Target: Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior
Sponsored by: Our Public Lands

Published on Monday, November 23, 2009 by TruthDig.com

Refuse Allegiance to Coal

by Chris Hedges

There are some 614 coal-fired power plants in the United States, and it is up to us to shut them down. No one in the White House will do it. No one in Congress will do it. And no one at the coming U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen will do it. We will build local movements to carry out acts of nonviolent civil disobedience to halt the burning of coal, or the polar ice caps will continue to dissolve, the Greenland ice sheet will disappear, the glaciers in the Alps, the Himalayas and Tibet will melt, and widespread droughts, rising sea levels and temperatures, acute food shortages, disease and gigantic mass migrations will envelop the globe. We are killing the ecosystem on which human life depends. One of the major polluters is coal, which supplies about half of the country’s electricity. NASA’s James Hansen has demonstrated that our only hope of getting our atmosphere back to a safe level-below 350 parts per million CO₂-lies in stopping the use of coal to generate electricity. We are currently at 390 parts per million carbon dioxide.

“The world political system is not about to keel over and give us a treaty that will get us to 350 parts per million anytime soon, or in fact do anything of great note,” the writer and environmental activist Bill McKibben told me when I met him in New York City. The author of “The End of Nature” and “Deep Economy” said: “The news that the Obama administration had punted on the Copenhagen talks is discouraging. The good news, to the extent that there is any, is that we finally have the beginning of a real global movement about climate change.”

McKibben and his group, 350.org, this year organized perhaps the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history: On Oct. 24, people in 181 countries joined in calling for environmental reform. But such popular calls for change have largely been ignored by the leaders of industrialized nations. The climate crisis will be solved by widespread and sustained civil disobedience or not at all.

“There were no celebrities, no rock stars, no movie stars,” McKibben said of the October protest. “People were rallying around a fairly obscure scientific data point, and the 25,000 pictures or so that have come into the Flickr site from the 5,200 events in 181 countries make it clear that the canard that environmentalism is something for rich white people is crazy. It is mostly something for black, brown and yellow people and mostly something for poor people. We are all going to bear the consequences before very long, but Bangladesh and places like Bangladesh get it first. This is why it was so great to see them heavily involved. We have about half the countries in the world that have endorsed the 350 [parts per million] target. Unfortunately they are the poorest countries on Earth. They will not carry the day at Copenhagen or anywhere else, but they have begun to challenge the right of the rich countries of the world to submerge them, burn them up or whatever else.”

There are five countries that are responsible for over half of fossil-fuel-related CO₂ emissions. The United States and China alone account for more than a third. We in the U.S. have been the world’s largest emitters for more than a century, although we have now been overtaken by China, where growth in emissions has been driven by a rapid increase in coal consumption. China is currently opening an average of two coal-fired power plants a week. Emissions there have more than doubled since 1990. The burden to act rests on us, our major trading partner and a handful of other highly industrialized nations.

“The average American family uses more energy between the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve and dinner on Jan. 2 than the average Tanzanian family uses all year,” McKibben said.

The projected rise of sea levels, as much as six feet this century and 23 feet if the Greenland ice sheet disappears, will submerge coastal nations such as Bangladesh, a country of 160 million people, as well as places such as the Mekong Delta, the Maldives and the Marshall Islands. The disappearance of glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau-glaciers that feed the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze and Yellow rivers-will create catastrophic water shortages and devastate the rice and wheat harvests in China and India, where about four of every 10 people live. World food prices will rise dramatically. If we can’t save countries such as the Maldives and Bangladesh we will also be unable to save Venice, Hawaii, the Netherlands, New Zealand, London, Hong Kong and Manhattan. But don’t expect much from Barack Obama and other leaders in the industrialized world. Their loyalty is not to the planet, or to us, but to the oil and gas industry, the coal industry and the huge corporate polluters who own them.

“Even the inadequate bill before the Congress has been postponed until the spring,” McKibben said, “which in my political calendar is a little too close to the election to be very comfortable. We are getting no leadership from the president, rhetorical or otherwise. All the problems are obvious. The only good news is that there is finally something that looks like the glimmer of a movement.”

It is incumbent on all of us to find out where the nearest coal-powered plant is located-the one closest to me is in Hamilton, N.J.-and begin to organize to shut it down nonviolently. Princeton, where I live, is also home to NRG Energy, the ninth-biggest coal energy producer in the United States. A map of the nation’s coal-fired plants can be found here.

“Coal is the key commodity,” McKibben said. “The ability to cease the combustion of coal will be the thing that decides whether or not we go over the precipice meteorologically in the decades ahead.”

“It is unlikely that the environmental movement, or any other movement, will come up with as much cash as those industries,” McKibben said of the corporations he opposes. “ExxonMobil made more money last year than any company in the history of money. We better not compete in that currency. We better find something else to compete in. The only thing I can think of is bodies, creativity and passion. These are the sort of things, with all their strengths, the Exxons of the world tend to lack.”

McKibben, along with the writer and activist Wendell Berry, organized a mass act of civil disobedience conducted last March against a coal-fired power plant in Washington, D.C., near the White House. Thousands of demonstrators from around the country arrived to see that in anticipation of the protest a promise had been made to convert the plant from coal to natural gas. But there are over 600 more coal plants to close. And McKibben said that local and regional leaders need to rise up to organize against coal.

McKibben and Berry embrace civility and nonviolence. Protesters in Washington last March were enjoined to arrive “in their Sunday best.”

“If we are going to use civil disobedience we need to reclaim it from people who enjoy taunting the police and showing off,” McKibben said.

“I spent last Sunday night out on Boston Common with hundreds and hundreds of young people from across Massachusetts who were willing to very, very peacefully and unaggressively risk arrest, and in fact we were all cited [by the police] before the evening was done,” he went on. “They were sleeping in Boston Common and refusing to sleep in their dorms for the rest of the fall because [the dormitories] are powered by dirt energy. They have been lobbying for a bill in the Massachusetts Statehouse to close down all the coal-fired power plants within the next 10 years. There were students from every campus. The biggest contingent came from Clark in Wooster. The prize was whoever brought the most students got to have me sleep in their tent.”

McKibben and Berry are right. Nonviolent civil disobedience is the only tool that might work. If we mirror the violence employed by the instruments of state security we will become corrupt, as they are, and obliterate the moral high ground that attracts followers to any movement and sustains the long night of resistance. Violence is a poison that infects all those who use it, even in what can be defined as a just cause. And nothing could make ExxonMobil or the coal industry happier than to see shop windows broken, cars set afire and police lines rushed. The moment we resort to violence the corporate state wins. It will gleefully crush us like flies in the name of law and order and national security. The temptation to violence, especially given the passivity of most of us and the hypocrisy of our ruling elite, including Obama, will mount as climate change begins to create social and political unrest. But it must be resisted. This will be a long, long struggle. The coal companies will only be the start. The other corporations that have disempowered the citizenry, created a state of neo-feudalism and turned our democracy into a sham will be next.

“We are past the point where we are going to stop global warming,” McKibben said. “It is happening already, and more of it is coming no matter what we do. One of our jobs is to start figuring out how to cope with it. We need to build the kind of communities that can deal with that. The key question is scale. Communities need to be smaller. Our way of thinking about the world has to shrink. At the same time we need a global movement to continue this fight to bring carbon emissions under some kind of control. If we don’t, the kind of change we are talking about over the next decades is so big there is no way to adapt … no matter what we do, no matter how wonderfully organic your community has become. Communities still require water. People don’t quite understand what three or four or five degrees increase in the temperature of the planet will mean. One degree was enough to melt the Arctic. This was a bad sign.” 

“Nothing important is going to come out of Copenhagen,” McKibben warned, “just a lot of spin. … [Obama's] vast spin machine will be in full gear. There is no obvious route out of all this. We have started exploring mainly popular movements, and hopefully we have introduced a wild card into this game. Our plans are not even plans at this point. It is easier said than done. We shut down one coal-fired power plant and not a very big one. There are 600 left in the country. I don’t fancy myself up to the task of figuring out how to shut them all down. Hopefully some people will begin to do it.”

© 2009 TruthDig.com

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. 

 

Published on Friday, November 20, 2009 by Mother Jones

The Coal Industry’s $47 Million PR Spending Spree

by Kate Sheppard

The coal industry’s major lobby group, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, shelled out a stunning $47 million last year on lobbying, advertising and “grassroots outreach” efforts to fight climate legislation and tout the benefits of “clean coal.” Its efforts to actually develop clean coal technology, however, were a lot less impressive.

ACCCE’s most recent IRS filing, obtained by Greenwire (sub. req’d), lists the contributions to the coalition by the nation’s biggest coal companies. Arch Coal Inc., Consol Energy Inc., and Peabody Energy Corp. each chipped in $5 million; Foundation Coal Corp. gave $3 million, Southern Co. $2.1 million, and American Electric Power Co. Inc. and Duke Energy Corp. (which has since left the group) gave $2 million. ACCCE is among the biggest spenders when it comes to influencing the debate on climate and energy.

But for all their expensive efforts to sell the public on the wonders of clean coal, ACCCE isn’t working quite as hard to make the technology a reality. The coalition’s members have committed the comparatively paltry sum of $3.6 billion to research the technology between 2003 and 2017, according to an April report from the Center for American Progress. That’s just $257 million on average each year to develop the technology to capture and sequester carbon. To put that in perspective, ACCCE’s members made a combined total of $297 billion in profits between 2003 and 2008-meaning, as the report notes, that they’re spending less than two cents on clean coal research for every $1 of profit.

In fact, the climate legislation that ACCCE fought-and fought dirty-to defeat in the House would devote far more money toward developing clean coal than the companies have. (Its “grassroots” efforts hit the news after one of its subcontractors, Bonner and Associates forged letters to Congress opposing a climate bill.) If the Waxman-Markey legislation becomes law, it would hand the coal industry $60 billion for so-called carbon capture and storage (CCS) research and development through 2025. The House measure provides an additional $1 billion each year for demonstration and deployment of this technology, to be funded by a fee on consumers. Plus, early adopters of CCS would get bonus carbon credits for every ton of carbon dioxide sequestered by electric utilities.

Yet just days after Waxman-Markey passed the House, a number of ACCCE’s biggest funders were complaining to the Senate in public hearings that the bill doesn’t give enough money to the coal industry. They also griped that carbon capture and storage technology is more than a decade away from viability, so it would be unreasonable to demand big emissions cuts from the sector anytime soon. “I don’t think CCS will be widely deployed until 2020 or after,” Chris Hobson, senior vice president of research and environmental affairs at Southern Company, told senators in July. You’d never guess that from the coalition’s website though, which still proudly proclaims: “The technology isn’t 20 years away-some of it is here today.”

© 2009 Mother Jones

Kate Sheppard is s a staff reporter for Mother Jones. She covers energy and environmental politics from Washington, D.C. She was previously the political reporter for Grist and a writing fellow at The American Prospect. Her work has also been featured in the WashingtonPost.com, The Guardian, The Center for Public Integrity, The Washington Independent, Washington Spectator, Who Runs Gov, In These Times, and Bitch.

Published on Thursday, November 19, 2009 by Huffington Post

The New (Green) Arms Race

by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Hobbled by opposition from the carbon incumbents and their short-sighted allies on Capitol Hill the Obama administration acknowledged this week that it would not return from Copenhagen with any groundbreaking commitment to control green house gases. Meanwhile, Congress is backsliding on the administration’s wise commitment to impose a rational price on carbon. Behind the logjam, a treacherous U.S. Chamber of Commerce, always willing to put its obsequious scraping to Big Oil and King Coal ahead of its duty to our country, has battled every effort to accelerate America’s transition to a market-based de-carbonized economy.

The Chamber has continued to argue, idiotically, that energy efficiency and independence will somehow put America at a competitive disadvantage with the Chinese. Meanwhile, the Chinese have shrewdly and strategically positioned themselves to steal America’s once substantial lead in renewable power. China will soon make us as dependent on Chinese green technology for the next century as we have been on Saudi oil during the last.

Indeed, the Chinese are treating the energy technology competition if it were an arms race. China is spending as much or more on greentech as it does on its military, hundreds of billions of dollars annually on renewable energy and grid infrastructure improvements. Those investments, if not vigorously countered, will effectively erode America’s greentech industry leadership and secure China’s dominance. China’s economic stimulus package, targeted 38% of spending on greentech, as compared to a miserly 12% of the U.S. stimulus program. By 2013, greentech will account for 15 percent of the Chinese GDP. While the United States is projected to roughly triple its wind generation by 2020, China will increase its capacity twelvefold to a wind generating capability more than twice that of America’s. And, while the United States is projected to increase its installed solar generation a modest 33% by 2020, China’s solar generation is projected to increase 20,000%.

China’s investments in solar technology have so powerfully stimulated the growth of a Chinese solar market that Chinese solar panel manufacturers now far outnumber American ones, and they are achieving low-cost production much faster than their American counterparts. Chinese companies are now flooding the American market with cheap Chinese solar panels and devastating the American manufacturing sector that was gearing up to create tens of thousands of U.S. jobs for our own ailing economy. Hundreds of U.S. solar manufacturers now see their prospects as grim. BP Solar, Evergreen, and General Electric have already announced the closing of American-based solar panel factories and outsourcing, primarily to China. America’s leading solar manufacturer, Applied Materials, has opened the largest non-government solar energy research facility in the world in China. Of today’s ten leading solar panel manufacturers, only one is American. The largest solar panel installation in the United States is a 70,000 panel, 14.2 megawatt array on Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. The array provides more than 25% of the base’s power needs, and saves the Pentagon a million dollars annually in energy costs, but the panels’ manufacturer was China’s Suntech Power Holdings. Even in the thin film solar market, among the last redoubts of American dominance Chinese businesses are squeezing profit.

Last year, America achieved a milestone, building more wind power generation than all new oil and coal generation combined. We have led the world in wind installations for several years, and the wind industry already accounts for more American jobs than coal mining. At one point the U.S. enjoyed global domination of wind turbine manufacturing with great prospects for job creation. Yet today, of the five leading wind turbine manufacturers, only one is American. While Congress dawdles, China is clobbering us. Shenyang Power Group recently inked a deal to be the exclusive supplier of turbines to the largest wind project in the United States, a 36,000 acre, 600 megawatt development in west Texas. The project will create 2,800 new jobs — 2,400 in China, but only 400 in the United States. As Lu Jinxiang, chief executive of Shenyang’s controlling shareholder noted, “This is just the beginning … [the United States] is an ideal target.” China is likewise poised to take away our lead in batteries and electric cars, and has already pulled far ahead of America in automobile fuel efficiency.

Capitol Hill Republicans will soon recognize that the arms race of the 21st century is already in progress with a totalitarian nation that they not long ago called “Red China.” But America will not win with more warheads and better rockets. We can only prevail with robust investment in and support of U.S.-based greentech innovation.

© 2009 Huffington Post

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is chairman of the Waterkeeper Alliance and senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He is the author of Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy.

Published on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 by The Telegraph/UK

Great Barrier Reef ‘Will Die’ Unless Carbon Emissions Slashed

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef will be severely bleached and eventually die unless the world’s industrialised nations drastically cut carbon emissions by up to 90 per cent by 2050, a leading coral scientist has warned.

by Bonnie Malkin in Sydney

Professor Terry Hughes and representatives of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies told a meeting at the Canberra parliament that the future of the reef, and a large chunk of Australia’s tourist industry, was under grave threat from rising sea temperatures.

 

Just a small increase in average temperatures could cause massive coral bleaching on the reef, he said.

 

“We’ve seen the evidence with our own eyes. Climate change is already impacting the Great Barrier Reef,” said Prof Hughes, of James Cook University in Queensland.

To avoid permanently damaging the delicate balance of life on the reef, and give the world’s largest living organism a 50 per cent chance of survival, global carbon emissions must be cut by at least 25 per cent by 2020, he said.

Prof Hughes’s grim prediction came as the Australian parliament debated the details of the government’s planned Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. A final vote on the carbon trading bill is expected next week.

Australia, one of the world’s biggest carbon emitters per capita, has so far only pledged to cut its emissions by five per cent from 2000 levels by 2020.

It has said it would go further, with a 25 per cent cut, if a tough international climate agreement is reached at UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December, but this is looking increasingly unlikely.

John Quiggin, of the University of Queensland, has carried out research which shows the economic impact of a two degree rise in global temperatures.

He said a rise of more than two degrees would be “catastrophic” for the reef and tourism in North Queensland, which is already suffering as a result of the global recession.

The World Heritage-protected Great Barrier Reef sprawls for more than 133,000 sq miles off Australia’s east coast and can be seen from space.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that the Great Barrier Reef could be “functionally extinct” within decades, with deadly coral bleaching likely to be an annual occurrence by 2030.

Bleaching occurs when the tiny plant-like coral organisms die, often because of higher temperatures, and leave behind only a white limestone reef skeleton.

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2009

Published on Friday, November 13, 2009 by Facing South

Will South Carolina Become the Nation’s New Yucca Mountain?

by Sue Sturgis

Earlier this year President Obama canceled the federal government’s plans to store high-level radioactive waste from nuclear power plants and weapons facilities at the controversial Yucca Mountain site in Nevada — but now there are concerns that South Carolina could become a permanent dumping ground for the dangerous waste.

That state is home to the Savannah River Site, a nuclear materials processing center along the Savannah River 25 miles southeast of Augusta, Ga. Built during the 1950s to refine nuclear material for weapons, the site no longer has any operating nuclear reactors and is engaged in cleanup activities.

Given the demise of Yucca Mountain, business leaders in South Carolina and Georgia are expressing worries that high-level waste at the Savannah River Site may now be left there permanently. Scientists have warned about potential environmental contamination from long-term storage of such highly radioactive waste in the Savannah River watershed.

This week the SRS Community Reuse Organization — a nonprofit group working to diversify the region’s economy and a supporter of the Yucca Mountain site — released a report [pdf] calling for a special blue-ribbon panel to study options for disposing of the waste.

As the preface states:

The government’s about face on this critical issue leaves state and local leaders with more questions than answers. Those responsible for public safety, job creation, image enhancement and citizen confidence must now lead in a new reality. They must come to terms with their community’s lingering — perhaps permanent — role as caretaker for the Nation’s highly radioactive waste.As a region, we are now left wondering what’s next? How we will come together in unity to address a path forward in the wake of this broken promise — one that has implications of the longest possible term and a potential chilling effect on the region’s future growth and prosperity?

The group’s report says that if and when a panel is assembled to plot a new strategy for high-level nuclear waste storage, the Savannah River Site region’s leaders should get a “seat at the table.” © Copyright 2009 by the Institute for Southern Studies

Published on Friday, November 6, 2009 by Orion Magazine

Would We Listen to Nature if Our Lives Depended on It?

by Derrick Jensen

People who read my work often say, “Okay, so it’s clear you don’t like this culture, but what do you want to replace it?” The answer is that I don’t want any one culture to replace this culture. I want ten thousand cultures to replace this culture, each one arising organically from its own place. That’s how humans inhabited the planet (or, more precisely, their landbases, since each group inhabited a place, and not the whole world, which is precisely the point), before this culture set about reducing all cultures to one.

I live on Tolowa (Indian) land. Prior to the arrival of the dominant culture, the Tolowa lived here for 12,500 years, if you believe the myths of science. If you believe the myths of the Tolowa, they lived here since the beginning of time. This story may sound familiar, but its significance has, thus far, been lost on the dominant culture, so it bears repeating: when the first settlers arrived here maybe 180 years ago, the place was a paradise. Salmon ran in runs so thick you couldn’t see the bottoms of rivers, so thick people were afraid to put their boats in for fear they would capsize, so thick they would keep people awake at night with the slapping of their tails against the water, so thick you could hear the runs for miles before you could see them. Whales were commonplace in the nearby ocean. Forests were thick with frogs, newts, salamanders, birds, elk, bears. And of course huge ancient redwood trees.

Now I count myself blessed when I see two salmon in what we today call Mill Creek. Another Tolowa staple, Pacific lampreys, are in bad shape. Just three years ago you could not hold a human conversation outside at night in the spring, and now I hear maybe five or six frogs at night. Salamanders, newts, songbirds, all are equivalently gone. The rivers are poisoned with pesticides and herbicides. All in less than two centuries.

Why? Or, perhaps more important, how?

Only the most arrogant and ignorant among us would say something that implies that all humans are destructive, and that the dominant (white) culture is the most destructive simply because somehow indigenous peoples around the world were too stupid to invent backhoes and chainsaws, too backward to dominate their human and nonhuman neighbors with the efficiency and viciousness of the dominant culture. They might even try to argue that the Tolowa weren’t actually living sustainably, even though they lived here for at least 12,500 years. But when 12,500 years of living in place won’t convince them, it becomes pretty clear that evidence is secondary, and that there are, rather, ideological reasons the person cannot accept that humans have ever lived sustainably. One of these ideological reasons is very clear: if you can convince yourself that humans are inherently destructive, then you allow yourself the most convenient of all excuses not to work to stop this culture from destroying the planet: it’s simply in our nature to destroy, and you can’t fight biology, so let’s not fuss about all these little extinctions, and could someone please pass the TV remote? It’s an odious position, but a lot of people take it.

If we want to stop this culture from killing the planet, we might instead try asking how so many indigenous cultures lived in place for so long without destroying their landbases.

There are many differences between indigenous and nonindigenous ways of being in the world, but I want to mention two here. The first is that the indigenous had and have serious long-term relationships with the plants and animals with whom they share their landscape. Ray Rafael, who has written extensively on the concept of wilderness, has said that Native Americans hunted, gathered, and fished “using methods that would be sustainable over centuries and even millennia. They did not alter their environment beyond what could sustain them indefinitely. They did not farm, but they managed the environment. But it was different from the way that people try to manage it now, because they stayed in relationship with it.”

That last phrase is key. What would a society look like that was planning on being in that particular place five hundred years from now? What would an economics look like? If you knew for a fact that your descendants five hundred years from now would live on the same landbase you inhabit now, how would that affect your relationship to sources of water? How would that affect your relationship with topsoil? With forests? Would you produce waste products that are detrimental to the soil? Would you poison your water sources (or allow them to be poisoned)? Would you allow global warming to continue? If the very lives of your children and their children depended on your current actions—and of course they do—how would you act differently than you do?

The other difference I want to mention—and essentially every traditional indigenous person with whom I have ever spoken has said that it is the fundamental difference between western and indigenous peoples—is that even the most open Westerners view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to something real. I asked American Indian writer Vine Deloria about this, and he said, “I think the primary thing is that Indians experience and relate to a living universe, whereas Western people, especially science, reduce things to objects, whether they’re living or not. The implications of this are immense. If you see the world around you as made up of objects for you to manipulate and exploit, not only is it inevitable that you will destroy the world by attempting to control it, but perceiving the world as lifeless robs you of the richness, beauty, and wisdom of participating in the larger pattern of life.” That brings to mind a great line by a Canadian lumberman: “When I look at trees I see dollar bills.” If when you look at trees, you see dollar bills, you’ll treat them one way. If when you look at trees, you see trees, you’ll treat them differently. If when you look at this particular tree you see this particular tree, you’ll treat it differently still. The same is true for salmon, and, of course, for women: if when I look at women I see objects, I’m going to treat them one way. If when I look at women I see women, I’ll treat them differently. And if when I look at this particular woman I see this particular woman, I’ll treat her differently still.

Here’s where people usually ask, “Okay, so how do I listen to the natural world?” When people ask me this, I always begin by asking them if they have ever made love. If so, I ask whether the other person always had to say, “put this here,” or “do that now,” or did they sometimes read their lover’s body, listen to the unspoken language of the flesh? Having established that one can communicate without words, I then ask if they have ever had any nonhuman friends (a.k.a. pets). If so, how did the dog or cat let you know that her food dish was empty? I used to have a dog friend who would look at me, look at the food dish, look at me, look at the food dish, until finally the message would get across to me.

How do we hear the rest of the natural world? Unsurprisingly enough, the answer is: by listening. That’s not easy, given that we have been told for several thousand years that these others are silent. But the fact that we cannot easily hear them doesn’t mean they aren’t speaking, and does not mean they have nothing to say. I’ve had people respond to my suggestion that they listen to the natural world by going outside for five minutes and then returning to say they didn’t hear anything. But how can you expect to learn any new language (remember, most nonhumans don’t speak English) in such a short time? Learning to listen to our nonhuman neighbors takes effort, humility, and patience.

The Tolowa believed the nonhuman world had something to say, and that what the nonhuman world had to say was vital to their own survival. Given that they were living here sustainably for 12,500 years, and given that we manifestly are not, perhaps the least we could do is acknowledge that they were on to something, and maybe even explore just what that kind of relationship might look and feel like.

© 2009 Orion Magazine

Derrick Jensen is an activist and the author of many books, most recently What We Leave Behind and Songs of the Dead.

Target: U.S. Congress
Sponsored by: Union of Concerned Scientists

Published on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Unnatural Gas: The Inflated Promise of a Not-So-Clean Fuel

by Stan Cox

Holding out the prospect of vast new domestic reserves, the natural gas industry is promising to make the United States an energy-rich nation once again. But we should be careful what we wish for. Spending those riches could endanger water supplies for millions of Americans while still failing to solve the climate crisis.

Electric utilities have expanded their consumption because gas-fired plants can be “turned up” to meet high peak power demand more quickly than can coal-fired plants. Natural gas is also more climate-friendly than coal and less menacing than nuclear energy.

With the discovery of drilling techniques that can extract natural gas from deep shale formations, the authoritative Potential Gas Committee estimates that the total of confirmed and potentially accessible gas reserves has grown 35 percent in just three years.

Climate bills in the House and Senate contain strong incentives to increase drilling and burning of natural gas. Seized by anti-coal fervor, most major environmental groups have gone along with the gas rush.

But natural gas is “clean” only in contrast to coal – just as a bacon cheeseburger can be regarded as healthful compared with a double bacon cheeseburger. Per kilowatt of electricity generated, gas releases 55 percent as much carbon as coal. And gas drilling poses a growing threat to our water supplies.

The investigative news organization ProPublica has documented thousands of cases of surface and groundwater contamination caused by drilling in conventional and shale deposits in six states.

Concern is now growing over hydraulic fracturing, in which water laced with sand, clay and “fracturing fluids” is pumped deep underground to create fissures and free gas trapped in rock formations. Most of the polluted water returns to the surface and must be handled as waste.

Drilling in shale, which depends heavily on fracturing, can consume hundreds of times more water per well than does drilling in traditional gas fields.

In Pennsylvania, which shares the vast, gas-laden Marcellus shale formation with four other states, drilling is expected to generate 19 million gallons of waste water daily by 2011, according to the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. The water, which carries both natural and human-made toxins and is up to five times as salty as sea water, puts a heavy burden on water treatment plants. New York residents are working to prevent drilling in the Marcellus formation, because its shale and gas underlie the groundwater source for millions of people downstate.

Meanwhile, major fracturing-fluid manufacturers refuse to reveal their products’ ingredients. (Industry leader Halliburton maintains that to compel it to list the chemicals in its products would be an “unconstitutional taking” of its intellectual property.) Investigators have managed to identify many of compounds used in fluids, and many are toxic. Some, including benzene, formaldehyde, 1,4-dioxane, ethylene dioxide and nickel sulfate, are confirmed carcinogens.

Gas companies have enjoyed a slack environmental leash since the 2005 Energy Policy Act exempted them from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Water Pollution Control Act. Bills now stalled in Congress that would re-regulate the industry need broader grassroots support.

Meanwhile, in competing with Big Coal for the affections of Congress, the newly formed America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA) launched an $80 million advertising and lobbying campaign earlier this year to promote its “clean, abundant, American, reliable, and versatile” product. As climate bills work their way through Congress, ANGA’s efforts appear to be paying off.

Risking our water so we can burn more natural gas will not be the planet’s miracle climate cure. For the United States to achieve necessary reductions in greenhouse emissions – estimated at more than 80 percent – will require not more energy production, even if somewhat cleaner, but deep cuts in energy consumption.

Coal must be phased out as quickly as possible, but more gas won’t accomplish that. While electric utilities’ gas consumption doubled from 1996 to 2007, coal use continued its steady climb.

What if, with shale drilling, we could achieve another doubling of gas-fired electricity generation, but this time eliminate an equivalent amount of coal-fired generation? Even that steep escalation of gas drilling would cut the utility industry’s carbon emissions by only 12 percent and the nation’s total carbon emissions by just 5 percent, based on Energy Department figures.

Financier T. Boone Pickens recommends running our vehicles on natural gas. But substituting natural gas for gasoline in all vehicles would reduce the nation’s total carbon emissions by less than 9 percent. Converting all gasoline-powered vehicles would consume more natural gas than electric utilities, homes and businesses combined. Consequences for the nation’s water would be disastrous.

Natural gas is being hailed by some, including Pickens, as a high-energy “bridge” to a renewable future, and by others as sufficiently climate-friendly to be a “destination” fuel. But as gas’ environmental drawbacks become more evident, it’s looking more like a bridge to nowhere.

Published on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 by The Times Online/UK

It’s a Dirty Business — The New Gold Rush That Is Blackening Canada’s Name

by Ben Webster

A giant mechanical digger gouges out a chunk of topsoil, grass and tree stumps, extending a neat furrow that stretches into the distance. Dozens of similar furrows run parallel with the regularity of a ploughed field.

 

Yet no crop could grow in the pitch-black surface exposed by the machine working 1,000ft below our helicopter. This is the edge of a fast-expanding open-cast mine in the Canadian tar sands, one of the world’s most polluting sources of oil.

 

It takes only a few minutes to fly across the 200 sq miles (520 sq km) of mines, processing plants and man-made lakes of toxic water. But Canada has so far extracted only 2 per cent of a resource that it hopes will turn it into a global energy superpower.

BP and Shell are among dozens of oil companies preparing to raise production from 1.3 million barrels a day at present to 2.5 million by 2015 and 6 million by 2030.

Canada faces a dilemma as it prepares for next month’s UN climate summit in Copenhagen. It wants to present itself as environmentally responsible but also wants the profits from the tar sands, which cover an area of Alberta’s natural coniferous forest larger than England.

The sands contain 174 billion barrels of proven reserves, the world’s second-largest reserves after Saudi Arabia. With improved techniques, Canada hopes to extract between 315 billion and 1.7 trillion barrels.

A Co-operative Bank study calculated that, even if all other carbon dioxide emissions stopped, fully exploiting the tar sands would still tip the world into catastrophic climate change by raising global temperatures more than 2C above pre-industrial levels. Extracting each barrel of crude from the sticky mass of sand, clay and bitumen produces two to three times as much CO2 as drilling for a barrel of conventional oil. The tar sands boom faltered a year ago as the oil price fell below the $60 a barrel at which the extraction process is profitable. Now, with oil at about $80 a barrel, hundreds of fortune seekers arrive each day in Fort McMurray, the oil equivalent of a gold rush town.

Two lanes are being added to the bridges from the town to the tar sands projects across the Athabasca River. The airport is planning a new terminal and oil companies have built four private runways to ferry workers to their sites directly. But the best indication of Fort McMurray’s growth is the constant traffic jam. It can take an hour just to reach the highway from the suburbs that have sprung up in the hills around the town.

The average house costs C$600,000 (£340,000) , but that is well within the budget of truck drivers at the mines, who, with overtime, earn C$180,000 a year. Many workers fly in from depressed fishing towns in Newfoundland and save money by living in mobile cabins stacked four storeys high in clearings in the forest.

Jean Fournier, 64, a scaffolder working on a new processing plant, says that he has earned C$64,000 in the past four months – working 24 days on and four off. “That’s three times what I could earn back home in New Brunswick. I’ve made enough money to build my own house and I’m retiring after six more weeks here.”

He scowls when asked about Greenpeace’s recent occupation of tar sands plants: “Greenpeace will make people starve by killing the economy. We all care about the environment but we need our jobs.”

With winter temperatures of minus 40C, the 112,000 tar sands workers are more concerned with protecting themselves from the cold than the world from global warming. A comment article last week in the local paper, Fort McMurray Today, begins: “Where the hell is the global warming some people are so worried about?”

Syncrude, which operates one of the biggest mines, is working hard to improve its image and recently handed back its first piece of “reclaimed land” to the Canadian Government. Publicity photographs show imported bison and young trees, but when you visit you realise that this is less than half a square mile on the edge of a wasteland of mines and toxic lakes.

Syncrude no longer refers to tar sands, the name used since the 19th century, because it thinks “oil sands” sounds more positive. It describes the topsoil stripped away as “overburden” and the toxic lakes as “tailings ponds”.

In April last year 1,600 ducks died after landing on an oil slick on one of Syncrude’s lakes. It took a full year for the company and Alberta’s environment agency to admit the scale of wildlife loss. To ward off another PR disaster, Syncrude has filled the lakes with orange scarecrows, known locally as bit-u-men.

Canada knows, however, that the biggest long-term threat to its tar sands industry is not dead ducks but international regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. Most of the crude is exported to the United States, where several states are considering banning it because it is so carbon-intensive. America’s dependence on tar sands is a sensitive issue in Washington, and Barack Obama’s ambassador to Canada toured the mines last month and questioned the companies about their carbon emissions.

Alberta’s latest proposal to rid tar sands of their dirty image is a C$2 billion subsidy for carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities. Shell plans to install CCS by 2015 at an upgrading plant but admits that it would reduce carbon emissions from its tar sands production by only 15-20 per cent.

Mel Knight, the energy minister for Alberta, which receives C$12 billion a year in revenue from its oil and gas industries, told The Times: “There has to be at least a hundred years of production in the oil sands and CCS will make this more palatable. My feeling is we will reach a steady state of five million barrels a day. The oil sands are critical [to] the global supply of energy. The world needs the energy and there’s no alternative that we can see.”

Shell plans to increase production from 155,000 barrels a day to 255,000 next year. BP is designing a plant with an initial output of 60,000 barrels a day, rising to 200,000 within a decade.

Canada has offered belatedly to cut its current CO2 emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 but wants to be forgiven for ignoring the target set at Kyoto a decade ago. Its emissions were 26 per cent above its 1990 levels by 2006: the Kyoto target was a 6 per cent cut.

Peter Lee, director of the environmental group Global Forest Watch Canada, said: “There is no place for oil sands in a low-carbon future. Canada is ignoring its global responsibility and betraying its promises.

“If we can’t get it right in Canada, one of the world’s richest countries, how can we expect developing countries to reduce their emissions?”

Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at Victoria University, British Columbia, and contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said: “If we burn the tar sands, we are effectively saying we don’t owe anything to future generations.” Copyright 2009 Times Newspapers Ltd.

Published on Sunday, November 1, 2009 by The Independent/UK

What Lies Beneath the Rainforest

You want the Amazon to survive? Then pay us not to pump the oil, says Ecuador.

by Huw Hennessy in Quito

The tropical rainforest in the eastern lowlands of Ecuador assaults the senses: the sunlight dazzles the eyes, the heat is so fierce that within seconds one’s clothes are soaked in sweat. Then there are the sounds: a hypnotic symphony of frogs, crickets and other insects and birds which continues unabated day and night. There are sudden glimpses of the jungle’s abundant wildlife: a spectacular flash of a blue morpho butterfly at the river’s edge, a flock of green parakeets screeching.

 

This stunning region, which covers more than a third of Ecuador’s area, almost the size of England, and which is one of the world’s richest biospheres, with a huge diversity of animals and plants, some found nowhere else on Earth, faces a double threat: from the logging industry, which would strip it bare, and from the oil industry, which for nearly 40 years has been exploiting the huge resources of crude beneath the soil. Now, however, Ecuador is betting it can keep what is left of the oil in the ground and hang onto its biosphere into the bargain.

 

The South American country has learned the hard way that oil brings human misery and environmental devastation along with billions in export earnings. Every new oil field is an invasion that brings tens of thousands of outsiders into the forest’s heart, polluting the air, soil and water, destroying wildlife, and assaulting the support systems of indigenous tribes, which can lead to their extermination. And the damage is not confined to the immediate vicinity of the wells.

The Via Auca is the main highway cutting through the Ecuadorean Amazonia region, and it has been a lifeline of the oil industry for nearly 40 years, slicing through the countryside like a badly healed wound, the roadside lined with hellish flares, murky waste pits and corroded pipelines. Accidents involving the pipelines are frequent, and their consequences harrowing. On the far side of the town of Dayuma, which sprang up as an oil workers’ shantytown and is still riddled with crime and prostitution, one of the ageing pipelines has ruptured, sending a jet of oil shooting 30 metres into the air, staining the vegetation black all around.

The sickly stench of crude oil is overwhelming in the midday tropical heat. A house and a field across the road have also been soaked by the filthy gusher. Sebastian Ortiz, whose elderly father owns the simple wooden house by the roadside on the edge of the jungle, points out where the oil has drenched the field and seeped into the ground. Petrobel, one of many oil companies now operating in the region, has said it will pay his father US$5,000 (£3,000) towards the clean-up costs. But Ortiz says: “I don’t know when he will be paid, or even if it is still safe for him to carry on living here.”

Pollution is only one of the many ills that the oil business brings with it. Fernando Moreno, an anthropologist
with the Ministry of the Environment, has been monitoring the oil industry’s effect on the local community for years. “The people have become beggars” he says. “They have become accustomed to demanding whatever they need and more from the oil companies, just because they are in the same territory. Weighing up the benefits and drawbacks of the oil companies, I think it would be better not to have them. They lead to many bad habits, they make people avaricious, they increase the differences between people – and they are a source of contamination: for the land, the water and the people themselves.”

For the last 16 years Ecuador has been embroiled in a bitter battle over a huge $27.3 billion environmental damages claim brought against US oil giant Chevron by 30,000 Amazonian inhabitants. The plaintiffs accuse Texaco (which Chevron acquired in 1993) of dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the rainforest between 1964 and 1990, and claim that 1,400 deaths occurred in the region as a result of the contaminated soil and water, which brought unaccountably high levels of cancer, skin and breathing conditions. The Amazon Defence Coalition, which represents the plaintiffs, says the scale of the pollution makes it the biggest environmental disaster
in the world, dwarfing the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and leading some experts to dub it “South America’s Chernobyl”. It is certainly shaping up to become the world’s biggest environmental lawsuit.

Chevron robustly refutes the allegations. It says Texaco spent US$40 million on a clean-up before it handed over operations to the state oil company in 1992. Ecuador’s government then signed a release freeing Chevron from any liability for subsequent damages from potential oil contamination.

Whatever the outcome of the legal battle Ecuador is now banking on a new idea to help it shed its poisonous dependency on oil. The Yasuni-ITT Initiative aims to keep the region’s remaining oil reserves untapped and underground, in return for financial compensation from the international community and carbon offsets from the carbon markets.

The crux of the scheme is simple: to keep the oil beneath the Yasuni National Park where it is, in perpetuity. Covering nearly 2.5 million acres of primary tropical rainforest, Yasuni is the ancestral territory of the Waorani people and two other tribes, the Tagaeri and the Taromenane. It was named a Unesco biosphere reserve in 1989, and scientists regard it one of the most biodiverse places on earth.

It is also the home of Ecuador’s largest oil reserve. But by not extracting the estimated 846 million barrels of oil in the reserve, Ecuador will keep an estimated 410 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, making a big contribution to the fight against global warming.

It will also pledge to respect the territories of the indigenous cultures living in the national park, as well as protecting its flora and fauna. In return, the Ecuadorean Government has asked for compensation of $350 million a year for 10 years, which would be invested in environmental and social development programmes, helping the country move towards a sustainable economy.

After a slow start the plan has begun to attract serious promises of commitment. Amazon Watch, an organisation dedicated to protecting the rainforest and its indigenous inhabitants, calls it “a landmark proposal … a precedent-setting effort by an oil-exporting nation to preserve a global biodiversity hotspot, protect indigenous rights and set the stage for its own economic and energetic shift away from fossil fuels”.

Some big international players agree: Germany has offered $50 million on condition that other nations stump up similar sums. Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, and Yolanda Kakabadse, a senior member of the Yasuni commission, have been in London and continental European capitals this week spreading the word. And in December Ecuador’s former chancellor Francisco Carrión, the Government’s envoy on the initiative, will present it at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Among Ecuadoreans themselves, the initiative is welcomed particularly by the flourishing tourist industry. With a spectacular range of natural attractions, from the Galapagos Islands to the snow-peaked Andes, Ecuador has long been a pioneer in ecotourism.

Fander Falconi the foreign minister and one of the founders of the initiative, says the scheme will work on the basis of shared responsibility, locally and globally. “What we are aiming for is global sustainability, but with a distinction drawn between those who harm the environment and those who suffer the consequences of this harm.”

Luz Coloma, Yasuni-ITT’s press officer, added, “Ecuador has had sad experiences with the exploitation of oil and no one wants any more environmental disasters like the Chevron-Texaco case.”

On the banks of the Shiripuno river, to the west of the Yasuni National Park, is the Huaorani Ecolodge run and owned by formerly nomadic hunters who only came into contact with the outside world 50 years ago. Omene Paa, a tour guide at the lodge, tells how oil has been a curse for his people from the time “the path-cutters” first arrived. The “petrolera” companies brought disease and contaminated the water, he claims. One of his cousins died of a lung infection. Now Omene says his people, who first fought off the US oilmen with axes, just want to be allowed to live in peace. “Our battle should continue; we the Huaorani must look after our territory.”

Copyright 2009 Independent News and Media Limited

Published on Monday, October 26, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Battle at Coal River Mountain Explodes: Green Jobs Vs. Big Coal Showdown

by Jeff Biggers

The Battle at Coal River Mountain has officially begun.

At the same time President Barack Obama invoked the “legacy of daring men and women” in our nation’s quest for renewable energy initiatives, and as millions of concerned citizens rallied in support of 350.org climate change events around the world this past weekend, Big Coal bulldozers reportedly clear cut a swath of lush deciduous forests in the carbon sink of Appalachia and fired the opening salvos in the mountaintop removal mining blasting process to destroy the historic range slated for the Coal River Mountain Wind Project — the most symbolic clean energy project in the nation.

But not without a fight.

Just as Appalachian mountaineers single-handedly turned the tide of the American Revolution, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, in defeating the British loyalists who threatened to lay waste to mountain communities at the Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780; just as mountaineers and union coal miners marched to liberate mountain communities at the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 against Big Coal and their armed thugs, an extremely organized and growing coalfield uprising movement against mountaintop removal has marked a line in the sand on Coal River Mountain as the ultimate battleground to stop mountaintop removal and launch President Obama’s clean energy jobs program.

How can you join the battle at Coal River Mountain?

First, donate generously to the non-profit Coal River Mountain Watch advocates on the frontlines; support the coalfield organizations in the Alliance for Appalachia; put your body on the line with direct action organizations like Climate Ground Zero, Mountain Justice and Rainforest Action Network; contact national environmental organizations like the Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign and Natural Resources Defense Council.

RAN, in fact, has called for a national “End Mountaintop Removal Day of Action” for next Friday, October 30.

And take action at the I Love Mountains website.

Coalfield residents and the national allies are calling on all concerned citizens to contact President Obama, CEQ chief Nancy Sutley, EPA chief Lisa Jackson, and Sen. Robert Byrd to halt this unfolding tragedy.

In a blatant act of aggression against besieged coalfield residents, blasting dangerously close to one of the largest coal slurry impoundments in the nation, and immediately eliminating 24 megawatts of wind power development for the internationally acclaimed Coal River Wind Project, a subsidiary of Big Coal behemoth Massey Energy recently lay waste to the first acres of the 1,100-acre Bee Tree Branch section of a proposed 6,000-acre mountaintop removal operation designed to destroy the last in tact mountain on the historic Coal River Mountain range.

Here are the first exclusive photos of the destruction:

This blasting in the Bee Tree Branch area of Coal River Mountain effectively derails the Coal River Wind Project. Unlike the limited 14-year supply of coal on the site, the Coal River Wind project could provide long-term energy for 70,000 households, an estimated 200 jobs and $1.7 million in annual county taxes. In spite of the blasting, the upcoming UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen will also be reviewing the Coal River Wind proposal as a model for sustainable green economic development in the United States.

Last week, area residents also appealed to Gov. Manchin to halt the blasting and order a state of emergency, in order to thoroughly investigate the catastrophic potential of the jeopardized Brushy Fork coal slurry impoundment, which holds back billions of gallons of toxic coal sludge. Blasting is taking place within a dangerously close distance of honey-combed underground mines by the impoundment dam.

Residents noted that another Massey subsidiary in eastern Kentucky was responsible for the largest coal slurry spill in 2000, where 300 million gallons of toxic sludge into the area’s waterways and aquifers. If the earthen Brushy Fork dam breaks, nearly 1,000 area residents will have less than five minutes to save their lives.

In effect, Coal River Mountain should be ground zero in the climate change and renewable energy movements.

And the blasting of Bee Tree Branch will not only strip the great range of its resources, its tributaries and lush forests, its history and its meaning; it will rob Americans of the possibility of creating long-lasting green jobs and energy. It will resound as the death knell of an American and Appalachian way of life, and a rejection of any opportunities for a sustainable future for the embattled coalfields.

The blasting has been launched.

Will the nation — and the Obama administration — defend Coal River Mountain from this reckless assault on American citizens, our American mountains and waterways, and a clean energy future? 

Target: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar
Sponsored by: Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund

Published on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 by The Guardian/UK

US Gives Shell Green Light for Offshore Oil Drilling in the Arctic

Conservationists say the decision by the Obama administration to allow drilling in the Beaufort Sea repeats Bush era mistakes

by Ed Pilkington

Conservationist groups based in Alaska have accused the Obama administration of repeating the mistakes of George Bush after it gave the conditional go-ahead for Shell to begin drilling offshore for oil and natural gas in the environmentally sensitive Beaufort Sea.

 

The Minerals Management Service, part of the federal Interior Department, yesterday gave Shell the green light to begin exploratory wells off the north coast of Alaska in an Arctic area that is home to large numbers of endangered bowhead whales and polar bears, as well as walruses, ice seals and other species. The permission would run from July to October next year, though Shell has promised to suspend operations from its drill ship from late August when local Inuit people embark on subsistence hunting. 

Environmentalists condemned the decision to allow drilling, saying it would generate industrial levels of noise in the water and pollute both the air and surrounding water. Rebecca Noblin, an Alaskan specialist with the conservation group the Centre for Biological Diversity, said: “We’re disappointed to see the Obama administration taking decisions that will threaten the Arctic. It might as well have been the Bush administration.”

Whit Sheard, the Alaskan expert with the environmental group Pacific Environment, accused the US Interior Department of “again trying to implement an overly aggressive Bush-era drilling plan in one of the riskiest areas on the planet to drill”.

The question of offshore oil drilling in the Arctic was one of the controversial environmental issues that confronted the Bush administration. Its permission for exploration in the Beaufort Sea, widely condemned by environmentalists, was struck down last year by a federal court on grounds that it had failed sufficiently to consider the impacts on bowhead whales and the subsistence activities of Inuit populations.

The ruling was later set aside and Shell withdrew its drilling plans.

According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, there are between 30,000 and 50,0000 bowhead whales in the world, with up to 9,000 of them feeding in the Beaufort Sea. The whales migrate twice a year through the area and are crucial to the subsistence economy of the Inupiat people.

Whale experts warn that the bowhead stocks are sensitive to noise and could be driven further off shore by the disruption of drilling. That in turn would have an impact on their chances of survival, which have already been harmed by early side-effects of global warming.

There are also fears that any drilling could lead to oil spills which would be impossible to clean up amid the Arctic’s broken sea ice.

Shell must now satisfy the authorities that it has met air and water quality standards and safeguards for whale protection before it can begin drilling. The oil company’s head in Alaska, Pete Slaiby, said objections had been taken into account.

“We sincerely believe this exploration plan addresses concerns we have heard in the North Slope communities which have resulted in the programmes being adjusted accordingly,” he said.

© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited

Target: U.S. Federal Agencies
Sponsored by: Union of Concerned Scientists

Published on Thursday, October 8, 2009 by Greenpeace USA

Boxer-Kerry Climate Bill Greenwashes Nuclear Power

by Jim Riccio

Bowing to pressure from the pro-nuclear lobby, Senators Boxer and Kerry have included nuclear power into their bill to address climate change. In their proposed legislation, the Senators claim that “nuclear energy is the largest provider of clean, low-carbon, electricity….” Funny we’ve heard that before. In fact, the bill’s nuclear section reads like it was lifted off the Nuclear Energy Institute’s (NEI) website, despite its lack of veracity.

Over a decade ago, environmentalists challenged the nuclear industry’s propaganda that they were clean and green. As a result, the Better Business Bureau’s ( BBB ) National Advertising Division found that the Nuclear Energy Institute’s ads falsely claimed that nuclear reactors make power without polluting the air and water or damaging the environment. The BBB said that, “The nuclear industry should stop calling itself ‘environmentally clean’ and should stop saying it makes power ‘without polluting the environment.’” The director of the division said such claims were “unsupportable.” The bureau agreed with environmentalists that nuclear fuel is made using electricity from coal plants and that nuclear waste poses a threat to the public health and safety.

The nuclear industry’s brazen disregard for the BBB prompted the environmental groups to bring NEI before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC found that

[B]ecause the discharge of hot water from cooling systems is known to harm the environment, and given the unresolved issues surrounding disposal of radioactive waste, we think that NEI has failed to substantiate its general environmental benefit claim.

Unfortunately those same false claims have now found their way into the legislation offered by Senator’s Boxer and Kerry.

Even Andrew Kadak, “Professor of the Practice” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has acknowledged that nuclear power contributes CO2 to the environment. In a speech before the American Physical Society entitled “A Renaissance for Nuclear Energy?” Kadak bemoaned the fact that the international community had already rejected nuclear power as a solution to climate change. However, Kadak recognized that:

For many years, nuclear energy, while arguably a -CO2 emitting energy source, has been judged to be unacceptable for reasons of safety, unstable regulatory climate, a lack of a waste disposal solution and, more recently, economics.

If the Senators actually want to abate climate change rather than merely enriching nuclear corporations, we need solutions that are fast, safe and affordable, and that rules out nuclear power. The Congressional Budget Office has already determined that the risk of default on the nuclear loan guarantees congress will supply to the nuclear industry is well above 50%. Is it really the Senator’s intent to support the next taxpayer bailout?

Mid American, a subsidiary of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, has already conducted their economic due diligence on a new nuclear plant and determined that it does not make economic sense to build. If the “world’s greatest investor” will not waste his resources on new nuclear power, perhaps the Senate should listen.

But Warren Buffet’s corporation isn’t the only one who thinks nuclear power is an economic non-starter. In April, Jon Wellinghoff, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, stated that new nuclear and coal plants are not needed. Renewable energy like wind & solar and improvements in energy efficiency will provide enough energy to meet our future energy demands. Wellinghoff concluded that nuclear and coal plants are too expensive.

In June, Moody’s Investor Services released their analysis of new nuclear generation and determined that nuclear power was a “bet the farm” risk. Why should the American taxpayer be expected to support such an investment?

The history of nuclear power plant cost overruns that led Forbes magazine to call nuclear power the “largest managerial disaster in business history” is repeating itself with the current generation of nuclear reactors. Last month, the French nuclear giant, Areva announced that they had lost 550 million euros, a 79% drop in their profits, due to construction delays with their reactor in Finland. According to Areva, the 3-billion euro nuclear plant has now accumulated 2.3 billion euros in estimated losses. Does the Senate really want to repeat this fiscal fiasco in the U.S.?

Nuclear power is a deadly and dangerous distraction from real solutions to climate change and our energy needs. Nuclear power is unsafe, uneconomical & unnecessary. Rather than greenwashing nuclear power, Senators Boxer and Kerry should cut the nuclear title from their bill and work to oppose any attempts to support this failed experiment.

© 2009 Greenpeace

As Greenpeace’s Nuclear Policy Analyst, Jim Riccio has two decades of experience on nuclear energy policy and is considered one of the nation’s most prominent anti-nuclear activists. His advocacy experience has put his name in the country’s major newspapers: the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, as well as ABC News, NBC News, CNN, CNBC and
the Discovery Channel among others.

Published on Sunday, October 4, 2009 by the Herald Scotland

Beekeepers Tell Pesticide Firm to Buzz Off

by Rob Edwards

One of the world’s biggest pesticide companies, Syngenta, has been accused of a “howling conflict of interest” for funding research into the disappearance of honeybees – a problem which some people claim it may have helped cause.

 

Syngenta, based in Basel, Switzerland, last year clocked up £7.3 billion worth of sales in more than 90 countries. Among the products it markets to farmers are insecticides which have been blamed for harming honeybees. 

It now also co-funds a £1m project in the UK, announced last week, to research the decline of the bees. But the company has dismissed criticisms of its role in the project as “perverse”.

A film due to open in cinemas this week highlights the global plight of the honeybee and argues that insecticides are partly to blame. Called Vanishing Of The Bees, it is backed by the Co-operative retail group, which has a strict policy on the use of pesticides on the fruit and vegetables it sells, including a total ban on the use of several chemicals.

According to beekeepers, honeybee populations in the UK crashed by nearly a third in 2008. The implications are alarming, as bees contribute £200m a year to the UK economy, pollinating a third of our food.

Scientists speculate that a combination of factors may be involved, including disease, mites, weather and modern farming practices. But some argue that a group of widely-used nicotine-based insecticides known as neonicotinoids could be inflicting neural damage on bees, and contributing to their demise. Syngenta sells two products containing neonicotinoids, Actara and Cruiser.

To protect bee populations, some such insecticides have been banned or restricted in France, Germany, Italy and Slovenia. But they can still be used in other countries, including the UK and the United States.

A coalition of environmental groups has launched a campaign for a ban on neonicotinoids in the UK. The group includes the Soil Association, which certifies organic food.

Its Scottish director, Hugh Raven, said Syngenta had made its position clear by opposing a ban on neonicotinoids.

“The taint of commercial interest has undermined this research before it’s even started,” he said.

The research is also supported by the government’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. “The BBSRC should think again, and get a co-funder without this howling conflict of interest,” said Raven.

Professor Andrew Watterson, head of the occupational and environmental health research group at Stirling University, agreed there were “potential conflicts of interest in the project which may affect the credibility of the findings”.

Graham White, a beekeeper in the Scottish Borders and an environmental author, was scathing about Syngenta’s role: “Putting Syngenta in charge of UK research into the causes of honeybee deaths is arguably the equivalent of putting the tobacco companies in charge of research into lung cancer.”

But Andrew Coker, Syngenta’s head of corporate affairs in the UK, said: “It seems perverse that we put our money into researching bee health and then get criticised for it.”

Dr Celia Caulcott, BBSRC’s director of innovation and skills, also defended the research. She said: “The use of insecticides in agriculture is just one possible reason for the problems bees are facing. The most important thing to do right now is to understand what is happening and then translate that knowledge into actions to address the decline.”

Copyright ©2009 Herald & Times Group

Published on Friday, October 2, 2009 by The Nation

The Coalfield Uprising

by Jeff Biggers

When the Environmental Protection Agency declared this year on September 11 that all pending mountaintop removal mining permits in four Appalachian states stood in violation of the Clean Water Act and required further review, Lora Webb didn’t have time to join in any celebrations. As she and her husband, Steve, a coal miner, packed up their possessions and left his family’s ancestral property outside Lindytown, West Virginia, Lora was more concerned about finding a place to sleep that night.

For the past few years, ever since a massive twenty-story dragline landed on a ridge near their home, the Webbs had endured twice-daily, bone-rattling explosions and the quasi-apocalyptic storms of coal dust and fly rock that blanketed their home and garden. Lindytown’s creeks and mountain hollows no longer exist, and a once-thriving community has been reduced to a ghost town. “It’s unreal. It’s like we’re living in a war zone,” Lora Webb told a local newspaper last fall.

By the spring of this year, the Webbs were one of the last holdouts in the area. Hoping to avoid displacement, they pleaded with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) and various federal agencies to enforce mining laws. Lora Webb even toted a jar of coal dust to Capitol Hill. In the end, though, they threw up their hands in bewilderment at the government’s inaction and sold their beloved home to Massey Energy, the Richmond-based corporation that runs the nearby Twilight mountaintop removal site. Then they were issued a sixty-day order to evacuate.

The temporarily homeless Webbs are a stark example that mountaintop removal does more than “likely cause water quality impacts,” as the EPA has determined. More than 3.5 million pounds of explosives rip daily across the ridges and historic mountain communities in West Virginia; a similar amount of explosives are employed in eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia and eastern Tennessee. Mountaintop removal operations have destroyed more than 500 mountains and 1.2 million acres of forest in our nation’s oldest and most diverse range, and jammed more than 1,200 miles of streams with mining waste.

In cautious but no uncertain terms, the Obama administration has finally acknowledged these hazards, and has taken some important steps toward mitigating the damage. On June 11 the Council on Environmental Quality chief, Nancy Sutley, declared that the administration “has serious concerns about the impacts of mountaintop coal mining on our natural resources and on the health and welfare of the Appalachian communities.”

Yet, while officials are framing the issue as a manageable environmental problem, mountaintop removal has also caused considerable human suffering and one of the largest displacements of US citizens since the nineteenth century, a fact the government has not adequately addressed. The Webbs are just one family among an untold number of Americans over the past four decades who have been forced by the coal industry to relocate. And the death of 22-year-old Joshua McCormick–who succumbed to kidney cancer on September 23 in the Prenter Hollow area in West Virginia, one of the most notorious coal slurry-contaminated and Clean Water Act-violated places in the nation–was a reminder to area residents of the growing death toll in the coalfields.

While the EPA’s September announcement clearly signaled a return of science and law to the Appalachian coalfields after a Bush-era hiatus, the festering criminal implications of environmental and human rights violations from mountaintop removal remain a test for the well-meaning but Beltway-bound environmentalists in the Obama administration. Will they muster the political wherewithal to break King Coal’s stranglehold on the region’s fate?

Coalfield residents are not waiting for the Obama administration to come to their rescue. In fact, in the past year a surging activist and citizen lobbyist campaign has emerged as a fierce counterforce to the Big Coal lobby. The leaders of this growing and increasingly powerful movement are not content with a new era of stricter regulations in the coalfields. Their aim is to abolish mountaintop removal once and for all.

According to Stephanie Pistello, national field coordinator of Appalachian Voices and legislative associate for the Alliance for Appalachia (a coalition of thirteen citizens’ groups from five states, including the Sierra Club’s Central Appalachian Environmental Justice Program), more than 200 coalfield residents have traveled to Washington this year to tell Congress and the Obama administration about the true costs of mountaintop removal. In May a group of residents sent an urgent letter to the EPA and the Interior Department citing numerous examples of the WVDEP’s lack of enforcement and negligence, and calling for federal action “to take primacy from a failed agency.” Over the past year, residents have launched more than a dozen civil disobedience actions throughout the region: in August a group of coalfield activists chained themselves to the doors of the WVDEP office, and two tree-sitters halted a week of blasting at a Massey Energy mountaintop removal site in the Coal River Valley.

If anything, the EPA’s surprising move in September only strengthened the activists’ resolve. Three days after the announcement, the Alliance for Appalachia returned to Washington with a group of residents to meet with the EPA, the Council on Environmental Quality, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Interior Department and members of Congress.

“While we appreciate the EPA making this step to bring back enforcement of the Clean Water Act,” says Lorelei Scarbro, an organizer with Coal River Mountain Watch and a coal miner’s widow whose garden and hillside orchards border a proposed mountaintop removal site in West Virginia, “we will continue to come to Washington, DC, until mountaintop removal’s irreversible devastation to our communities and waterways is halted.”

No one understands the limits of regulation better than Bo Webb (unrelated to Lora and Steve Webb), a coal miner’s son and Vietnam veteran who lives under a mountaintop removal operation in Naoma, West Virginia, on land that has been in his family since 1830. “Nearly four decades of mountaintop removal regulatory history have taught me one thing,” he says. “The devastation from mountaintop removal can never be regulated but must be abolished.”

In an open letter to President Obama written this past spring, Webb spelled out the looming situation: “My family and I, like many American citizens in Appalachia, are living in a state of terror. Like sitting ducks waiting to be buried in an avalanche of mountain waste, or crushed by a falling boulder, we are trapped in a war zone within our own country.”

Webb’s hollow has become a base for numerous organizations, including Coal River Mountain Watch, direct-action groups like Mountain Justice and Climate Ground Zero, and national environmental groups like Rainforest Action Network (RAN). “I’ve seen oil spills in the Amazon, walked in clear-cuts so large they can be seen from outer space and have toured some of the nastiest toxic waste dumps imaginable,” says RAN executive director Michael Brune, whose national organization plays a full-time role in the coalfields movement. “But when it comes to complete and hopeless environmental devastation, nothing compares to a mountaintop removal site.”

On June 23 Webb helped to organize a high-profile rally and nonviolent sit-in in the Coal River Valley of West Virginia, where 94-year-old former Congressman Ken Hechler, NASA climatologist James Hansen, actress Daryl Hannah, Brune and thirty-one coalfield residents were arrested at a coal prep plant. “Mountaintop removal is a crime against local people, nature, our children and our planet,” Hansen declared.

A day later, Webb was informed that the blasting above his home, temporarily halted after federal regulators cited it for violations, would resume. “I received a call that the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, which determines the permits, gave the green light to renew the blasting closer to the coal seam, in an area that is even closer to our homes,” he said.

This blatant circumvention of regulatory measures came as no surprise to Webb, who has seen the coal industry’s influence penetrate not only the WVDEP but also the state judiciary. Earlier in June, the state Supreme Court upheld a decision to construct a second toxic coal silo near a school playground in Sundial, which sits down-slope of a 2.8 billion-gallon coal-slurry impoundment close to a mountaintop removal blasting site. A week before the decision, the US Supreme Court issued a 5-to-4 ruling that a Big Coal-financed justice on the West Virginia Supreme Court had engaged in an unconstitutional conflict-of-interest vote.

Thanks in large part to the work of coalfield activists, such state-level failures have earned notice at the federal level. On June 11 the Obama administration released an interagency plan for “unprecedented steps to reduce the environmental impacts of mountaintop coal mining.”

“The steps we are taking today are a firm departure from the previous administration’s approach to mountaintop coal mining, which failed to protect our communities, water and wildlife in Appalachia,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

While carefully crafted rhetoric from government officials made for good headlines, it reminded coalfield residents and environmentalists of the regulatory compromise that granted federal approval for mountaintop removal in the first place. Webb worried that the Obama administration had been lured into a familiar trap.

On August 3, 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act with an air of concern. Admitting it was “a disappointing effort” and a “watered-down” bill, Carter recognized that the historic legislation contained loopholes, allowing mountaintop removal while cracking down on other mining abuses.

For many coalfield activists, no one was more responsible for those loopholes than West Virginia Democratic Representative Nick Rahall. On the thirtieth anniversary of the signing of the bill, Rahall proudly recounted taking the House Natural Resources Committee chair, Morris Udall, to the Appalachian coalfields, where Rahall pushed the Arizona Congressman to insert language permitting mountaintop removal operations.

Rahall, who is now serving his seventeenth term in Congress, remains a fierce proponent of the practice. He still touts putting golf courses and shopping centers on flattened ranges for “higher uses,” even though a 2002 EPA study pointed out that less than 3 percent of all mountaintop removal sites had been returned to any post-mining uses. In July he jumped out of a plane with the US Army Parachute Team at a “Friends of Coal” auto show in Beckley, West Virginia.

When the EPA announced its intention to bring greater scrutiny to mountaintop removal permits this past spring, Rahall made the rounds with top-level environmental officials and members of Obama’s staff to fight against any reviews. The EPA clearly listened to his pitch. Reflecting on the sign-off on forty-two out of forty-eight surface-mining permits, many of which were for mountaintop removal, acting assistant administrator Michael Shapiro curiously fell back on misconstrued economic arguments. Even though mountaintop removal operations account for less than 8 percent of US coal consumption and rely mainly on nonunion and mechanized labor in areas of entrenched poverty, in May Shapiro told Rahall in a letter, “I understand the importance of coal mining in Appalachia for jobs, the economy and meeting the nation’s energy needs.”

A month later, as Ken Ward reported in the Charleston Gazette, a breakthrough study by West Virginia University researcher Michael Hendryx found that “coal mining costs Appalachians five times more in early deaths as the industry provides to the region in jobs.” According to the study, “The coal industry generates a little more than $8 billion a year in economic benefits for the Appalachian region,” but the researchers also estimated the cost of premature mining-related deaths across the Appalachian coalfields at a yearly average of $42 billion.

The Obama administration remained indecisive throughout the summer, publicly announcing its intentions to bolster regulatory oversight while quietly allowing the Army Corps of Engineers to continue issuing Clean Water Act permits for mountaintop removal. As Ward reported on August 11, the EPA privately approved eight valley fill waste piles proposed by CONSOL Energy. “Copies of key permit documents were not yet being made public, despite a promise from the Obama White House of increased transparency in the permit review process,” Ward wrote.

A day later, when a federal court struck down an earlier move by the Interior Department to reverse a Bush-era manipulation of the 1983 “stream buffer” rule–a rule designed to restrict the dumping of mine waste into streams–the Obama administration could only manage a weak commitment to “improve mining practices” within the context of the court’s ruling. In essence, a kinder, gentler mountaintop removal would blast on.

Appearing on Diane Rehm’s National Public Radio talk-show on September 3, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson openly agreed with a caller, Ohio Citizen Action organizer Kate Russell. Russell cited University of Maryland scientist Dr. Margaret Palmer’s Senate hearing testimony that “the impacts of mountaintop removal with valley fills are immense and irreversible, and there are no scientifically credible plans for mitigating these impacts.”

“Let me first start by acknowledging that Kate’s right,” Jackson responded. “Much of the science shows that when you have a lot of, when you start to see a preponderance of stream miles filled in, you start to see higher conductivity levels, which is indicative of higher suspended solids, which starts to affect the aquatic ecosystems sort of from the bottom up.”

An internal memo in June by WVDEP biologist Doug Wood provided even more startling conclusions: “We now have clear evidence that in some streams that drain mountaintop coal quarry valley fills, the entire order Ephemeroptera (mayflies) has been extirpated, not just certain genera of this order,” Wood wrote. “The loss of an order of insects from a stream is taxonomically equivalent to the loss of all primates (including humans) from a given area. The loss of two insect orders is taxonomically equivalent to killing all primates and all rodents through toxic chemicals.”

One thing was certain: the reckoning on mountaintop removal had come due for the Obama administration.

As the regulatory games stretch on, coalfield residents and their national allies have redoubled their efforts to hold the EPA and the Obama administration accountable for enforcing the Clean Water Act, and for bringing the thirty-eight-year terror of mountaintop removal mining to an end.

Activists like Chuck Nelson, a retired coal miner from Sylvester, West Virginia, and a volunteer with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, are planning an action in October to call attention to the Webbs’ devastated homeland. “In six months, one will never know Lindytown was ever there, that a community once served as home to many families,” Nelson says. “We plan to hold a vigil for Lindytown. I guess you could call it a funeral, for all the families that used to love this land and considered it as home.”

Invoking the image of the legendary Mary “Mother” Jones and her campaign as an octogenarian on behalf of West Virginia coal miners and their children in the 1920s, 81-year-old military veteran Roland Micklem recently announced a twenty-five-mile march and nonviolent sit-in, to be led by senior citizens on October 8 at a Massey Energy mountaintop removal site in Kanawha County.

Along with encouraging investment in the region for green jobs and renewable energy sources, the Alliance for Appalachia plans to mount an even more aggressive citizens’ lobby campaign to pass the Clean Water Protection Act, which would in effect end mountaintop removal by halting the creation of valley fills and polluted waterways from mine waste.

“In order to counter the Goliath-like, multimillion-dollar coal industry lobby, the Alliance for Appalachia has organized monthly citizen lobby weeks,” says Stephanie Pistello. “As a result, the Clean Water Protection Act has a record 157 bipartisan co-sponsors in the House, and for the first time in history, we have legislation before the Senate, the Appalachia Restoration Act, which has eight co-sponsors.”

“The EPA has the authority to veto the permits,” Jackson reminded NPR listeners in September. “The permits themselves are issued by the US Army Corps of Engineers. So EPA plays sort of an oversight role there.” By the end of November, after receiving the Army Corps revisions of the permits, Jackson and the EPA should let the coalfield residents–and the nation–know how far that oversight extends.

“It looks like EPA is prepared to do everything it can, within the existing regulatory framework, to protect the mountains and people of Appalachia,” says Teri Blanton of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, a citizens’ organization in the state where more than half the designated permits are located. “This is great news, but it will take more than regulations to end the destruction. Mountaintop removal and valley fills should be banned.”

Back in Washington, planning the next lobby week of coalfield residents and pinning their hopes on Congress to move forward on the Clean Water Protection Act, Pistello concludes: “The people of Appalachia are asking for mountaintop removal to be abolished, not regulated. We will continue to bring residents to DC as long as mountains are being bombed and water runs black.”

 

 

Copyright © 2009 The Nation

Jeff Biggers is the author of The United States of Appalachia, and the forthcoming, Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland (The Nation/Basic Books).

Published on Thursday, October 1, 2009 by Inter Press Service

ATLANTA, Georgia – Environmental groups across the southeast United States, from Georgia to the Appalachia region, are stepping up their opposition to a controversial but widespread practice by coal companies of removing the tops of mountains with explosives.

Atlanta-based activist Darci Rodenhi recently organised an ad hoc group called Mountain Justice GA, which lobbied the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Atlanta regional office to reject 79 new permits for mountaintop removal.

The EPA denied the permits earlier this month, saying the applications were in violation of the Clean Water Act. Advocates see the move as a victory because it was the first set of permits to come before the EPA since President Barack Obama took office in January 2009.

Austin Hill of Appalachian Voices says the George W. Bush administration would routinely rubber-stamp the same types of applications.

“That’s what’s shocking. These are standard operating procedure for industry, to file these types of permits. We’re just seeing an administration now willing to enforce the laws on the books,” Hill told IPS.

However, the permit denials are not a done deal. The EPA and other agencies involved are currently working with the coal companies during a 60-day period in which the coal companies can submit a new set of applications. Advocates say they are staying vigilant because the EPA may yet approve the applications in the future.

Environmental groups also stress that many of the damaging effects of mountaintop removal have already occurred, some which cannot be undone and others which will take great time and effort to address. Moreover, many permits approved under the Bush administration are still in place.

Critics point to numerous problems with mountaintop removal: the destruction of mountains, pollution of water, destruction of ecosystems, health impacts on humans and animals, destruction of homes, displacement of local residents, and even the disruption of local economies.

“We’re looking at 500 individual peaks across Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia [that have been removed]. The 500 peaks are the equivalent 1.2 million acres of land, the size of the state of Delaware,” Hill told IPS.

“About two-thirds of all mountaintop removal operations across Appalachia have valley fills in conjunction with actually removing the peak. Valley fills are where you blow the top off the mountain, you access this thin seam of coal, and you dump the remaining waste in the valleys. In 99 percent of valleys will be some type of stream or creek,” he said.

Hill said that mountaintop removal involving the valley fills “have buried or impaired about 2,000 miles of streams”.

He added that only a small portion of the mountaintop is useful to coal companies. “Imagine a multilayer cake, you have cake and you have thin layers of icing: that’s generally how coal is distributed in a mountain,” Hill said.

He adds that there are less destructive ways to get coal out of a mountain, such as contour mining, but they are more costly and labour-intensive, and coal companies tend to be primarily concerned with making a profit.

“If you can imagine constant blasting where the landscape around you is completely being ravaged, it’s razed. This blasting, it fractures foundations in homes, it disrupts the local water table, it sends boulders and fly rock crashing into homes, and it frays your nerves,” said Hill, who grew up in a mining family.

“There’s folks in West Virginia who dread when the clock goes to 4 p.m. They, in their homes, have to brace for an explosion – this is every day,” Hill said.

Many families in Appalachia have already been displaced from their land, advocates say.

“Mountaintop removal is a tragedy. Even miners are against it because it’s taking their jobs,” Erin Glynn, national organiser for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, told IPS.

“It’s unnecessary, that’s the biggest tragedy of all. We’re doing this and we don’t need to be. It’s a waste of resources and it’s an antiquated system that’s not necessary,” Glynn said.

Glynn, who is based in Atlanta, Georgia, notes the state is the number one user of coal power in the U.S. – which also produces the most carbon emissions of any fossil fuel.

“You see the train sometimes coming in with piles of coal but you don’t really think, how are they obtaining that? And what is it doing to the economy and the people and the land? Mountaintop removal has ruined lives, homes, towns, and not to mention rivers that starts in the Appalachian Mountains and flow into our watershed in Georgia,” Glynn said.

Appalachian Voices’s primary goal as an organisation at the moment is to see the passage of legislation in U.S. Congress which would ban the dumping of mining waste in the nation’s waterways, including ponds, rivers, and streams.

A bill titled HR 1310, “to amend the Federal Water Pollution Control Act to clarify that fill material cannot be comprised of waste,” was introduced in the U.S. House by Rep. Frank Pallone and has 155 co-sponsors. It has been referred to a subcommittee but no action has yet been taken on the bill.

A companion piece of legislation has been introduced in the U.S. Senate, Hill said.

“The bill would amend the Clean Water Act [of which the Federal Water Pollution Control Act is part] to restore it to its original 1972 intent,” Hill said.

The legislation originally included provisions allowing fill material such as dirt or gravel to be placed in waterways when a city had a legitimate need, such as to build a bridge.

“Fill material didn’t originally include any kinds of waste. You couldn’t just dispose of waste [from coal mining in waterways]. When you look at valley fills, this is a pretty flagrant abuse of the Clean Water Act. In 2000, in response to… class action lawsuits that valley fills were illegal, the last [George W. Bush] administration, responding to pressure from industry, changed the definition of fill material to include mining waste,” Hill said.

“This [was] a rule change, not an act of Congress; it’s an executive action,” Hill said.

HR 1310 would thus clarify the original act so that the executive branch will no longer have the discretion to make such a rule change in the future.

© 2009 IPS North America

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Coal cannot be clean

It’s a dirty business from start to finish

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

The G-20 summit is coming to Pittsburgh this week because, in President Barack Obama’s words, the city stands as a “bold example” of how to succeed in “transitioning to a 21st-century economy.” So it’s a sad irony that the International Pittsburgh Coal Conference is being held at the same time.

While world leaders will gather at the G-20 summit to consider the way forward for the global economy, the coal conference, in its misguided promotion of coal as a clean and sustainable energy source, is pointing America and the world in the opposite direction.

The simple truth is that, from cradle to grave, coal is inherently filthy; the environmentally responsible use of coal is impossible. The coal industry is attempting to put a pretty face on coal through glossy multi-million-dollar advertising campaigns promoting the lie that coal is not only clean and green, it’s also red, white and blue. But coal is neither responsible nor patriotic.

Coal industry lobbyists are quietly working the halls of Congress, outwardly promoting the coal industry’s attempts to “clean up” while trying to ensure that any climate-change legislation protects their dirty ways. And they’re doing this at a time when the United States urgently needs to address global climate change and the critical role played by our continued addiction to coal.

Southwestern Pennsylvania is home to four of the 50 dirtiest coal plants in the United States, including the Bruce Mansfield plant, 25 miles upwind from Downtown Pittsburgh. But coal’s damage to the region is far greater than the pollution from these coal plants.

Longwall mining in southwestern Pennsylvania literally undermines homes, transportation networks and waterways, destroying streams, structures and water supplies and creating an enormous tax burden on Pennsylvania citizens. Strip mining destroys ecologically valuable headwater streams and causes blasting damage to homes and structures. It also contaminates drinking-water supplies, often with heavy metals. Abandoned mine drainage continues to foul more than 4,000 miles of Pennsylvania streams, rendering many biologically dead.

Then there’s the growing crisis of coal-ash storage and disposal.

A recent failure of a coal-ash impoundment in Tennessee released 1.1 billion gallons of slurry into an adjoining community and into the Emory and Clinch rivers. Contamination from an impoundment near Pittsburgh called “Little Blue” has been detected at groundwater monitoring wells in the area. Little Blue is 30 times larger than the Tennessee impoundment, and a potential breach could threaten the health and lives of 50,000 people. The National Inventory of Dams gives this facility a “high hazard” rating.

Even if we could reduce toxic emissions from coal-fired power plants — and that’s a big if — coal mining and waste disposal are unavoidably destructive to the environment. Though the International Pittsburgh Coal Conference is touting industry efforts to clean up coal-fired power, there is no clean way to extract coal or dispose of coal waste.

And while coal is filthy from an environmental standpoint, the industry also plays very dirty politics, lobbying hard to prevent Congress from passing a true clean-energy jobs plan. This was made evident this past July when it was discovered that letters forged by lobbyists to misrepresent community organizations’ positions on the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) were sent to several members of Congress, including Pennsylvania Reps. Kathy Dahlkemper and Chris Carney.

Dirty politics aside, the U.S. House of Representatives’ recent passage of the ACES was a step in the right direction. But it does contain one major loophole that stands in the way of an economy truly based on clean energy.

ACES, as currently written, does not adequately address carbon-dioxide emissions spewing from hundreds of existing coal plants across the country — plants that contribute over 30 percent of our nation’s climate-changing greenhouse gases. Allowing existing plants to escape regulation encourages the expansion of these dirty plants, effectively increasing emissions and undercutting the purpose of the clean-energy act.

The Senate can take several measures to strengthen clean-energy legislation.

First, the dirtiest sources of pollution should be cleaned up. According to the House bill, only plants permitted after Jan. 1, 2009 would be subject to performance standards — giving older, dirtier plants a license for lifetime pollution.

Second, energy-efficiency and renewable-energy standards should be improved, eliminating loopholes in the House legislation, to encourage the creation of additional clean energy jobs.

Third, more money should be invested in clean-energy opportunities that would help protect us against the impacts of global climate change.

These measures would help our nation begin the transition away from coal toward cleaner forms of energy generation and would lessen the burden on citizens in vulnerable Pennsylvania coalfield communities.

Instead of creating additional loopholes that allow for continued coal pollution, the Senate should ensure that any climate-change or clean-energy legislation does more to build a true clean-energy economy — and frees our country from the coal industry’s dirty business-as-usual tactics.

Published on Sunday, September 20, 2009 by The Associated Press

Vacated Mercury Mines Taint Calif. Waters

by Jason Dearen

NEW IDRIA, Calif. – Abandoned mercury mines throughout central California’s rugged coastal mountains are polluting the state’s major waterways, rendering fish unsafe to eat and risking the health of at least 100,000 impoverished people.

 

But an Associated Press investigation found that the federal government has tried to clean up fewer than a dozen of the hundreds of mines – and most cleanups have failed to stem the contamination. 

Although the mining ceased decades ago, records and interviews show the vast majority of sites have not even been studied to assess the pollution, let alone been touched.

While millions live in the affected delta region, the pollution disproportionately hurts the poor and immigrants who rely on local fish as part of their diet, according to a study conducted by University of California at Davis ecologist Fraser Shilling. His research found that 100,000 people, which he calls a conservative estimate, regularly eat tainted fish at levels deemed unsafe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“Tens of thousands of subsistence anglers and their [families] are consuming greater than 10 times the U.S. EPA recommended dose of mercury, which puts them at immediate risk of neurological and other harm,” Mr. Shilling said.

The legacy of more than a century of mercury mining in California – which produced more of the silvery metal than anywhere else in the nation – harms people and the environment in myriad ways.

Near a derelict mine in this California ghost town, the water bubbling in a stream runs Day-Glo orange and is devoid of life, carrying mercury toward a wildlife refuge and a popular fishing spot.

Other mercury mines are the biggest sources of the pollution in San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the largest estuary on the Pacific Coast.

Records and interviews show that federal regulators have conducted about 10 cleanups at major mercury mines with mixed results, while dozens of sites still foul the air, soil and water. The AP’s review also found that the government is often loath to assume cleanup costs and risk litigation from a failed project.

Mercury from mine waste travels up the food chain through bacteria, which converts it to methylmercury – a potent toxin that can permanently damage the brain and nervous system, especially in fetuses and children.

The federal government calls methylmercury one of the nation’s most serious hazardous-waste problems, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it is a possible carcinogen.

Mercury is considered most harmful to people when consumed in fish. People who regularly consume tainted fish are at risk of headaches, tingling, tremors and damage to the brain and nervous system, according to the CDC.

The toxin is less of a threat in drinking water, which is filtered and monitored more closely.

Mining in California ceased decades ago, leaving behind at least 550 mercury mines, though no one knows for sure how many. One U.S. Geological Survey scientist says the total may be as high as 2,000.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, California produced up to 90 percent of the mercury in the U.S., and more than 220 million pounds of quicksilver were shipped around the world for gold mining, military munitions and thermometers. Much of the liquid mercury was sent to Sierra Nevada gold mines, where miners spilled tons of it into streams and soil to extract the precious ore.

For the Elem Band of Pomo Indians, whose colony is next to Clear Lake, the most mercury-polluted lake in the world, the mercury has made it unsafe to eat local fish.

Their colony was built in 1970 by the federal government over waste from the mine. Officials knew it was contaminated, but were not aware at the time how dangerous mercury was to people. The mine is now a Superfund site.

State blood tests on 44 volunteer adult tribe members in the 1990s found elevated levels of mercury. The average level was three times higher than found in people who do not eat tainted fish, but regulators said only one man was at immediate risk of brain damage or other harm.

Yet the EPA determined that the tribe’s mercury levels were a serious enough threat for the agency to spend millions of dollars removing contaminated dirt from the colony’s homes and roads.

Many have moved from the colony, leaving about 60 of what was once a community of more than 200 people.

“We are here to protect the environment, and sometimes we do it better than other times,” said Daniel Meer, EPA’s assistant Superfund director for the region. “We can’t start cleaning up everything all at once.”

“It took a hundred years to occur,” said Mr. Meer. “And it may take a hundred years or more to solve.”

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.