The Iowa chapter of the
Sierra Club is pushing state
regulators to investigate two factory farms and a feed mill linked to
this summer's massive recall of salmonella-tainted eggs, Lynda Waddington
reports in the Iowa Independent. The Sierra Club sent a strongly-worded
letter to Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller urging him to investigate
Wright County Egg, Hillandale Farms and the Quality Egg LLC feed mill. All
three firms were linked to the salmonella outbreak that sickened an
estimated 1200 people; and all three firms are linked to agro-baron Austin
"Jack" DeCoster.
Tom Philpott of Grist calls DeCoster a "habitual" environmental
offender and "one of the most reviled names in industrial agriculture." In
1996, the Department of Labor fined DeCoster Eggs $3.6 million for what
the then-Secretary of Labor described as "running an agricultural
sweatshop" and "treating its employees like animals." Over the years,
DeCoster enterprises racked up additional fines in other states. A
previous Attorney General of Iowa dubbed DeCoster a habitual offender for
water pollution. In 2002, five female employees at the DeCoster's Wright
County egg operation alleged that their supervisors had raped them and
threatened to kill them if they reported the crime. The company paid $1.5
million to settle the lawsuit.
Drowsy doctors
A coalition of public health activists is pushing the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to regulate the work hours of
doctors in training. New proposed guidelines would limit the shifts of
first-year residents to 16 hours, but more senior trainees could be forced
to work shifts up to 28 hours. The group, which includes the Committee of
Interns and Residents/SEIU Healthcare, the American Medical Student
Association, and Public Citizen, says that's not good enough to protect
doctors or the public. As I explain in Working In These Times, research
shows that sleep deprivation is a major
preventable cause of medical errors, which is why the coalition wants to
see shifts for all residents capped at 16 hours.
Insurance
premiums soar
A new report from the Kaiser Foundation
Family shows that health insurance premiums continued to climb with
employers shifting an ever-greater share of the burden onto employees. A
family health insurance policy costs about $14,000 a year, with employees
shouldering 30% of that cost. Michelle Chen reports in ColorLines that
families that manage to hang onto their health insurance can't expect relief through health care
reform any time soon. The major reforms don't go into effect until 2014
and the biggest early beneficiaries will be those who are currently
uninsured rather than those who are already paying through the nose for
lousy coverage. The ultimate goal of comprehensive health care reform is
to reshape the health care and health insurance systems to bring costs
down across the board, but that's small consolation to workers who are
struggling to stay on top of their premiums right now.
BP oil has been spilling into the Gulf of Mexico for more than two months, and while attention has focused there, deepwater oil drilling is just one of many risky methods of energy extraction that industry is pursuing. Gasland, Josh Fox's documentary about the effects of hydrofracking, a new technique for extracting natural gas, was broadcast this week on HBO. In the film, Fox travels across the country visiting families whose water has turned toxic since gas companies began drilling in their area.
"So many people were quick to respond to our requests to be interviewed about fracking that I could tell instantly that this was a national problem-and nobody had really talked enough about it," Fox told The Nation this week.
Natural gas
In Washington, even green groups like the Sierra Club have been pushing natural gas as a clean alternative to fuels like coal; reports like Fox's suggest that the environmental costs of obtaining that gas are not yet clear. Besides water contamination, natural gas opponents are also documenting environmental damage to air quality. Like the problems with deepwater oil drillin, which became apparent after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, the dangers of hydrofracking could go unchecked until disaster strikes.
And both deepwater drilling and hydrofracking are symptoms of the greater crisis threatening the country: as energy resources become harder to extract, energy companies are taking greater risks to get at the valuable fuels.
Drilling on government land
As Fox documents, new gas wells are popping up like gopher holes all over the country, on private and public lands. Just this week, Earthjustice, an environmental advocacy law group, challenged the Bureau of Land Management's decision to allow drilling in a southwestern Colorado mountain range, the Colorado Independent reports.
"The HD Mountains are the last tiny, little corner of the San Juan Basin not yet drilled for natural gas development," Jim Fitzgerald, a farmer, told Earthjustice. "This whole area depends on the HD Mountains watersheds. Drilling could have disastrous effects upon them."
From coast to coast
Coloradans are not the only ones pushing back against drilling. In The Nation, Kara Cusolito writes about the problems Dimock, PA, has faced:
After a stray drill bit banged four wells in 2008...weird things started happening to people's water: some flushed black, some orange, some turned bubbly. One well exploded, the result of methane migration, and residents say elevated metal and toluene levels have ruined twelve others. Then, in September 2009, about 8,000 gallons of hazardous drilling fluids spilled into nearby fields and creeks.
After that second incident, fifteen families began a lawsuit against Cabot Oil and Gas, the gas company that's dominating that area. In The American Prospect, Alex Halperin wrote a couple of months back about efforts to fight back against natural gas drilling in Ithaca, NY.
Regulation
One of the problems with hydrofracking is that it's poorly regulated right now. No one except the natural gas companies know what goes into the "fracking fluid" that they pour into wells to help bubble the gas up to the surface. A loophole in the Safe Water Drinking Act also exempted the practice from regulation.
"Thanks in large part to the work done by a handful of journalists and angry residents over the past couple of years, the EPA is finally looking into fracking more seriously. In fact, they're looking into it so comprehensively the energy companies are getting worried. It's worth noting here that all the big oil guys have a big stake in natural gas drilling, and many of them have contractual loopholes with the smaller companies that own the gas drilling leases that if fracking is taken off the table as a legitimate drilling process, they're out."
Like deepwater oil drilling, fracking is a relatively new endeavor, the risks of which are not fully understood. Unlike that type of drilling, though, the opportunity still exists to create a framework in which the companies will have some accountability to the environments and communities that they threaten.
Future present
Besides regulating the industries who are providing energy now, the environmental community needs to keep pressing towards a future where the country does not depend on fossil fuels like oil and gas to run our world. This week, at the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, thousands of people are considering how to fight against problems like these.
Ahmina Maxey, for instance, is a member of the Zero Waste Detroit Coalition. "We are planning, next Saturday, the Clean Air, Good Jobs, Justice march to the incinerator to demand that the city of Detroit clean up its air," she told Democracy Now!
"Detroit's population has shrunk to about a quarter of what it was forty or fifty years ago, leaving lots of open green space. But neighborhood groups are transforming these vacant lots into community gardens. Seven years ago there were 8o community gardens, consisting of neighborhood gardens, backyard patches, and school gardens. By 2009, there were 800 community gardens. This year there are 1200, including some urban farms."
"What we need now is a collaborative effort that could echo around the world. An Urban Green Lab. What possible better stage than the 11th largest city in the United States which is experiencing Depression-level economic conditions? Let's take sustainability home. Collectively we have everything the people of Detroit need to build their city anew. Their solutions are likely to be the very same solutions every community will need in some form in the years ahead."
Here's hoping ideas like this take root.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Environmental advocates from around the world gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia, this week and resolved that, a year from now, they would hold a world's people referendum on climate change to marshal support for the rights of the planet.
"Although it is hoped that some states will cooperate, the participation of governments will not be essential to the referendum, as civil society organizations are to plan it according to their own lights and the traditions and customs of each local area," reports Franz Chavez for Inter Press Service.
The conference's democratic, citizen-oriented format starkly contrasted with March's United Nations-led summit in Copenhagen. The conference at Cochabamba emphasized inclusion and a diversity of voices, providing an antidote to processes like the U.N. climate negotiations, where smaller countries were excluded from key discussions.
No official United States delegation attended the conference, but this week, the country held its own celebration of the environment: the 40th annual Earth Day. On Thursday, arguments over climate change were put on pause, as environmental leaders recognized both accomplishments and the unfinished business of cleaning up the air, land, and water.
"Environmentalism isn't such a mysterious thing anymore. People are looking more at environmental values as being things that are tangible and relate to how we live our lives," Pete Carrels of the South Dakota Sierra Club told Public News Service.
The mystery, now, lies in finding a way to shore up defenses against old environmental hazards-dirty water, dirty air, diminishing resources-and to agree on a path towards a low-carbon future that avoids the worst calamities of climate change.
At Cochabamba
"Bolivian music, indigenous ceremonies and the Bolivian army's honor guard were on hand to greet the first indigenous president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Evo Morales," Democracy Now! reported from Tiquipaya, the town just outside Cochabamba where the actual conference is being held.
In a stadium crowded with fifteen thousand people, President Morales opened the event Tuesday morning with exhortations to choose life for the planet. Franz Chavez of Inter Press Service reports:
"The stadium, ablaze with the multi-coloured traditional garments of different Andean and Amazonian native communities and the flags of people from different countries around the world that contrasted with the cold formality of presidential summits, served as the stage for Morales, of Aymara descent, to call for an "inter-continental movement" in defence of Mother Earth."
One of the main goals of the summit was to draft a "universal declaration of rights of Mother Earth," envisioned as a complement to the United Nations declaration on human rights. There were also 17 working groups that dealt with issues like climate migrants, the Kyoto protocol, and technology transfer. Any conference participant could participate in up to five working groups.
The open format was, at times, chaotic. Cormac Cullinan, an environmental lawyer from South Africa who provide the baseline text for the declaration of rights, told Democracy Now! that on one day of the conference four hundred people were contributing revisions to the text. Another day, that number jumped to one thousand.
"The challenge is to make sure we integrated all the different comments and point of view," he said. "We're essentially expressing an entirely new world view from an indigenous perspective in legal language."
Many voices, but what are the solutions?
Elizabeth Cooper affirms this emphasis on a diversity of voices in a report for Yes! Magazine. "This issue of valuing the knowledge and abilities of indigenous peoples and those from the South was an undercurrent to the rest of the afternoon as it is to the Summit as a whole," she writes.
But this scale of participation also meant that conversations could veer from essential topics. Also at Yes! Magazine, Jim Shultz asks, "If forcing rich countries to pay a climate debt is a dead end, what is the plan to move "climate debt" from a catchy idea to a real proposal with a chance of delivering some results?"
"At a workshop today on that topic, there was an abundance of declarations about why climate debt is important, but few ideas of how to make it real," he reports.
The need
There's a need, though, for people to participate in these discussions, even if the conversations don't take a smooth and tidy course. At The Nation, Naomi Klein writes that "Bolivia's climate summit has had moments of joy, levity and absurdity. Yet underneath it all, you can feel the emotion that provoked this gathering: rage against helplessness."
At a conference like Copenhagen, the worries and priorities of smaller countries were ultimately excluded from the debate. In Bolivia, Klein explains, glaciers-the water source for two major cities-are melting. Yet that problem did not earn the country a place in the Copenhagen discussions that could determine its fate. Cochabamba's goals were, in part, to reestablish a more democratic system for decision-making about climate reform.
As Regina Cornwell documents at the Women's Media Center, left to its own devices, international bodies like the United Nations easily exclude interested groups from the conversation.
"In early March, just as the entire area of Manhattan around the UN was crawling with women wearing their blue Conference for the Status of Women tags, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced a "High-level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing" composed exclusively of men," she writes.
Earth Day 2010
The conferees at Cochabamba traveled to Bolivia because they saw a gap in leadership after UN climate talks at Copenhagen crumbled. The ideas developed this week could prompt the world's leaders towards brave action on climate change. Strong leadership can make the difference between real change and status quo.
At The Nation, John Nichols reflects on the leadership of Sen. Gaylord Nelson, who helped create Earth Day. Nelson, was "a bold progressive who recognized the need to make the health and welfare of human beings, in the United States and abroad, a priority over the profits of multinational corporations," he writes. Nelson's vision for Earth Day was to produce an outpouring of empathy for the environment "so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy."
It worked. The first Earth Day is credited with driving action on the environmental institutions that still protect Americans today: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency.
For more inspiration, check out the climate rally on Sunday, April 25 on the Mall in Washington, DC; organizers are promising the largest climate rally ever, along with an awesome line-up of speakers and performers.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Weekly Mulch: Off-shore drilling, auto emissions, mountaintop mining from Obama administration
By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
President Barack Obama announced this week that his administration would open areas from Delaware to Florida and in Alaska to offshore drilling for gas and oil. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation also released new guidelines for auto emissions to cut carbon emissions, and the EPA said new benchmarks for issuing mountaintop mining permits would prevent damage to waterways in Appalachia. The environmental community welcomed these last two announcements but both were overshadowed by the off-shore drilling decision, which green groups largely condemned.
Off-putting off-shore drilling decision
Although as a candidate President Obama began by opposing off-shore drilling, by the end of the campaign he said he would support an expansion of drilling areas. Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard explains the series of decisions that made this week's announcement possible:
"In October 2008, amidst calls of "drill, baby, drill" from conservatives, Congress failed to renew the long-standing moratorium on offshore drilling. Months earlier, George W. Bush had lifted an 18-year-old executive ban on offshore drilling, which had originally been imposed by his father in 1990. Obama, of course, could have issued his own order, but didn't."
The administration had been considering the decision to go ahead with drilling for about a year but kept deliberations quiet. Key senators, however, knew the decision was coming, and it's pushing Democrats like Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Mark Warner (D-VA) to warm towards energy legislation, TPMDC reports.
Cars' carbon emission
The EPA's announcement on auto emissions, on the other hand, comes as no surprise. It marks the first big step the Obama administration has taken to limit carbon emissions through regulation. Auto regulations are a relatively easy sell. A chunk of Congress wants to keep the EPA from taking these sorts of actions, but in this case, the auto industry supports the federal regulations. At the Washington Independent, Aaron Wiener notes that "the guidelines drew immediate praise from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which has long advocated national emissions and efficiency regulations rather than patchwork state-by-state rules."
Mountaintop removal mining
The coal industry will be less happy about the EPA's announcement on mountaintop removal mining. The agency admitted that the practice causes significant damage to streams and said its new guidelines would lead to significantly less harm.
The new policies, Jeff Biggers writes at AlterNet, will "effectively bring an end to the process of valley fills (and the dumping of toxic coal mining waste into the valleys and waterways)." It could be, he says, "the beginning of the end of mountaintop removal."
One sign that mountaintop removal's doomsday is nigh? Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), one of coal's staunchest and most powerful advocates on the Hill, praised the EPA's decision, reports Mike Lillis at the Washington Independent.
Green groups groan
Green groups are lauding the EPA's two announcements. (The Sierra Club called the mining announcement "the most significant administrative action ever taken to address mountaintop removal coal mining," for instance.) But the push for off-shore drilling has environmental advocates squirming.
"As the president extends olive branches to his critics, he's alienating allies in the environmental community, who say his policies are reminding them more and more of those of his predecessor, George W. Bush," says Mother Jones' Sheppard. "Some enviros are even likening Obama to Alaska's oil-loving ex-governor, Sarah Palin."
On Democracy Now!, Brendan Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity, called the decision "horribly disappointing" and said, "Obama is essentially embracing wholeheartedly the policy of: we can drill our way to energy independence."
The Obama administration's energy and environmental policy is creeping ever further towards the center. Ken Salazar, Secretary for the Interior, said this week that "Cap-and-trade is not in the lexicon anymore," TPMDC reports. It's no wonder that progressive members of Congress are starting to feel uncomfortable with the direction their climate bill is taking, as Sheppard reports. The president may be using up his reserves of political support from his allies as he stretches to meet conservatives and centrist Democrats on some shaky middle ground.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Seven months out from the midterms, electoral anxieties are hampering potential climate change legislation. Election years are a time to pass easy, politically popular policies, and climate change legislation does not fit that bill. For the Senate's climate change legislation to have a chance, Congress has to sweep through the financial overhaul faster than any bill in its history. Otherwise, politicians' focus will shift to the midterms before they pass a climate bill.
The next international climate negotiations are just weeks after the November midterms, and failure to pass a bill now means that the United States could show up once again without a solid platform from which to negotiate. After working on climate legislation for over a year, leaders on the Hill and in the executive branch are getting nervous.
At this point, any climate legislation that reaches the president's desk will have far less impact than advocates once hoped, but Congress can still pass a bill that moves the country forward on this issue.
Tick tock
Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsay Graham (R-SC), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) are working on a bill. On Thursday, Sen. Graham half-promised it would come a couple of weeks after Congress' spring recess. That's not the end of the process, though, as Kate Sheppard reports for Mother Jones. The Environmental Protection Agency will also take a crack at the bill and weigh in on its cost and overall environmental benefits.
That process could take a month and a half, Sheppard says, and on Capitol Hill, Democrats are getting antsy. "If the legislation isn't ready to go to the floor by Memorial Day, it probably won't make it there at all this year," Sheppard writes.
Connie Hedegaard, the outgoing Danish Minister of Climate and Energy who hosted this year's international climate negotiations at Copenhagen, also noticed the unease in a series of meetings with environmental leaders rangingfrom Todd Stern, the U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change, to Carol Browner, head of the White House Climate and Energy Office. Hedegaard told Inter Press Service (IPS) that "she got the sense that they are not sure "what will fly and what will not fly or when" with regards to U.S. climate legislation."
"I definitely get the feeling that if [the legislation] fails this time then it would not come until after the midterm elections," Hedegaard said.
That means the U.S. would go to the next round of international negotiations empty handed. As IPS notes, midterm elections "take place Nov. 2. The Cancun climate conference starts Nov. 29."
Energy reduction is key
As far as anyone can tell, the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill is not going to do a great job limiting carbon emissions. Don't expect that to change between now and May, or whenever the bill comes to a vote. In the absence of a real cap on carbon, Grist's David Roberts has some advice for the trio of senators on what they can do:
"The main goal with your bill should be to establish a framework whereby a carbon price is implemented and steadily raised. The initial price can be low -- low enough to avoid the kind of political backlash that has poisoned previous efforts -- and phase in over time so affected industries have time to prepare ... In exchange for reducing the role of carbon pricing, you should push to strengthen and expand the clean energy and efficiency provisions in your bill."
In other words, the bill can avoid the politically treacherous cap-and-trade system, as long as it pushes through strong policies for programs like energy efficient appliances, home insulation, and other actions that reduce the amount of energy we're using.
Who watches the watchmen?
Climate legislation, even in weakened form, is still on the table, so the amount of finger-pointing over its difficulties has been limited so far. But in The Nation a few weeks back, Johann Hari threw a stink bomb at big environmental groups, arguing that their increasing coziness with the corporate world had checked their political strength and led them to advocate for milquetoast environmental policies.
This week, the magazine published responses from the groups profiled, who called the story "plump with distortions of reality" and "a toxic mixture of inaccurate information and uninformed analysis."
The responses are worth a read, as is Hari's original article. In his rebuttal, Hari asks the critics to point out specific inaccuracies in his story and worries at the defensiveness of the environmental community. "Do none of these people feel any concern that the leading environmental groups in America are hoovering up cash from the worst polluters and advocating policies that fall far short of what scientists say we need to safely survive the climate crisis?" he writes.
Local action for green jobs
If big environmental groups are not as perfect as one might hope, more local environmental efforts can still make an impact, albeit on a different scale. Chris Rabb and Colorlines profile three grassroots efforts to create green jobs in three corners of the country. In Los Angeles, solar panels went up on roofs; in New York, more low income communities won access to public transportation; and in Arizona, a Navajo group formed to advocate for more green jobs in their community.
"We need all kinds of solutions--local, state, and national--and as we've seen the people need to make it happens," says Rabb.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Climate legislation is returning to the Senate's docket, and leaders on Capitol Hill are hoping that this version, a compromise bill spearheaded by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), can pass without getting caught in the morass of money and politics that has delayed action so far.
A long, long time ago...
Remember, there was a time when Congress was going to pass climate legislation before the international climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. President Barack Obama was going to show up with a bill in hand and lead the world towards a better climate future. After the House passed its climate bill in June 2009, the Senate began discussing climate change, and a first stab by Sen. Kerry and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) went nowhere. Now, Kerry has turned to less liberal colleagues to draft an alternative that would appeal to moderates and even Republicans.
Now the Massachusetts senator is promising that climate change isn't dead. A new bill is coming-more information may be in the offing as early as today, as Kate Sheppard reports at Mother Jones.
Third time's the charm
Sen. Kerry is trying a new tactic to pass climate legislation. He's waiting to release his plan until he knows the bill has the 60 supporters it needs to circumvent a filibuster. The details have not been hammered out yet, and even the Senators who've been in talks with Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman don't seem to have a clear sense of what will be in the version that will emerge.
In the House, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, released an ambitious draft of the legislation, let lobbyists and members of Congress fight over it, and passed a much-changed edition months later. Sen. Kerry tried a similar plan on his side of Capitol Hill (that was the Kerry-Boxer bill), but it did not work.
With this piece of legislature, Sens. Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman are working out the compromises before they release the legislation. Both reporting and speculation about their bill say that it will abandon the cap-and-trade system passed in the House. Cap-and-trade restricts carbon emissions across the economy; a variation on that policy that the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill may favor will limit the system to a few sectors.
Will it work?
Kerry's expected bill may be a much weaker plan than any proposed so far, yet it is still not certain that the Senate will support it. The lead authors of the bill have been meeting with conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans, as Sheppard reports, but those targets have not promised support yet. Coming out of a meeting, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) told reporters: "There were some interesting things that were discussed in there and like everything else in the United States Senate, the devil is in the details."
From a distance, banner-day climate legislation still seems possible. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Foundation, and the National Resources Defense Council believe that they will see a bill this year that caps carbon. These green groups would be able to live with the incentives handed to industry groups so far, according to Campus Progress' Tristan Fowler.
"There are compromises [that can go] too far. Fortunately, I don't think we're getting near that territory at the moment," Josh Dorner, a spokesman for the Sierra Club, told Fowler.
Sickly green
Before getting too excited about stamping a green seal of approval on Congress' legislation, consider Johann Hari's testimony in The Nation about the relationships between environmental groups and the industries that they oppose.
Hari has reported on climate change issues for years, and at first, he "imagined that American green groups were on these people's side in the corridors of Capitol Hill, trying to stop the Weather of Mass Destruction. But it is now clear that many were on a different path-one that began in the 1980s, with a financial donation."
Hari argues that as environmental groups began to reach out to polluters, handing them awards for green behavior and accepting support from their deep pockets, they learned to compromise too readily and accept political excuses for delaying action on climate change. While in other realms these compromises might fly, when the stakes are as high as they are on environmental issues, that behavior turns the stomach.
"You can't stand at the edge of a rising sea and say, 'Sorry, the swing states don't want you to happen today. Come back in fifty years,'" Hari writes.
The green future
When Kerry, Lieberman and Graham do release the compromised bill, watch for a tsunami of money and influence that could pack the bill with prizes for specific industries-or derail it altogether. Just this week, the natural gas industry's lobbyists told The Hill, a D.C.-based newspaper, that they were ready to fight with the coal industry over incentives in the Senate bill. At AlterNet, Harvey Wasserman writes that the nuclear industry spent $645 million in the past decade to get back into the energy game, according to a new report from American University's Investigative Reporting Workshop. (Hint: that $645 million is working in their favor.)
In the Senate, the influence of oil companies will play an important role, according to David Roberts at Grist.
"While coal has a lot of power in the House, oil has enormous power in the Senate, particularly over the conservadems and Republicans needed to put the bill over the top," Roberts explains.
No matter what legislation passes and what incentives it contains, environmentalists need to continue putting pressure on their representatives in Congress and on national environmental groups to push back against polluting industries and work to fix the world's climate.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Stingy credit markets and high regulatory hurdles have spurred Houston-based Dynegy to step back from new coal-fired power plant projects by ending a joint venture with LS Power Associates.
Dynegy will keep the right to expand its 27 existing coal, natural gas and oil-fired plants in 13 states, and it retains stakes in a pair of Texas and Arkansas coal projects.
But Dynegy will pay New York-based LS Power $19 million as part of the split and let it take full ownership of new projects under consideration in Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan and Nevada.
Shares of Dynegy closed up 38 cents, or 19 percent, to $2.38 on Friday.
Dynegy Chairman and CEO Bruce Williamson said the power plant development landscape has changed since the company entered into the joint venture with LS in the fall of 2006. Funding new projects is much more difficult given the worldwide credit crunch and the possibility of new climate change legislation under the Obama administration.
"In light of these market circumstances, Dynegy has elected to focus development activities and investments around our own portfolio where we control the option to develop and can manage the costs being incurred more closely," Williamson said in a statement.
The Sierra Club has just won a case before the EPA appeals board which will make it very hard to build new coal plants unless they actually have carbon mitigating technology in place. Looks like we're headed to clean coal or no coal (of course with the requisite caveats that this case isn't set in stone, blah blah blah). I often criticize the electoral strategy of the Sierra Club, but their legal work and anti-coal work does bring results. Kudos.
One of the claims of the coal industry - that there's some capacity to use coal without emitting carbon dioxide using fancy new technology - is about to be tested in a big way. One sign to look for is squealing; if the industry gets very upset, it means they weren't really telling the truth about the ability to use clean coal technology in the first place. If they don't squeal, then it looks like we're going to get a whole bunch of coal plants that don't emit carbon.
One of the most predictably irritating parts of the last week was hearing that environmental groups - including the Sierra Club - were lobbying for the bailout bill because it had tax credits for solar and wind power. Of course, as Greenpeace notes, the bill also contained "subsidies for oil shale, liquid coal, and unproven schemes to store carbon dioxide from coal and oil." The push for renewal energy tax credits is laudable, but the tradeoffs - increased liquid coal and a $700 billion bailout - are incredibly high. Penny-wise, pound-foolish, seems to be the motto of the Sierra Club.
But what's really disturbing about this move is that it suggests the Sierra Club and the PCL have lost their focus - instead of looking at the big picture of high speed rail and emphasizing the game-changing environmental benefits it brings, they're focusing on a small non-issue instead. They've lost sight of the forest for the trees and instead of providing leadership on this issue they may instead cast their lot with the far right and leave Californians with no viable alternative to soaring fuel prices and a transportation system that is making our environmental problems far worse.
First, their criticisms as reported by E.J. Schulz:
But the environmentalists are still seething over the selection of relatively undeveloped Pacheco Pass as the route to connect the Central Valley to the Bay Area. They favor the more urban Altamont Pass to the north because they say it would induce less sprawl....
Environmentalists would rather see trains run farther north in the Valley before heading west so that more populated cities are served. They like the Altamont route because it would bring trains closer to Modesto, Dublin, Pleasanton and Livermore in the first phase.
By contrast, the Pacheco route -- roughly following Highway 152 -- is in a less populated area. Environmentalists worry that a planned station in Gilroy would induce sprawl in surrounding rural areas.
These worries are baseless. Gilroy and much of southern Santa Clara County have strict urban growth boundaries. If those places were going to sprawl they would have already done so given their proximity to the job center and hot housing market of Silicon Valley. HSR doesn't change that dynamic.
Photo to the right is Boxer's fundraising appeal for Landrieu just after Landrieu provided the 41st vote for Bush against a historic green energy bill. And the Al Wynn primary ripples begin. Donna ran against the energy industry, with ads like this one and this one put up to the tune of a million dollars or so by her campaign and outside groups. And now, one of those outside groups, the Sierra Club, is feeling emboldened to pursue a more aggressive approach on global warming and taking on Barbara Boxer in the process.
Carl Pope, head of the Sierra Club, has come out against Lieberman-Warner, Boxer's baby. Here's how he compares the legislation with the Clean Air Act.
Fast-forward to present day: the carbon industries are lobbying to get a deal done this year that would give away carbon permits free of charge to existing polluters -- bribing the sluggish, and slowing down innovation. And politicians are telling us that while it would be better to auction these permits and make polluters pay for putting carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, creating that market unfortunately gets in the way of the politics.
We are being urged to compromise -- to put a system in place quickly, even if it is the wrong system. Given that we only have one chance to get this right before it's too late, our top priority must be to make sure that we do not settle prematurely and sign a weak bill into law in the name of doing something about global warming. With momentum for strong action and a friendlier Congress and White House building every day, it's no coincidence that some wish to settle their accounts now.
Kicking Wynn off Energy and Commerce immediately makes Congress friendlier, but significantly, it's the huge number of new liberal anti-carbon energy voters out there that are going to allow the public to get a sustainable deal on climate change next Congress. There's some evidence that Obama might make global warming his highest priority, having promised to begin negotiating a new Kyoto-style treaty even before taking office.
All of this is excellent and game-changing news that we've seen happen in the last week or so. As a reminder, here's what Boxer said just two weeks ago about Friends of the Earth, which has waged a campaign called 'Fix it or Ditch it' about the massive Lieberman-Warner bill to subsidize polluting industries.
"They're sort of the defeatist group out there," she said. "They've been defeatists from day one. And it's unfortunate. They're isolated among the environmental groups."
This nasty slur, while not true at the time (Greenpeace was opposing the bill), is now silly. At least one big green group has moved in response to Wynn's loss to get a better deal, and the business right, the coal producers, the nuclear industry, and the oil guys know they will have to deal soon. The Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth have said that we must work on global warming, but that it must be done smart and sustainably.
Good job, Donna. And great job, Sierra Club, for your work putting her into office and making everyone in Congress look over their left shoulder. I think it's pretty clear that primary challenges, while quite expensive upfront, are much more efficient than advocacy alone.
Ending the war long-term means getting the country off oil. And on that score, Pelosi gets points, as does the Democratic House caucus as a whole and the Sierra Club in particular. The Energy bill passed today in the House is a genuine accomplishment. It begins the process of moving us off foreign oil, and is therefore one more step towards ending the war. There is no chance it passes until 2009, but it lays down a clear marker as to where Democrats are, and lets us run against Republicans on energy. The vote total was pretty partisan, with only a few Democrats voting against it. These Democrats are Gene Greene, Jim Marshall, Dan Boren, Jim Barrow, Alan Boyd, and Charlie Melancon. Brian Baird didn't vote.
Grover Norquist fought against this bill aggressively, and the Republicans kept remarkable cohesion. A bunch of the blue state Republicans got crunched and forced to vote for it, like Reichert, Dent, Murphy, Gerlach, etc. And Al Wynn and most of the Bush Dogs voted for it.
The strategic difference between this bill, which puts a line in the sand, and the coal subsidy bill known as Lieberman-Warner couldn't be starker. We should consider our job as electing progressives into Congress, and moving the country's economy to a place where we don't need to fight for energy resources.
John Edwards says that it's time to be patriotic about something other than war. Today, the House Democrats acted as patriots, and Pelosi really did show terrific leadership. The bill did not have to go down this way, but it did.
The bill now moves to the Senate, where Bingaman offers strong encouragement.
This bill makes significant forward progress in a number of areas, including CAFE and energy efficiency. I hope that now that the Senate has the opportunity to act on the House amendment, we will find a way to put in place a lot of good policies that we've been trying very hard to enact for many years.
Bush is going to veto the bill, but what else is new?
UPDATE: The Energy bill lost in the Senate, 53-42.
Rather than working to protect vulnerable communities like this in Southern California, the Bush administration has spent years protecting timber companies in Northern California.
If there's a message to take home from this tragedy, it's that we are woefully unprepared for the type of catastrophes we expect to see more and more of with global warming. Scientists have found that increasing temperatures in recent years have stretched the wildfire season by nearly two months. And hotter, drier conditions will lead to mega-fires unlike anything we've seen in the past.
If we want to prevent this scenario from happening again and again, we need to focus our energy and money on making communities safer, figuring out how to best respond to large-scale disasters like this, and combating global warming.
Both groups are being extremely careful about the science, refusing to demagogue excessively on climate change as the cause of these fires. Wildfires have long been a thorny issue for environmental groups, because they bring them smack dab into a political thicket of local development patterns and unfavorable Western political winds. Environmentalists are also the favorite target of the right in the media, blamed for the wildfires.
It's good to see activity around climate change, rebuilding and combating wildfires. One wonders if this pattern of disaster followed by rebuilding along more sustainable lines won't be repeated many times.
UPDATE: Gene Karpinski of the League of Conservation Voters also weighed in.
A few years ago, liberal provocateurs Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus wrote a provocative essay called 'The Death of Environmentalism' (PDF), arguing essentially that the 'environmental movement' operated as a narrow set of interest groups. Focusing on the need to protect the environment, instead of framing arguments around values, translated directly into a stunning loss of political power over 30 years. They put forward the notion that investment choices are the key drivers of a new movement, and the essay in general had remarkable parallels to Crashing the Gates in terms of describing an ossified advocacy structure. This argument has basically taken fundamental root throughout the group that was once known as the environmental community, and it seems to be working.
And now, in Kansas, thanks to Governor Sebelious and the recent Supreme Court case declaring carbon a pollutant, Kansas Department of Health and Education Secretary Rod Bremby rejected a permit by Sunflower Electric Power Corp to build two new coal-fired power plants. It's the first case which takes into account that carbon will soon be regulated by the EPA.
The AP has a wonderful timeline here. It was a mix of organizational competence from the Sierra Club and EarthJustice, Attorney Generals from around the country, hundreds of people showing up at multiple local hearings, and a Governor willing to listen to reasonable arguments.
Innovative approaches like Step It Up and Architecture2030 are emerging to drive the movement orientation of carbon reduction, as well as creating the capacity for the economy to move to a carbon neutral frame. Businessweek is running 'Sustainability Rankings' for business schools (Stanford is tops), and sustainability specialist employment fields are stretched ridiculously thin. On the social front, norms are emerging faster than anyone could possibly track them, from facebook applications like 'Greenbook' to the carbon offset business.
The move in Kansas to cut off coal investment will have ripple effects throughout the country and the world. It's not clear where the new energy supplies will come from, though the wind lobby in Kansas made a difference, and when I met with Tim Walz he spoke of rural sustainable energy as a new growth driver.
I'm impressed. A switch flipped on the new carbon neutral economy a few years ago, and we'll see how far and how fast we can take it.
We here at the Sierra club are proud of the work we do, fighting to protect the environment, which as we showed recently http://www.dailykos.... is often the very same thing as protecting people. Just as importantly we understand how important it is to fight the powerful rightwing frames that make doing what most Americans want on the environment , seem outside of the mainstream. We look forward to 2008 and electing a President who doesn't hate the planet, as well as expanding the Environmental Majority. But this upcoming week, we are going after Fox News. Fox News viewers overwhelming vote against pro-environmental candidates and the reason could not be more clear, as this video by Robert Greenwald clearly shows, http://foxattacks.br...
Fox injects doubt into the American people about global warming and therefore makes all actions on global warming less possible and while global warming is viewed to be a real and therefore hopefully serious problem by the vast majority of Americans. Even in states like Alabama, http://www.surveyusa... but sadly close to 1 in 4 Americans don't believe in global warming and while there are many reasons for this disbelief, Fox News denials are a key part of it. With our petition we are telling Home Depot that you can't be both green and on Fox News at the same time. We at the Sierra Club look forward to our continued collaboration and a great victory for all of us and our Planet in 2008.
Please sign our Petition. https://secure2.conv...
STATE BLOGS
Photo to the right is Boxer's fundraising appeal for Landrieu just after Landrieu provided the 41st vote for Bush against a historic green energy bill.