Julia Bovey's Blog: Curbing Pollution

Look who's following me... yikes!

2009-01-28T21:42:18Z

I was struck with confusion, convinced I had misunderstood. But there is was:

Hi, JuliaBovey
AmericasPower (AmericasPower) is now following your updates on Twitter.

AmericasPower! I'm so flattered. It's only the most deceptive, sneakiest, best-funded front for the coal industry ever conceived! They sponsored half the presidential debates, have an ad on every five minutes.

These are the guys who brought us the Coal Christmas Carols - which was so stupid everyone thought their site had been hacked by The Onion.

Frosty the coal man is a jolly happy soul...
There must be magic in clean coal technology
For when they looked for pollutants
There was nearly none to see

I'm not making this up!

But unfortunately, they're not usually that stupid. On the contrary, they're blindingly deceitful, charmingly insidious. Their ads feature beautiful scientists in white coats in sparkling labs swirling colored liquids in beakers - all part of the dirtiest myth alive today, "clean coal."

And these are the guys who are now following me on Twitter!

NRDC is proud to be part of Reality (www.thisisreality.org), a campaign designed to tell the truth about coal. The reality is that burning coal is the dirtiest way to make electricity and the leading cause of global warming pollution.

It is true that someday, coal-fired electricity plants will likely be able to capture and store their global warming pollution, and that's something that NRDC encourages, as long as it's done well and done honestly.

But even when coal captures and stores it's pollution - will that make coal clean? Absolutely not! Just take a look at the video I shot in Kentucky. Or meet someone with black lung. Or look at what happened to the community in Tennessee where the dammed-up swamp of filthy coal ash - what's left over when you burn it - spilled into people's homes and polluted their water. (read Frances Beinecke's post on that) Clean Coal? Just plain impossible.

You can move a mountain, it takes five guys and some dynamite

2009-01-22T21:13:33Z

I recently returned from a trip where I saw environmental destruction worse than anything I saw during my week in China. I saw something that I just can't believe is happening in the United States of America. It's called Mountain-Top Removal Mining. Basically, coal companies blast off the top of a mountain, dump the top into the valley below, creating an earthen dam that destroys streams, and spew toxic chemicals all over the whole thing. Then, they move on to the next mountain.

I've heard about this practice for years, seen photos, met people who live in these communities. But seeing it with my own eyes was truly transformational.

I shot video with my Flip camera - this one shows the tiny town of Montgomery Creek - one of the remaining creeks in an area where many creeks no longer exist. The beginning is shot from a car window. The car is being driven by a salt-of-the earth man who took us to his hometown and into his home to show us the devastation. In the back seat of the car was the oxygen tank he uses because he has black lung from being a miner.

The second video starts in the plane, taking off from a flat runway where their once was a mountain. What's left behind looks like Southwestern mesas. And there, beside those flat-top mountains, instead of valleys, there were more flat bridges to the next mesa, where the mining waste had been dumped.

Frequently, the filled-in valleys served as dams to hold back ponds of chemical waste, unnatural in color, hovering above the valleys below.

In addition to the flat mountaintop removal sites, we also saw what's called contour mining, where machines go around the mountain, creating level steps, and take the coal out there. I'm told that contour mining can be done responsibly, as miners take the coal out of one section, they can replace the rock and dirt they've moved aside to get the coal. But we saw no sign of this alleged responsible contour mining. We saw bare rock steps, with the dirt and topsoil dumped below.

We met people who live amongst the mining. They were united in their fight against mountain-top removal, but divided on what to do about coal in general. Many of them worked in coal mining - in deep-shaft mines where more than a thousand men would work, often for good wages. Now, they tell me, it takes 5 men to blow apart a mountain and plow out the coal, and bulldoze the rest into the valley to create a hollow fill. Five men, thanks to technology. And someone is getting rich. But not the people who live among the destruction. They are poorer than they were a generation ago.

Usually when I think and write about energy I look to technology to solve problems. And though technology has hastened the ruin of Eastern Kentucky, technology can also be the answer there. Eastern Kentucky needs an economic base. Jobs. A future. Without mountain-top removal mining.

Take a look at the map of wind energy that exists or is being built across the US. Notice that one of the states with no wind whatsoever is Kentucky.

Now look up close at the potential wind map for Kentucky. There is clearly potential for wind in exactly the areas of south-eastern Kentucky that are being flattened -- -- but of course the potential for wind there decreases when the mountains disappear. So Kentuckians are trading their mountains now for their clean energy future. And it's permanent.

Greetings from a soon-to-be greener China!

2008-10-23T01:43:23Z

Greetings from Beijing, China, where NRDC's multi-year effort to reduce pollution from factories got a major bump from Wal-Mart.

I was here in the room when Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott told a room of Wal-Mart's 900 Chinese suppliers that they will have to waste less energy and stop polluting (as much) if they want to keep making goods for Wal-Mart. (See the Wall Street Journal's coverage; subscription required.)

If you're wondering whether this is big - the answer is YES... if Wal-Mart sticks to its commitments and IF there is expertise and capital for the suppliers to really figure out where their waste is occurring and how to fix it. That's what NRDC is doing for 10 factories here, so that we can then create a set of best practices that we hope factories here in China - and eventually all over the word - can use to be cleaner, greener, and even save money.

NRDC's Linda Greer has been behind this effort from the get-go, and she was on the panel here at the Wal-Mart conference to try to explain to the suppliers how energy efficiency will help them and the planet. Afterward, NRDC's booth at the "trade fair" was swamped with Chinese manufacturers asking how to implement Linda's ideas.

More to come on this soon, but now I am packing up from Beijing and we're heading to Wuxi to see a rayon factory. Yesterday I was telling a Chinese journalist that we were going to try to figure out how to make rayon without so much devastating pollution and energy use. She said, "Yes, that already exists. It's called silk."

Tysons Corner, USA

2007-07-19T07:09:24Z

On June 1st my husband was riding his bike home from work when he was hit by a car. Of course he was. He works in a place called Tysons Corner, Virginia.

He's going to be fine, though he's still pretty banged up and his mouth is crocked from the way they sewed him back up. But he could have been killed, so I'm not complaining about the crocked mouth thing too much.

Even if you've never been to Tysons Corner, you know exactly what it's like, because if you live in the United State of America, you likely have a Tysons Corner of your very own. Two major and two minor highways meet there, so in about 1980, someone decided to build a mall there. Then a movie theater. Then an office building. Then more office buildings. Then another mall. Then fill in the parts in-between with strip malls. Then more office buildings and a couple of hotels.

What didn't they build in Tysons Corner? Sidewalks. Bike paths. Public transportation. So if you want to get to Tysons Corner, you drive. And if you want to get from, say, Tysons Corner Center, which has dozens of shops, four department stores, and a 16-screen movie theater, to Tysons Galleria, which has 120 stores and six restaurants, then you have exactly one way to cross the road that runs in-between them. You drive your car. It was biking across this road that my husband was hit.

The Major Corporation for which my husband works was very proud when it built its headquarters in Tysons Corner about six years ago. Back then, we lived in Boston and when he traveled to the headquarters everyone said to him "Isn't this great! We have a Starbucks in the building!"

What cracks me up is that the Major Corporation paid an architect a zillion dollars to design this really nice-looking building, but when you drive up to it guess what you see? A massive, poured-cement parking garage.

And, as you know from visiting your town's own version of Tysons Corner, the traffic is outrageous. In the evening it takes my husband one hour to drive the 13 miles home to DC from Tysons Corner. Most of that time is just getting out of Tysons Corner. By biking he was saving time.

But not anymore, because a) his bike is in a million pieces, b) he's scared, and c) bikes really have no business being in Tysons Corner. Neither do pedestrians.

When people at Major Corporation ask why we live in DC, my husband says "so my wife can take the Metro to work and we can walk to shops and restaurants." People look at him like he's mentally ill. They point out that if he lived near Tysons Corner he could have a bigger house. But not a shorter commute – because people who live mere miles from Tysons Corner also have an hour commute because they are in absolute gridlock the entire way home.

Here's the disconnect for me. People say they like communities. They say they like biking and walking. They say they hate traffic and concrete. They say they want to save money on gas. So why are we getting more and more, bigger and bigger Tysons Corners? How on earth can we move America beyond oil if we need to work or shop in a place that's only accessible by car?

And here, gentle readers, is the punch line. A mere 25 years since building the first mall at Tysons Corner, a train is now planned to bring commuters there and on to Dulles Airport. But, after much pleading to do otherwise, local authorities have decided to build the train ABOVE ground, rather than putting it in a much-recommended tunnel under the malls and office buildings. So, while most trains are heralded for getting people out of their cars – this train will in fact make the traffic at Tysons Corner WORSE.

Hmmm, maybe that means no cars will be going fast enough to make a dent in my husband.

How can you be clear when you’re basically schizophrenic?

2007-06-22T23:27:47Z

The Senate Energy Bill passed without the provisions that would have made biofuels cleaner while also making sure growing crops to make them doesn't mean bulldozing Redwoods to grow corn. That stinks.

The excuse/reason is that Senate leadership wanted a vote lickedy split so that they could pass the bill before some numbskull could offer an amendment to ruin the fabulous, historic, bold, courageous vote on CAFE standards (see every previous post). So they voted, and the Senate Energy Bill passed.

Now, we turn our attention to the House, where if we play our cards not only right but hard and relentlessly we could get the good stuff -- the global warming and land and water protections we desperately need -- into the House version That's one of the things that's agonizing about this work. What we really want to be doing today is jumping up and down and hugging and drinking over the CAFE win. Is it HUGE. But instead we're wringing our hands about how the bill lacks other things that are very important to us.

Many people -- including the grumpy but excellent Wall Street Journal energy reporter John Fialka -- say that the problem with us environmentalists is that we "make the perfect the enemy of the good." Not only that, but it seems that wins and losses happen to us simultaneously, so that we're forced to be thrilled about one thing at the same moment that we'e bitterly disappointed about something else. We want to have a clear message. But how can you be clear when you're basically schizophrenic?