Pete Altman's Blog: Living Sustainably

40 Years After the First Earth Day, A Diverse Movement. Join it - Text "EARTHDAY" to 30644

2010-04-22T15:59:27Z

There is a lot to celebrate forty years after the first Earth Day. My colleagues have noted many of the key environmental and health gains we have made thanks to America’s environmental awakening.

I am also struck by another aspect of this 40th anniversary of Earth Day: the remarkable diversity of support for the key ideas Earth Day embodies: that natural wonders and the wonders of life are worth protecting and nurturing, for their own sakes as well as our own, for now and ever.

Four decades ago, scientists and tree-huggers recognized and believed that we needed to take much greater responsibility for how we as individuals and societies treat the world around us.

Now look around, and it’s a lot more than just the pocket-protector and granola set urging that Congress take on the biggest challenge we’ve faced in those four decades (if not more). CNN has a good piece on this that quotes NRDC President Frances Beinecke. And in the twenty years that I have been organizing, I've seen a lot more constituencies get active, and have had the honor of working with many of them.

Labor unions and their members understand that promoting clean energy industries, reducing toxics in the workplace, promoting public transit and other steps create stronger and safer workplaces and employment opportunities.

Faith-based organizations view stewardship of the earth as care for God’s creation. As the National Religious Partnership for the Environment notes on its website, “With Earth in grave environmental peril, many religious Americans are seeking to respond through our faith.”

Military experts increasingly understand that drastic changes to the environment can trigger social upheavals, struggles for resources and violence. Keep the environment on which people depend healthy and sustaining, and we make the world a safer place.

And veterans are becoming more vocal in pointing out that remaining addicted to fossil fuels keeps America’s men and women in harms way.

National hunting and fishing groups, whose conservative-leaning membership has expressed growing concern with the impacts of climate change on wildlife, are becoming increasingly involved in the climate fight.

More and more businesses – all sizes and types – either see new opportunities in a cleaner, greener future, or have learned how reducing waste and pollution can help their bottom line in the present.

So on this, the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, I hope you will join me in recognizing and celebrating our common cause in protecting the earth – and ourselves – from our worst habits and join me in celebrating our greatest opportunities.

You can start by texting EARTHDAY to 30644 to demand comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation. Legislation that will create 2 million jobs, cut 2 billion tons of pollution, and save 2 trillion dollars.

Want to do more?

Make a sign with instructions, tell your friends, take a photo and share it. The message is simple, “text EARTHDAY to 30644” and tell the Senate it’s time for a comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation. Help us spread the word: make a sign or a T-shirt with the words “Text EARTHDAY to 30644” and take it or wear it to your local Earth Day event.

NRDC and more than 80 other organizations representing faith leaders, labor organizations, veterans, environmental activists, sportsmen, farmers, business leaders, youth and community leaders are all asking you to text EARTHDAY to 30644. Will you join us?

Call on America's elected leaders to deliver on the promise of a clean energy revolution and climate action now! After all, forty years ago, Congress responded with a spate of legislation to protect our environment. Forty years later, with broader support than ever before, Congress has no excuse not to act.

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.

The Green Economy Keeps on Growing

2008-10-20T21:39:18Z

America's overall economy may be stumbling today, but the emerging green economy here and abroad seems to be going great guns. Just look at the growing evidence:

Earlier this month, I blogged about how 750,000 American workers are getting paychecks to do green jobs. That was based on a novel index from the U.S. Conference of Mayors looking at existing U.S. jobs devoted to reducing the use of fossil fuels, increasing energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
In the New York Times today, Felicity Barringer writes that "California's energy-efficiency policies created nearly 1.5 million jobs from 1977 to 2007, while eliminating fewer than 25,000.The study, conducted by David Roland-Holst, an economist at the Center for Energy, Resources and Economic Sustainability at the University of California, Berkeley, found that while the state's policies lowered employee compensation in the electric power industry by an estimated $1.6 billion over that period, it improved compensation in the state over all by $44.6 billion." So much for the doomsayers who keep telling us that doing better by the environment means killing jobs. As the California research shows, they couldn't be more wrong about that!
On a global basis, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is promoting the idea of a "Green New Deal" on a planet-wide basis to deal with unemployment and growing starvation challenges. As The Independent reported last week: "The ambitious plan - the start of which will be formally launched in London next week - will call on world leaders, including the new US President, to promote a massive redirection of investment away from the speculation that has caused the bursting "financial and housing bubbles" and into job-creating programmes to restore the natural systems that underpin the world economy."

The "Green New Deal" promoted by UNEP would use the process of tackling climate change to address a host of interrelated problems: "These range from climate change; poverty; job creation for the 1.3 billion people under or unemployed and accelerating natural resource scarcity to the need to fuel and to feed six billion, rising to nine billion people by 2050."

Why is "green" the color of a new economy? One reason is that clean energy tends to be much more labor-intensive than traditional fossil-fuel based energy. A previously discussed report by economists at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) found that investments in clean energy create nearly four times as many jobs as investments in oil production. So if we are looking to put people to work, clean energy is clearly the way to go.

So while the financial challenges facing the U.S. and the global economy are enormous, it is worth recognizing that a strong and growing green economy could be a significant source of relief.

Van Jones: Green Collar Minister for a Clean and Just Future

2008-10-08T15:06:54Z

Van Jones is the nation's leading visionary calling for a social, economic and energy revolution driven by a massive effort to repower America's outdated and broken energy systems. A long-time advocate for helping those on society's lowest rungs to climb out of poverty, Van Jones' new book, The Green Collar Economy, charts the course to reversing economic and environmental injustice through a national commitment to repower our most impoverished communities with clean energy.

This is one of the powerful reasons that Congress and the President need to consider and create comprehensive solutions that address the economy, our energy systems and the climate as a whole, as I've previously discussed, But how do we get them to do that?

The founder of Green for All, Mr. Jones makes the case that we must unite organized labor, social justice activists, environmentalists, students and people of faith in a combined and concerted advocacy effort, if we are to overcome the entrenched power of the oil, gas and coal companies and their supporters in Congress and the media. This book is an essential read and strategy guide for all advocates of a clean and just future, and I am proud that NRDC is working with Green for All to make the vision a reality.