Harvard University fossil fuel divestment

Just a gesture, or something more? In any case, public institutions like universities and colleges should exercise all their options when it comes to kissing goodbye to the purveyors of dirty rocks. This is what an LTE writer told NY Times readers.

Obama waging a war on coal? Hah, hah

Not even remotely, this open letter from PEER states:

The mid-term election results sent the distressing message that these were the good old days and it’s only downhill from here.  Anti-environmental riders will be springing up faster than Uber drivers.  Political battle-lines will become so embedded that Hill denizens will contract trench-foot.

A seam running through much of this fighting revolves around coal.  Newly re-elected Senate (now) Majority Leader Mitch McConnell campaigned hard against what he termed Obama’s “War on Coal” and how it was costing Kentucky good jobs and creating hardships. In fact, it seems that coal is waging war on Kentucky:

• Black lung disease among coal miners in eastern Kentucky has risen tenfold in the past 15 years.  This progressive massive fibrosis is lethal with few treatment options and no cure;
• Coal mining remains very dangerous work and it is getting harder to enforce mine safety laws. One bit of solace is the criminal indictment of former Massey Coal CEO Don Blankenship – four years after chronic safety violations killed 29 miners; and
• Mounting evidence about the social and human health cost of coal mining – especially mountaintop removal techniques –  documents shattered lives and communities.

Mitch McConnell could not survive a month working in a coal mine – though it is an intriguing notion.  His advocacy is rooted in pander-ship, not leadership. Even coal-state stalwarts, such as the late Robert Byrd of West Virginia, saw the need to help transition his state away from dependence on only coal. But McConnell – and more importantly his financial backers – benefit if rural Kentucky remains in a third-world, mine dependent and extraction scarred condition.

The other canard is that President “All of the Above Energy Plan” Obama is actually waging a war on coal.  If he was, he is letting a strategic opportunity slip through his fingers.

The coal industry enjoys a huge subsidy because it does not have to clean up after itself.  Coal mining creates the biggest waste stream in the country. The country’s second largest waste stream is coal combustion wastes – 120 million tons a year of the intensely nasty arsenic, lead, and other heavy metal-laden stuff that scrubbers block from billowing out of smokestacks.

Thanks to a vacuum in federal regulation, the coal industry does not have to properly dispose of this vast sea of highly toxic combustion wastes. Imagine if the nuclear power industry was allowed to shred its spent fuels rods and throw them into the pits of old uranium mines and call it “beneficial reuse.” That is exactly what coal plants are doing.

As a result of a horrendous coal ash lagoon blowout in Kingston, Tennessee in 2008 – an event labelled one of America’s ten worst human-caused environmental disasters –   the new Obama administration pledged to regulate coal ash by the end of 2009.  Their proposed regulation was long-delayed, watered down and required litigation to finally get an adoption schedule.  

Meanwhile, PEER is pressing Obama’s reluctant coal warriors to –

• Conduct risk assessments before allowing coal ash to be used in an array of consumer and commercial products. EPA is even gagging its own scientists from discussing risks;
• Stop claiming that use of coal ash reduces greenhouse gases.   EPA has refused to respond to its blatant violation of its own life-cycle calculation principles until it finishes with the coal ash regulation; and
• End award of green credits for using coal ash in construction materials.     Further, the U.S. should ban coal ash from federal procurement programs altogether. 

Help us make the coal industry clean up after itself responsibly. 

Sincerely,

Jeff Ruch

Executive Director

A paltry start in curbing climate change

That's the premise behind this NY Times op-ed I just read. And the headline is on the mark. I read nothing in the EPA's plan to curb the burning of coal any mention of individual Americans' carbon footprint. Where is the plea from President Obama to everyone to live more quietly and simply turn the lights off earlier each day? Growth for the sake of growth is the meandering spirit of the EPA plan. And that's not good enough.

The globe is running out of time

This editorial from today's NY Times drives (no pun intended) the point home: Earth is running out of time for nations to take real, meaningful action to curtail the constantly escalating burning of fossil fuels. For the U.S. Senate, that means kicking lobbyists out of the chambers and doing the real work its members were elected to do.

A look at the shills, skeptics and other climate change denalists

What a crowd. The Earth - our only planet - is entering what conservationists have termed the Sixth Great Extinction - but the shills skeptics and other shrills are worried only about the goodwill of their polluting campaign contributors and the other outliers in the "clean coal" universe. Read a dissection of the denalists.

Op-ed: Don't sell U.S. coal to Asian markets

There is no such thing as "clean" coal. Whether anthracite or bituminous, the stuff is fossilized dirt, and digging it up and shoveling it into a furnace means spreading the filthy, harmful dust. The writer of this NY Times op-ed says it right. If Americans care about the atmosphere we leave for generations to come, we'd better stop burning it, and selling it, too.

New EPA initiative targets coal-fired power plants

That phrase - coal-fired - always makes me think of the power plants I'd see while traveling about Pennsylvania. To get the coal, of course, requires trashing the land, a reality that many Pennsylvanians live with daily.
Here's what the EPA is up to: A new rule being drafted by the Environmental Protection Agency will primarily affect coal-fired power plants, the country’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. 

The NY Times offers some nice graphs to make  the picture clear: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/01/31/us/politics/an-aggressive-climate-initiative.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140204&tntemail0=y

EPA to revise climate rule for new power plants; will still require carbon capture

This month, the Environmental Protection Agency will propose standards that will establish stricter pollution limits for gas-fired power plants than coal-fired power plants, according to individuals who were briefed on the matter.Okay, that's good. But that's not going to rein in the carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants, much less the mercury air pollution. So, this is a good step, but it is far from what is really needed for our natural heritage and for the future of our country and our planet.

A tree hugger (me) says his piece

I’ve considered myself a tree hugger since my teen years and membership in an Explorer post in Pocatello, Idaho, sponsored by the Idaho Fish and Game Department. My father, who was himself a great conservationist (which being a tree hugger is synonymous with), would drive me to the monthly post meetings that were conducted in a building on the Idaho State University campus, where he was a professor.

That was four-and-half decades ago. I’ve logged a lot of miles on hiking trails since then, some in the Gem State, many in New York’s Adirondack Park, and a bunch more in Virginia, Georgia, Oklahoma, Washington State, Oregon, and in three overseas countries thanks to a career in the Air Force.

For at least a half-century – and certainly from the darkest days of the Cold War – many politicians have dedicated themselves (and the tax dollar) to soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen – and the weapons, ships, vehicles and aircraft they train and fight with.

I rehashed all this in my own veteran’s mind last week after listening to the Kingston Trio (a circa mid-1960s folk music ensemble) sing Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie’s “The Sinking of the Reuben James.”

The destroyer USS Reuben James, history recorded, was the first U.S. Navy ship to be sunk by hostile action early in World War II, going down off the coast of Iceland after being struck by a German U-boat’s torpedo.

Guthrie and Seeger’s song begins: “have you heard of a ship called the good Reuben James, manned by hard fighting men both of honor and fame? She flew the stars and stripes of this land of the free . . .”

I then turned a page to the President Reagan era and smiled at the memory of driving an actual old-fashioned pre-Humvee-era Jeep while on temporary duty in Honduras in early 1984.

Sure, many of today’s politicians, even those in the Republican-dominated House, know American military history pretty well. And just as many of the elder class of congressman gave many a speech to keep military bases in their districts from being closed once we emerged as victors of the Cold War. I remember fielding questions from the news media again and again about the future of Plattsburgh Air Force Base, N.Y., the Strategic Air Command base at which I served as public affairs officer 1986-88.

Yet, hardly any politician recognizes today’s big threat to military installations – principally those on our coasts; at least to the point of publicly talking about it. The independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont is among the lawmakers who understand what global warming is and the science behind what is also referred to as climate change. Full disclosure: I voted to re-elect Sanders last November.

Seven decades after the Reuben James went to the bottom of the Atlantic, the threat today has no governmental entity driving it.

Far from it.

We humans are behind the melting of polar ice and glaciers worldwide. And that, buckaroos, is making sea levels go up.

And that, in turn, is threatening to flood – forever – some of our most magic and treasured wildlands: the national seashores called Cape Hatteras, Assateague, Padre Island, Cape Cod, Cumberland Island, Canaveral, Gulf Islands, Cape Lookout; and many hundreds of historical sites like the Wright Brothers National Memorial on Hatteras Island, N.C.; dozens of key national and state wildlife refuges like Chincoteague, Prime Hook, Bombay Hook, Sanibel Island, Aransas, Laguna Atascosa, Pelican Island, Hobe Sound, Archie Carr, St. Marks, St. Vincent, Wolf Island, Savannah, Texas Point and Boggy.

The National Park Service, on its Web site, says: “Living in one spot on the planet, we find it difficult to detect or ‘believe in’ global climate change. Weather is just so chaotic—one winter seems warm, another snowy, spring brings rain but sometimes drought. However, scientists examining the average weather conditions over a long period of time (i.e. climate) across the entire planet see a warming pattern emerging. During the last 50 years, it is likely that global temperatures were higher than at any time during the last 1,300 years. Scientists compare that temperature data with sea levels, the size and number of glaciers, the length of fire seasons and the condition of arctic permafrost and conclude that climate change is here today.”

Some folks try to convince readers and listeners that there is some sort of “debate” going on as to whether climate change is real or make-believe.

It is quite real.

“Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security.” That was the headline over an Aug. 8, 2009, New York Times article by John M. Broder. He began the piece by writing, “The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.” (You can read the whole thing at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/science/earth/09climate.html).

On Nov. 25, 2010, the Times, under this headline, “front-Line City in Virginia Tackles Rise in City,” reported, “As sea levels rise, tidal flooding is increasingly disrupting life here and all along the East Coast, a development many climate scientists link to global warming.
“But Norfolk is worse off. Situated just west of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, it is bordered on three sides by water, including several rivers, like the Lafayette, that are actually long tidal streams that feed into the bay and eventually the ocean.
“Like many other cities, Norfolk was built on filled-in marsh. Now that fill is settling and compacting. In addition, the city is in an area where significant natural sinking of land is occurring. The result is that Norfolk has experienced the highest relative increase in sea level on the East Coast — 14.5 inches since 1930, according to readings by the Sewells Point naval station (at Norfolk).”
It’s clear to this lifetime conservationist and retired Air Force officer that many of our federal-level elected officials just don’t get it; oftentimes belittling our country’s natural heritage.
But to not take action – today – with legislation tackling the cause (the burning of fossil fuels) of global warming and thus protect invaluable parts of our national defense network is perplexing, to be kind about it.
I served a lot of days and years at Langley Air Force Base just north a bit from Norfolk. It too is endangered by sea-level rise. It too is threatened by sea-level rise. And so are oodles of other Defense Department coastal installations.
Climate change is still debatable? No, no it isn’t. It is real and it is past time for our leadership and us to deal with it.

Coal by the numbers

More than 160,000 acres of land in Wyoming have been disturbed by mining.

About 4 percent of that land has been sufficiently restored to warrant final bond release.

More than 400 million tons of coal are extracted in Wyoming each year. That’s almost half the total amountof coal mined in all the U.S.