Thursday, 11 Apr 2002

AUSTIN, Texas

I slept in some today, as the baby kept me up much of the night. Once up, I decide to work from home, because I have a lot of writing to do and it’s easier without the distractions of the office.

I start the day with my SEED Coalition hat on. In 1996, I was asked to lead this statewide project to promote renewable energy and energy efficiency in Texas. While we’ve got some victories under our belt (working with close ally Smitty of Public Citizen’s Texas office) in the form of power plant cleanups and mandates for the use of renewable energy, there’s a long way to go.

Texas has the best combined wind and solar resources in the nation. Out in west Texas the wind never stops blowing, and ranchers and rural communities are benefiting from wind power development. It would make a great case study on the economic benefits of renewable energy — and in fact, we’re working on such a study right now.

The problem is that Texas is the country’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter. If some folks got their way and Texas became an independent country, it would rank as the seventh biggest carbon dioxide emitter in the world. So despite the excellent, eco-friendly energy resources in the state, it’s still an uphill battle to promote their use, plus push for the cleanup of the conventional energy industry.

The current leader of the SEED Coalition air program is Karen Hadden. She has been doing a lot of outreach and collaboration with sport fishermen in Texas, building support for cleaning up mercury emissions from coal plants. Karen is also educating people about the value of proposals at the federal level to overhaul the nation’s outdated power plants.

Most of the electricity in the U.S. comes from burning coal — that’s right, the same stuff that powered trains 100 years ago. As a result, power plants are a leading source of global warming, smog, haze, and acid rain gases, as well as other forms of toxic pollution. Clear the Air is a national group leading the fight against dirty power. We work with that organization to educate citizens and policymakers about the value of cleaning up coal plants. But it’s tough work in Texas, home to some of the nation’s most bull-headed policymakers. Joe Barton is a good example. He’s the chair of Congress’s Energy and Air Quality sub-committee, which is responsible for the Clean Air Act. Funny position for a man who’s pretty much a sworn enemy of clean air. A few years ago, Barton earned himself the nickname “Darth Vader of the Environment” when he tried to gut the Clean Air Act.

Now Barton and his compadres are at it again, trying to weaken the Clean Air Act and some of its most important provisions. If these efforts are successful, they will really hurt people who live near refineries. Almost all refineries are located in urban areas, often in low-income or minority neighborhoods, and they are huge sources of toxic emissions that cause high rates of respiratory, reproductive, and other health problems. Thus people who live near refineries consider themselves to be in the sacrifice zone; their lives and health are sacrificed so that the refiners — ExxonMobil, Shell, Orion, Premcor — can pocket bigger profits. Some of the stories are absurd — plants that continue to operate with broken equipment, failures to warn communities when clouds of pollution escape, totally inadequate regulation by state and federal authorities. (You can see the kind of devastation refineries cause on the Refinery Reform website.) Pure and simple, refineries are a national disgrace.

That’s why the SEED Coalition formed the Refinery Reform Campaign this year: to build widespread support for refinery cleanup. We were lucky to get Denny Larson, a long-time community organizer, to lead the campaign for us. Denny spends his time traveling the country, talking to refinery community groups and helping them get educated and organized. One of the key tools is teaching people to do their own air monitoring with sampling “buckets,” Community groups form “bucket brigades” and sample the air when they smell bad odors or detect what might be violations at the nearby plant. One of our partners is Anne Rolfes of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. She’s helping several communities sample their air and use the results to pressure offending companies to clean up their acts and regulators to do their jobs.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with so many terrific people and to feel like I’m working on the energy system as a whole — promoting solutions, fighting pollution, getting people organized, and helping them reclaim control over their lives and health.