commissioners who will have the ultimate say on the LNG proposal. He and the other commissioners have not made a decision to support or oppose the project, but Cordero says that he recognizes the benefits of LNG.

Mario Cordero>> You look to the north here, MTA is using LNG, and if you look to the south, Orange County Transit is using LNG. In terms of this city itself, including the port, the street sweepers are all on LNG.

Sam Louie>> Since 2003, Long Beach street sweepers and garbage trucks have been using liquefied natural gas. These vehicles have significantly lower smog emissions than the diesel trucks.

Mario Cordero>> LNG clearly is an extreme benefit in terms of the environment. I mean, that type of fuel reduces nox and particulates by ninety-five percent, so from an environmental point of view, I mean, I think there's no question that it's a benefit.

Sam Louie>> But not everyone is convinced that an LNG terminal in Long Beach is a good idea. In fact, critics say it would be unsafe, that the gas is highly combustible and could cause catastrophic fires. Critics point to two fatal liquefied natural gas fires as a reason to abandon the proposal here in Long Beach. The first occurred in 1944, killing more than one hundred people in Cleveland, Ohio. The most recent killed twenty-seven people in Algeria last year.

Bry Myown>> It can burn hot enough that people can get second degree burns a mile away in thirty seconds and third degree in fifty seconds.

Sam Louie>> Bry Myown is with the Long Beach Citizens for Utility Reform. She's vehemently against the idea of an LNG terminal in her city. She's not only worried about accidental leaks and fires, but the additional threat of an LNG terminal as a terrorist target.

Bry Myown>> If someone wanted to attack all cargo movement in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, how would adding eighty-five million gallons of liquefied natural gas help make us safer?

Frank Colonna>> If we were to have an explosion, it would set us back to the Flintstone era.

Sam Louie>> Long Beach Councilman, Frank Colonna, is also against the project. He wanted the city to terminate its talks with the gas developer, but was out-voted five to four earlier this month. He says he's not against an LNG terminal on the west coast, just not in an urbanized and industrial area like Long Beach.

Frank Colonna>> The port of Long Beach is a designated port of national significance, so we have a tremendous amount of economy, national security and, of course, urbanized population that would be put at risk over this facility.

Sam Louie>> Supporters disagree with the safety concerns.

Tom Giles>> It's not a very good target because it's not very easy to damage. These tanks and these ships are not easy to damage at all. You know, a glass building in New York is a lot easier to damage than a double-hulled ship or a double-walled concrete tank.

Sam Louie>> But a government study shows LNG can be highly volatile under the right conditions. As a liquid, natural gas cannot explode or burn. But if it is accidentally released into the air as a gas, it could float to nearby neighborhoods and possibly ignite. High hazard zones such as bridges, harbors and populated areas could see significant damage. Gas developers refute those claims, saying the storage tanks are built to withstand a lot of punishment.

Tom Giles>> The tanks are nine nickel steel, three feet of insulation, three feet of pre-stressed concrete roofs. The ships are double-hulled. There's never been a leakage from one of these ships. There have been submarines come up under them and holed them and no loss of cargo. They've been run ashore and grounded in Japan with no loss of cargo.

Sam Louie>> In addition to safety, opponents worry about America's growing dependence on natural gas imported from foreign countries.

Bry Myown>> The United States has learned what it's like to be completely dependent on foreign oil and this is an opportunity to repeat that mistake with gas.

Sam Louie>> But supporters counter that natural gas is not like oil, much of which is controlled by OPEC and a few other countries.

Tom Giles>> That won't work in natural gas. Natural gas has too many sources around the world. There are too many places that you can get it from.

Sam Louie>> But the issue of safety is clearly the main priority when people talk about an LNG terminal in Long Beach. In late fall, the results of an environmental impact report are expected to be released. The Long Beach Harbor Commission will make a final decision on the project shortly afterwards. And whatever they decide, the outcome is sure to fuel even more debate here in Long Beach. I'm Sam Louie for Life and Times.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life and Times".

Val>> The King Tut exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will draw hundreds of thousands of visitors and many of them won't be satisfied with seeing antiquities in the museum. They'll be inspired to travel to Egypt themselves.

Ahmed El-Maghraby is Egypt's Minister of Tourism. I met him at the Beverly Hills Hotel where he was a speaker for Town Hall Los Angeles. He came to Los Angeles to help launch the opening of the King Tut exhibit which returns to Los Angeles after twenty-seven years and includes more than a hundred thirty treasures from the Boy King's tomb. Why do you think people have this fascination after all these years with King Tut?

Ahmed El-Maghraby>> Well, it is fascinating in the sense that when you think that a kid of eight or nine years old ruled over the most important country at that particular time for as long as nine years. The periods for ruling Egypt was not very long at that time, so in that sense, it is quite amazing.

Also the fact that we were very lucky to find all the artifacts in his tomb almost intact contrary to a lot of other royal tombs that were plundered much earlier on. You could imagine, if you could, somebody who at that age, nine years old, ruling the United States with its position in the world today for nine years. That would really make whoever it is -- that young man would become a personage in history.

Val>> Tell us, in Egypt, tourism is a huge part of the economy. Isn't it about sixty or seventy percent?

Ahmed El-Maghraby>> Well, I wish it was that. Being the Minister of Tourism, I'd like to brag and say that it is, but it is not. Egypt is a very large economy with many activities in it. However, tourism is very important. Tourism has one or two features that are important for Egypt. Initially, it was the fact that it generates a lot of foreign currency. Last year in 2004, it generated over six billion dollars in foreign currency.

Also, it's an industry that is labor-intensive which, in a country like Egypt with a very young population, the creation of jobs is one of the main functions for any government in Egypt. We need six hundred fifty thousand new jobs per year to take in the new generation coming into the employment market and tourism is one of those industries that could generate quite a bit. That's number two.

Number three is an industry that has been growing in Egypt at a very fast rate. We started ten years ago with about 3.1 million visitors. We are now at the end of 2004 up to 8.1 million visitors, nearly two and a half plus times the number we started in growth over ten years. In 2005, we do expect to grow by another fifteen percent, hopefully reaching about nine million visitors to Egypt this year.

Val>> I, in fact, can count myself among the tourists to Egypt and it was an incredible trip. But I have to ask you, what is the impact of the latest bombings and so forth that threaten the tourist industry? How has that affected the tourist industry and what has Egypt done to respond?

Ahmed El-Maghraby>> Well, the events, minor as they might be, that took place in Egypt in the last several months have really had very little impact on the number of travelers. When I say the events were minor, they were minor in the sense of the impact on tourism, but anytime an event touches even the life or the well-being of one human being, they are very major events and they're very disturbing events for all of us. However, we as human beings, I think we have resolved that we are not going to allow any band of criminals to rob us of our natural right to travel around this earth freely.

Val>> I just had some friends who came back from Egypt just a month or so ago. They had also an incredible time, but they said that they had a bodyguard. They didn't even ask for one. There was just one provided.

Ahmed El-Maghraby>> I don't know who they were visiting, but they must have been visiting somebody important to provide a bodyguard.

Val>> No, they said they had a bodyguard that went with them along the whole tour. They weren't famous or anything or celebrities.

Ahmed El-Maghraby>> Well, we do provide security when there is a large number of people as a group together. We do provide security, whether the security is obvious or it's covert security. Egypt is well secured. I don't like to think that a lot of it is very obvious, but I can assure you that it is well monitored.

Val>> Now the people who go see the King Tut exhibit here, I understand that part of the ticket price is going to go to help preserve the monuments and archaeological sites in Egypt? That's a big concern because I know when I was there, a lot of them looked like they were under stress and people were coming through and sometimes touching them. So what is Egypt doing to preserve these?

Ahmed El-Maghraby>> You know, with the incredible amount of artifacts and sites, Egypt is really one big depository of antiquities. There is a lot of effort that needs to be done. All the money that people pay when they visit our museum does not go into the budget of the Egyptian government. It goes strictly toward the preservation of those monuments.

This is exactly what's going to happen with the shares from the proceeds of this visit by the King Tut exhibition. They will not go into the budget of the Egyptian government, but will go directly to the antiquity department for building museums, for improving the sites, for protecting what I call really the heritage of the humankind, not really only Egyptian. We're the depositories of that heritage, but that is the heritage of mankind.

Val>> And finally, Egypt is going to be having an election in September?

Ahmed El-Maghraby>> Yes.

Val>> Major changes politically could be coming along after twenty-four years of rule under Hosni Mubarak. Do you think they'll go smoothly? Will they be democratic? What's your opinion?

Ahmed El-Maghraby>> I am confident they will go smoothly and I'm confident they will be democratic. The changes that President Mubarak brought in to have a multi-candidates election is a major step forward in our march toward democracy. I think the minority of opposition parties have raised a lot of questions. I think they fail to see the positive direction that Egypt has been taking for the last several years, you know, the freedom of the press, the multi-party system and now a fully contested presidential election. I think these are major steps and I'm quite proud of how fast we are moving with these steps.

Val>> Well, we wish you all the luck and thank you again, Mr. El-Maghraby, for spending some time with us.

Ahmed El-Maghraby>> Thank you very much. It's been my pleasure. Thank you.

Val>> Mr. El-Maghraby was a guest of Town Hall Los Angeles. You can go to their website or give them a call for information on future speakers. Their website is townhall-la.org.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val>> It's a dream kitchen that would make Wolfgang Puck drool and the food that comes out of is some of the best in Southern California, but don't try making a reservation at this place. It's not open to the public, although its recipes are very public. Toni Guinyard explains.

Toni Guinyard>> Mary Ellen Rae and Donna Deane are used to people watching what they're doing while they're on the job, but they're no ordinary cooks and this is no ordinary kitchen. Consider it a culinary research center. This is the test kitchen for the Los Angeles Times.

Donna Deane>> Whenever people come in the kitchen, they always say, "What a great kitchen. I wish I had one like this." I always say that I wish I did too. I don't (laughter).

Toni Guinyard>> The test kitchen is just that, a kitchen where every recipe printed in the Times is tested before it's published in the paper. The kitchen is huge, approximately 986 square feet, but it's equipped with the same appliances many serious cooks have in their own homes.

Donna Deane>> We want to duplicate the recipe in the same manner as you would at home, so we don't have professional stovetops, for instance.

Mary Ellen Rae>> When you go into the culinary world, you're expecting to work in a restaurant and you're expecting to have a little bit of space to work with and that's how it is in most restaurant kitchens. You've got a little bit of space. Well, I come in here and I have all of this to myself. I have refrigerator drawers. I mean, look at these. I mean, I have everything to work with. I have every ingredient, every flavor of whatever.

Donna Deane>> Everyone is amazed, first of all, that we do have a test kitchen at this paper. Especially the people on tours have no idea that all the recipes in the food section are tested.

>> "Recipes of all kinds, domestic, foreign, ethnic, could be anything."

Toni Guinyard>> A recipe for anything from any number of sources. The recipes are submitted by chefs, taken from cookbooks.

Mary Ellen Rae>> I mean, you can see all of our notes. And you can see all the grease spots. I mean, we literally have cooked our way through this book.

Toni Guinyard>> And suggested by food section writers.

Mary Ellen Rae>> "Now this will be just to practice to see what Russ is talking about and then we'll do another one and test it for timing and all of that."

Toni Guinyard>> The day of our visit, food section writer, Russ Parsons, is doing an article about grilled mackerel. His recipe is being followed, but the mackerel being tested on a stovetop grill isn't exactly turning out as expected, so Russ is asked to troubleshoot.

Russ Parsons>> "Right before you put the fish on, get a paper towel with oil and hit the grill really good. Put the fish on it and let it sit on the grill. Don't mess with it. This is a big mackerel. I couldn't find these mackerel fresh. It's pretty big."

Mary Ellen Rae>> "Well, we have three more to work with (laughter).

Toni Guinyard>> And so it goes, try again, then on to something new.

[Film Clip]

Toni Guinyard>> Each recipe is prepared, painstakingly put into place and photographed and then the photographs are reviewed.

>> "Donna separated the parsley around the frame so that we have it beautiful."

Toni Guinyard>> It's a complicated process. In this case, all this attention over an appetizer. But before it goes from test kitchen to photography studio, it must first pass the taste test. So who has the final say?

Donna Deane>> Well, the food editor, Leslie Brenner.

[Film Clip]

Donna Deane>> She tastes every single thing that goes in the paper and approves everything that goes in the paper.

Leslie Brenner>> It's both fun and serious. The reason it's serious is that I feel that, with any recipe that goes in the paper, somebody is going to spend their hard-earned cash to buy the ingredients and they're going to take the time to cook this. It had better work, not only just work okay, but it had better be terrific. Otherwise, I don't want to put it out there.

[Film Clip]

Leslie Brenner>> You have a huge audience and an incredibly diverse audience both in terms of taste and sophistication about food and cooking skill and all of that. In a very few pages each week, the trick is trying to find something to appeal to, you know, a wide spectrum of that audience.

Toni Guinyard>> With such diverse readership, it's impossible to find recipes, food and drink-related topics to appeal to everyone.

Leslie Brenner>> You'll find more elaborate recipes than you used to find, you know, seven or eight years ago in the Los Angeles Times. At the same time, I do really like to have enough very simple recipes.

Toni Guinyard>> What readers like, they really like. What they don't like, Brenner hears about that too from emails, letters and an occasional phone call.

Leslie Brenner>> I hated that story, I loved that story. Your section used to be so great and now it's terrible. Your section used to be terrible and now it's great.

Toni Guinyard>> Just about everyone who has anything to do with the paper's food section approaches their work as if charting new territory, searching for some new discovery.

Leslie Brenner>> That's what newspaper food-writing is all about. It's finding what's new, finding what's exciting. Sometimes it's just a story that has never been told.

Toni Guinyard>> The story behind this story involved the process of how the test kitchen operates.

Donna Deane>> Well, Monday is our startup -- I call it like our startup day and that's when we get our recipes in, we begin to look them over and see what ingredients we need.

Mary Ellen Rae>> So I shop Monday morning and then I come in and start testing the recipes Monday and Tuesday.

Donna Deane>> Every recipe has been tested at least twice and sometimes up to seven, eight, even nine times.

Leslie Brenner>> We all taste. It's not just me. We all taste and we talk about it and, you know, we do pow-wows in the kitchen or in here, wherever we happen to be.

Donna Deane>> And then, of course, after we scrutinize and carefully look at the recipes, we send out an email and everyone in the food section comes in and tries. We get everyone's opinions.

Leslie Brenner>> We'll taste and everybody sticks a fork in.

Donna Deane>> Once we know what recipes we have and we look at them, we decide how we want to photograph them.

Mary Ellen Rae>> Sometimes, if everything works perfectly, I don't need to make it again until the day of the photograph. But then a lot of recipes need to be tweaked a little bit. You know, too much of that spice or too much of that herb or, you know, not enough wine or something.

Toni Guinyard>> The final product is then taken from the kitchen where it's been prepared into the studio to be photographed for the food section of the Los Angeles Times. Now eight hours a day, five days a week, the test kitchen staff is either cooking or shopping or tasting and then the process begins all over again on Fridays.

Mary Ellen Rae>> Usually on Friday afternoons, I'm given a list of recipes that we're going to test the next week. So then I sit down and make out my shopping list and figure out where I'm going to have to go.

Toni Guinyard>> And so the process continues. Before Times readers can even try the recipes tested on this day, the test kitchen and food section staff is already moving on, searching for something new, something readers just might be willing to try.

Donna Deane>> I want them to feel confident that they can open up that Wednesday food section and they can look at it and they can look at any recipe in the food section and say I would like to make that.

Leslie Brenner>> I think, if people can make food discoveries and get excited about them, then we've done our job.

Toni Guinyard>> I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times.

Val>> And you can see the photographic results of that fish dish in the food section of tomorrow's Los Angeles Times. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

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