Pete Altman's Blog: Health and the Environment

US Chamber Calls on Congress to Force Dirty Energy Projects Down Americans' Throats

2009-04-16T23:29:42Z

The US Chamber of Commerce has been drinking its own Kool-Aid again, and trying this time to get members of Congress to think it's green tea. The Chamber is attempting to convince policymakers that burdensome regulations are blocking clean energy development, and thus blocking green jobs.

This newest silliness from the Chamber comes in the form of something called "Project/No Project" which purports to document how "radical environmentalists" and their "Not in My Backyard Allies" are blocking new clean energy development with "green tape" (like red-tape, except when enviros are involved I guess.)

Except that the Chamber's own website actually identifies the obstructionists associated with each project, and the terms "Neighboring businesses", "Local residents", "Government officials" "Local officials" seem to show up an awful lot for a problem the Chamber blames on "radical environmentalists." NRDC's name appears as well, but "radical" isn't usually the term applied.

At any rate, the Chamber's proposed solution to this is to ask Congress to "streamline the environmental permitting process to make the promise of green projects a reality."

Wouldn't that be nice? Except for the fact that the Chamber has documented far more cases of dirty and unsafe energy (coal and nuclear plants) than renewable energy projects (wind, solar, etc.) So what kind of energy do they really want to move forward?

For example, there are 12 pages of coal and nuclear projects, but only 7 pages of renewable energy projects, including wind, solar, geothermal and biomass. What's surprising is that there aren't all that many the Chamber actually says have been "killed." For example, out of those 7 pages of renewables projects, they only describe 16 as having been "killed."

For comparison's sake, there were about 125 wind energy projects brought on-line last year according to the American Wind Energy Association. That's not even counting the number of solar, biomass, geothermal and other renewable energy projects brought on line last year.

I don't have #s for all those sources, but the Solar Energy Industries Association's Year in Review reported that "The U.S. solar energy industry grew to new heights in 2008 and many industry observers expect that growth to continue in 2009."

In fact, SEIA goes on to note that projects are becoming easier to develop: "With the easing of supply bottlenecks and the aggressive alternative-energy investments provided by 2008's EESA and 2009's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, going solar will be increasingly attractive and affordable for families, businesses and utilities across the country."

So its hard not to draw the conclusion that renewable energy projects are actually moving along quite well, and that the stalled dirty energy projects are the Chamber's real concern, and the real goal of their call for "streamlining" is to get these dirty energy projects moving again.

And frankly, I can't think of why any member of Congress would want to pass a law that enables energy developers - clean or dirty - to shove projects down the throats of "Neighboring businesses," "Local residents," "Government officials" and "Local officials."

18 million tons of contaminated coal waste from new coal plants

2009-03-12T18:37:03Z

Today NRDC is publishing new data on the contaminated coal waste that more than eighty proposed coal-fired power plants would create if built.

We are also publishing data on waste from existing coal plants, including our estimates of the toxic metals that are in that waste.

With the detailed spreadsheets, Google maps and Google Earth files, you can find out more about how much contaminated coal waste is in your community or state, and using Google Earth zoom in and get a close-up look of the power plants. The storage ponds used by many plants are easy to spot this way.

Resources:

Press release

Main web page on coal waste, with all the data and maps

Google Earth file with all the data included

Tivos For The TVA: The Latest From The Clowns Who Brought Us Kingston

2009-03-06T18:19:09Z

There's some encouraging news this week that the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) may swear off wet fly ash storage at coal-fired power plants, but who knows if we can trust them to do so when the heat is off months from now.

Then again, maybe the heat never will come off the TVA, which seems to be lurching in recent months from one disaster to another. Consider the new Office of the Inspector General (OIG) audit report out this week on the financial abuse and fraud at the TVA. As our friends at Facing South put it:

The Tennessee Valley Authority, already caught in a legal quagmire following December's disastrous spill of a billion gallons of coal ash from its Kingston power plant, is in trouble yet again -- this time for out-of-control credit card spending by its employees. A two-year review by TVA's Inspector General found that spending as part of a program created in 1995 for minor business-related expenses had ballooned to more than $75 million annually ...

The OIG report prompted this scathing report from the Associated Press:

Televisions, X-Boxes, alcohol, Internet software and tuition are just some of the questionable purchases made by Tennessee Valley Authority employees on their government charge cards, according to auditors in TVA's inspector general's office. A two-year review of the card program, created by the nation's largest public utility in 1995 for small business-related expenses, found spending has swelled to more than $75 million annually, the audit said. Nearly a third of the purchases in fiscal 2007 were for more than $5,000 and many apparently were rubber-stamped by administrators. One unidentified cardholder had more than $5.9 million in charges on six cards over two years.

This from the same Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight that bungled the Kingston wet-ash storage site and also is in charge of other such sites across the Southeast U.S.

How did the TVA respond to the findings of $75 million of abuse and apparent fraud?

It turns out that Tennessee Valley Authority President and Chief Executive Tom Kilgore leapt into action by sending out an email to his employees encouraging them to use their credit card properly. Ouch! Zing! Talk about your 40 lashes with a wet noodle!

The problems at the TVA aren't going to away on their own. We have to agree with this blogger at the Shelbyville (TN) Times Gazette:

I bumped into this story this morning about fraud, waste, and abuse of TVA issued expense credit cards and I must say that I am disturbed by it. In the military, expense cards of this nature were common, but fraud was not. Why? Accountability. If a purchase was made on the expense card, the user had to document every single purchase with supporting documents. These people at TVA have been on a spending spree and many of the people charged with ensuring that the purchases were necessary have been negligent. These people should be relieved of their duties in my opinion. The report states that televisions, video games, college tuition, and alcohol were charged during 2008. I read parts of the official TVA report and I could not believe the level of negligence that has been going on at this agency.

It is this kind of sloppy organization that leads to careless situations like the Kingston eco-disaster. And that is not a situation that Mr. Kilgore can just sweep under the rug by sending some email or doling out some other light slap on the wrist. As the AP has reported in recent days:

A third of the people living near the toxic coal ash spill from a TVA power plant in East Tennessee are reporting respiratory problems, and about half have experienced increased stress and anxiety, according to a Tennessee Department of Health survey. Public health staff interviewed 368 residents during January visits to homes within one and a half miles of the Kingston Fossil Plant facility in Roane County. A coal ash pond at the plant burst Dec. 22, spilling 1 billion gallons of coal ash sludge onto nearby land and into the Emory River. No one was killed or seriously injured, but environmental groups said the accident was proof of the danger of lax regulation of coal ash storage.

Look up "lax" in the dictionary. If the top management team of the Tennessee Valley Authority isn't listed there by name, it should be.

Don Blankenship: YouTube Star

2008-12-31T02:58:42Z

When we found the video footage from Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship's now infamous speech in West Virginia last month, we didn't quite know what to expect. Now that the video has been viewed by thousands and thousands of people on YouTube, it's pretty apparent that we weren't alone in our reaction.

At ThinkProgress, "The Wonk Room" summed up his bizarre rant saying:

"Don Blankenship, the 'scariest polluter in the United States,' is the CEO of A.T. Massey Coal Company, an egregious polluter, union buster, and extreme practitioner of mountaintop removal mining. Blankenship also happens to sit on the board of directors of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which promotes his virulent brand of right-wing global warming denial."

As Kevin Grandia notes in The Huffington Post in a post titled "Big Coal CEO's Anti-Environment Screed Caught on Tape":

"Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy (NYSE: MEE) the fourth largest coal producer in the United States thinks Gore, Pelosi, Reid and environmentalists are crazy, atheist, communist Greeniacs who lie about climate change and other environmental issues. Blankenship seems to either be a very confrontational sort of person or to have completely jumped the shark by the looks of this video footage released today by NRDC."

The IEEE Spectrum's EnergyWise blog is even blunter:

"The Natural Resources Defense Council embarrassed the coal industry last week by acquiring and distributing video of Don Blankenship, CEO of number-four U.S. coal producer Massey Energy, proudly professing his continued denial that climate change is real."

Over at the MoJoBlog at Mother Jones, Jonathan Stein writes:

"There's an awful lot that is crazy about this speech by Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy, the fourth largest coal company in the country, and member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce board of directors. He says 'greeniacs' are trying to take over the country. He says that people who disagree with his retrograde views on global warming and energy (climate change doesn't exist, duh) are 'communists' and 'atheists.' He compares the editors of a newspaper that has criticized him to Osama bin Laden. But my favorite part is when Blankenship suggests that somehow third world countries have got themselves in their unfortunate states by trying too hard to conserve energy and live sustainably ... Whatever you say, chief."

Perhaps our favorite write-ups came from Lloyd Alter on the Science & Technology blog at TreeHugger:

"It really is quite extraordinary. We quoted Don Blankenship of Massey Energy earlier, but NRDC has found the tapes and edited highlights for us short attention span types. Essentially, anyone who thinks climate change is real and is against more use of coal is a communist, an atheist, the enemy and in league with Osama bin Laden. Watch the killer minute above ... Really, between Blankenship and the carolling lumps of coal, these guys should be run out of town on a rail. They are evil, manipulative trolls."

You might think that Blankenship would have learned his lesson here, but there's no sign this Big Coal CEO is planning to tone down his incendiary rhetoric any time soon - after all, someone's got to make up for "The greeniacs [who] are taking over the world" and censoring the poor folks of the Chamber."

We look forward to finding more video like this to share in 2009. Stay tuned!

Real-life coal disaster pops coal industry pr bubble

2008-12-23T21:41:48Z

It is always a headache for corporate pr flacks when reality intrudes and negates months of planning and millions in spending trying to persuade the public of something that just isn't so.

So the flacks at coal front-group ACCCE (pronounce "acky") must have a hell of a migraine today, what with the 400-acre toxic spill of coal ash from a coal plant in Harriman, Tennessee in the wee hours of the morning. As the Tennessean reports,

"Millions of yards of ashy sludge broke through a dike at TVA's Kingston coal-fired plant Monday...About 2.6 million cubic yards of slurry - enough to fill 798 Olympic-size swimming pools - rolled out of the pond...Cleanup will take at least several weeks, or, in a worst-case scenario, years...The wave of ash and mud toppled power lines, covered Swan Pond Road and ruptured a gas line. It damaged 12 homes..."

But the long-term impacts could be far greater. Coal ash - the stuff left over after coal is burned - is loaded with toxic metals and other hazardous substances. According to a 2000 report by the Clean Air Task Force, coal waste contains

"Concentrated levels of contaminants like arsenic, mercury, chromium and cadmium that can damage the nervous systems and other organs, especially in children."

This is bad news, because the toxic pollutants in coal ash waste move don't stay put, even in the absence of spills. Studies for the EPA show that pollutants from ash piles make their way into nearby groundwater, where they pose a significant risk to surrounding communities:

"the excess cancer risks for children drinking groundwater contaminated with arsenic from power plant wastes have been found to be as high as one-in-one hundred - ten thousand times higher than the Agency's own regulatory goal of reducing cancer risks to less than one-in-one million."

How much of this toxic trash is out there? According to the Task Force,

"Every year, over 100 million tons of these wastes are produced at nearly 600 coal and oil-fired power plants. Seventy-six million tons are primarily disposed of at the power plant site in unlined and unmonitored wastewater lagoons, landfills and mines."

Mmmmm...delicious. But don't expect the coal industry to change their strategy. How much do they want Americans to think that coal can be clean? Just in time for Christmas, one of ACCCE's chief flacks recently compared coal to a 'gift' and encouraged Americans to "Put coal in the stocking of your favorite people."

I can think of somewhere the victims of the Tennessee disaster would probably like to stick that coal right now. But maybe we should just settle for leaving coal in the ground.

===Update: Just yesterday, nearly 40 groups called for more stringent regulation of coal combustion wastes. And coal plants produce 129 million tons of wastes per year, making it the 2nd largest source of industrial waste in the United States.

Coal is dirty and dangerous

2008-11-20T16:39:11Z

All the coal money in the world can't cover up the fact that coal fired power plants are one of our dirtiest and most dangerous energy sources.

Coal-fired power plants are the United States' single biggest pollution problem, the source of

global warming pollution (2,134.1 million tons in 2006)
acid-rain causing sulfur dioxide pollution (9.8 million tons in 2004)
airborne emissions of birth-defect and brain-damage causing mercury pollution (approximately 48 tons each year.)

In addition, U.S. coal-burning plants annually emit 56 tons of arsenic, 62 tons of lead compounds, 62 tons of chromium compounds, 23,000 tons of hydrogen fluoride, and 134,000 tons of hydrochloric acid.

The annual costs to human and environmental health are staggering. Quick example: the pollution from coal-fired power plants is responsible for roughly 24,000 deaths per year in the United States. And this doesn't even get into the devastation from traditional coal mining, mountaintop mining or the leftovers after coal is burned.

There is a better way to meet America's power needs.

Energy efficiency is the fastest, cheapest, and cleanest energy resource we have. Efficiency saves consumers and businesses money on their energy bills, reduces global warming pollution, and keeps American energy dollars here. Making just 5% of American homes more energy efficient would eliminate the need for almost 300 power plants by 2030 and save American consumers billions in energy costs.

By shifting our investments to truly clean energy sources like efficiency and renewables, we can move America toward 100% clean electricity. And dollar for dollar, investing in clean energy (efficiency and renewables like wind and solar) creates more jobs than investing in traditional energy sources like oil and gas.

Global warming solutions: Just the stimulation we need

2008-10-30T18:39:23Z

One of the most bizarre arguments made by the "let's not solve global warming" crowd is that doing so will hurt the poor (about whom, mysteriously enough, these voices seem to remain pretty unconcerned when almost any other topic is on the agenda.)

But according to one of the leading experts on macroeconomics and conditions for low-wage workers in the U.S., this thinking is outdated and wrong. Testifying at a recent hearing before the House Committee on Education and Labor, Dr. Robert Pollin, of the Political Economy Research Institute, argued that "there is no reason at all to delay taking action now to fight global warming" and went on to make the case that "green" investments would be one of the smartest economic stimulus strategies that Congress could pursue.

Exhibit 1 in Pollin's argument is the job creation potential of different kinds of investments. According to analysis using the U.S. Department of Commerce's own economic data, investments in clean energy (energy efficiency and renewable energy) create more jobs per dollar invested than tax cuts, military spending, or oil and natural gas.

Therefore, in order to get the most bang for the taxpayers' bucks, Congress should invest money in renewable energy, in education, and in retrofitting buildings and other infrastructure for maximum energy efficiency. Such a plan will benefit both the environment and American workers.

But where would the money come from? In the near-term, Congress could pay for this just like it would pay for any other stimulus package: deficit spending. Over the long-term, Pollin says, "the primary new source should be revenues generated through a carbon cap-and-trade program such as that sponsored last year in the U.S. Senate by Senators Boxer, Lieberman, and Warner. A cap-and-trade program, such as Boxer/Warner/Lieberman would set limits on carbon-dioxide emissions and require companies to obtain permits to release carbon into the air. The government would generate revenues by charging businesses to obtain the carbon-emitting permits. Credible estimates as to how much the government could raise through such a program range widely, between $75 and $200 billion."

But where does climate regulation fit in? As our Andy Stevenson notes, the "cap and trade" proposals that have been before Congress in recent years would, if passed, produce revenue which could be put into research and development of renewable energy sources as well as into retrofitting existing infrastructure. Perhaps more importantly, a cap-and-trade system would encourage the private sector to move the economy in a greener direction: to join with labor, scientists, government, and ordinary citizens in building a new, greener foundation for prosperity in America.