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Coal River Mountain sit-in campaign blooms

As the U.S. Supreme Court continues to hear the Brent Benjamin-Don Blankenship case on the compromise of judicial neutrality from special interest lobbies -- read: Massey Energy's Big Coal grip on West Virginia courts -- five more arrests took place today in a growing campaign to stop mountaintop removal in the Coal River Valley.

If the local and nationwide momentum is any indication of a promised spring and summer campaign of civil disobedience, Coal River Mountain is destined for an extraordinary Appalachian Spring.

Earlier this week, a student campaign at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit-related school in California, won a successful victory in getting their university administration to agree to divest from their stock in Massey Energy.

Today's action took place at 1:30 p.m., at the Massey Energy Edwight mountaintop-removal site on Cherry Pond Mountain. Calling attention to the mine blasting taking place near the Shumate Dam, a mountain valley Class-C dam which holds 2.8 billion gallons of coal sludge that sits a few football fields above the Marsh Fork Elementary School, five activists unfurled a banner -- "Stop Blasting, Save the Kids" -- and were cited for trespassing and peacefully escorted by the state police to jail at Pettus, West Virginia. They were released.

World Bank approves $1.3 billion for Brazilian eco-projects

WASHINGTON — The World Bank said Thursday it has approved $1.3 billion for environmental and climate projects in Brazil, focused on fighting deterioration of the Amazon rain forest and renewable energy sources. The World Bank said its board of directors approved Thursday the 1.3 billion dollar loan to the Brazilian government of President Luiz Inacio […]

Sean Hannity: Worst person in the world

Two good eco-related entries:

More perspectives on tax/auction revenue allocation

This post makes a point that I already made last Monday, but it bears repeating -- this time in the context of cap-and-trade.

Chaz Teplin gave some approximate numbers for how much Obama's cap-and-trade plan would raise energy prices (based on a $14.30/MT carbon price):

Effect of the Obama carbon price

• Petroleum fuel: adds 15¢/gallon
• Electricity: adds 0.8¢/kWh (compare to 7-10¢/kWh residential rates)
• Natural gas: adds 8¢/therm (compare to 85¢/therm residential rates)

 

The conclusion: "... energy prices would increase by about 10 percent. It's a start, but a very slow one." But that's not the whole story.

On the greenness of Jimmy Fallon's set

Word is that Jimmy Fallon's new late-night set is green, with features including low-VOC paint and reclaimed seats from Radio City Music Hall.

Which is cool and all. Except wouldn't it have been greener to just ... use the old set? (That said, kudos to Build It Green! for salvaging Conan's remains.)

And P.S.: As Kate rightly points out, Jimmy's house band, The Roots, is oh-so-green -- seen most recently at last weekend's Power Shift conference.

Google CEO tells conference to get ambitious

Following Mulally (that's fun to say ... following Mulally following Mulally whee!) last night was Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. Good lord what a contrast!

Most of what Schmidt had to say was about Clean Energy 2030, Google's big renewable energy plan. I won't go over that again. Suffice to say it's great.

WSJ's Alan Murray started off by asking Schmidt what he would say to a shareholder who didn't approve of Schmidt's focus on renewable energy and do-goody environmental stuff. Said Schmidt:

Money we save on energy goes straight to the bottom line. Lower costs mean higher earnings. Green energy done right is more profitable than old energy. Is that a crisp enough answer for you?

Yes. (More on Schmidt's remarks on the WSJ energy blog.)

One of my favorite things about Schmidt is that he clearly understands, as so few people in the climate/energy discussion do, that one of the central barriers to renewables and efficiency is dumbass utility regulations. People tend to recoil from the subject -- so boring! so technical! -- but nonetheless, it's the elephant in the room.

And it prompted one of the more interesting exchanges in the audience Q&A.

First, Michael Morris, CEO of American Electric Power (a Southeastern utility), stood up and and showed that fossils can walk and talk. In so many words, he said building retrofits are a myth, renewables are far away, and decoupling (so utilities can make money from efficiency) is bogus. Specifically, "I'm not a decoupler. If my revenues go down, they go down." (Yes, I'm sure AEP and the utility regulators it's in bed with will stand by idly and watch its revenue go down.)

Then Peter Darbee, CEO of PG&E (a California utility) stood up and showed what it looks like to live in the 21st century. He said he's made tons of money off decoupling. He said PG&E's found it easier to reach their renewable targets than anyone thought. He said ambitious targets always sound "impossible" when they're first proposed and American innovation always hits them.

Schmidt and Darbee come out of the forward-looking, ambitious, innovative culture of California tech. They both seem frankly astonished at the lack of ambition, the fear, the smallness of thinking -- not only of some of the business folk, but of the media too. Eventually Schmidt burst out: "This is America! We can do this!"

I hope.

Economists rip off climatologists, get away with it

As if we didn't have enough problems with the atmosphere, now along come economists to rip off the rhetoric of climatology. Or so I argue in an op-ed in the Ventura County Star. Here's the "nut graph," as they say in journalism:

The more we discuss the economic crisis in terms of the physical world, the less we discuss the climate crisis itself, even though restoring balance in the atmosphere will be far more difficult than reviving the faltering economy. It's an alarming irony. As we worry about our melting savings and our vanishing jobs, we forget about melting icecaps and vanishing species.

If you like to double-check sources, check out a linked version of the op-ed.

Gore backs idea for a new .eco domain name

Al Gore and his Alliance for Climate Protection are partnering with the group Dot Eco LLC to pursue a new top-level domain for environmental groups and initiatives, “.eco.” Rather than a “.com” or a “.org,” groups could choose to use this new domain to show their eco-tasticness. According to the press release, “.eco will be […]

Waterkeeper Alliance unveils anti-coal campaign

The essay below was written by Steve Fleischli and Scott Edwards of Waterkeeper Alliance.

Right now the coal industry is engaged in a multi-million-dollar campaign propagating the lie that coal and so-called clean-coal technology are the answer to America's future energy needs. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There is no such thing as clean coal.

Waterkeeper programs in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Utah, and West Virginia have been fighting the coal industry for years. Now, they have joined together with the nearly 200 programs of Waterkeeper Alliance in a grassroots campaign called "The Dirty Lie" -- because none of us can afford to wait another minute to start creating a new national energy policy that frees us from a reliance on fossil fuels.

You don't have to live in the coal fields or in the shadow of a coal-fired power plant to be affected by this filthy industry -- coal causes acid rain, pollutes our water and food chain with mercury, and is grossly accelerating climate change. From mining it to the disposal of ash after it's burned, there is no part of the coal industry that is good for the environment, good for people, or good for America.

Every year, the 1,100 coal-fired power plants in America spew 48 tons of toxic mercury into our air, poisoning hundreds of square miles of rivers, lakes and streams, accumulating in fish, and entering our bodies through fish consumption.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that one of every six women of childbearing age now has unsafe mercury levels in her blood and, potentially, breast milk, putting more than 410,000 American children born each year at high risk for neurological damage and a grim inventory of illnesses.

And while coal-fired power plants generate about half of America's electricity, they contribute 80 percent of the total greenhouse gases from electricity production that cause global warming. Yet, even if carbon capture and sequestration technology existed to remove these emissions, it still wouldn't make coal clean.

The International Polar Year: 'Arctic sea ice will probably not recover'

Some of the top polar scientists in the world have concluded (boldface in original):

Our main conclusions so far indicate that there is a very low probability that Arctic sea ice will ever recover. As predicted by all IPCC models, Arctic sea ice is more likely to disappear in summer in the near future. However it seems like this is going to happen much sooner than models predicted, as pointed out by recent observations and data reanalysis undertaken during IPY and the Damocles Integrated Project. The entire Arctic system is evolving to a new super interglacial stage seasonally ice free, and this will have profound consequences for all the elements of the Arctic cryosphere, marine and terrestrial ecosystems and human activities. Both the atmosphere and the ocean circulation and stratification (ventilation) will also be affected.

This is what U.S. experts have been saying for a while (see here). Though not every scientist got the memo (see here). And this is just one in a long line of climate impacts coming up faster than the models projected (see here for a list).

But what I think is quite interesting is that this is the first time I've seen such leading polar scientists elaborate so bluntly the potentially dire consequences of an ice-free arctic: