A new rule proposed by the Office of Surface Mining would repeal the "stream buffer zone rule" rather than enforce its protections. The proposal would remove one of the few remaining protections for streams, opening the way for Big Coal companies to mine next to or through streams, despite the serious risks mining poses to stream and fish health and drinking water sources. This rule would expressly allow and encourage the most dangerous and destructive mountaintop removal mining activities. Tell the Office of Surface Mining to protect our streams by enforcing the stream buffer zone rule, not repealing it!

The Greening of an Ivory Tower
by Marilyn Berlin Snell
October 17, 2007

What stood out at Stanford University last week was how green this ivory tower has become. From panels on innovations in sustainable fish farming to climate change, the campus was promoted as the vanguard of the green tech revolution. Sure, there was football talk. How could the university resist celebrating its wildly unexpected upset against USC the week before? But what really got the crowd going was the announcement, during the global warming panel, that Al Gore had won the Nobel Peace Prize, along with four Stanford faculty members who had contributed to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There was uproarious applause for the winners.

 

"This is going to be the silicon and green valley," said Stanford's president John Hennessy at a roundtable conversation in front of more than 5,000 alumni. He was joined by a wide-ranging group that included a utility executive, a Supreme Court justice, a New York Times columnist, and a retired Army general. During a discussion of oil, water, and the fight for a healthy planet, more than a few eyes bugged when John Abizaid, former commander of the US Central Command, said that the Iraq war was being fought in part over oil. "We can’t really deny that," he said. Tom Friedman, whose Sunday column echoed much of what was discussed, lamented that none of the current crop of presidential candidates is showing leadership on environmental issues. Again, wild applause.

 

At first blush, it seemed risky to focus on potentially controversial issues like the environment and petro politics in front of a group of people, many older and conservative, who keep the school’s coffers well stocked. As the daughter of two alumni who voted for George W Bush, I admit to squirming a little when the director of Stanford's Earth Systems Program dismissed out of hand anyone who still questions climate change. Just before the talk, my mother had encouraged me to read an article she thought compelling about how we're just experiencing a natural cycle of warming that has nothing to do with emissions from power plants, factories, and cars. As we left the auditorium, I wanted to change the subject in an effort to promote familial harmony, but she charged right in. "That was really good!" she said, adding that it had been both "clear and convincing."

 

Maybe we've reached a tipping point after all.

 

Marilyn Berlin Snell is senior writer for Sierra magazine.

 

What's Al Got To Do With It?
by Carl Pope
October 12, 2007

What’s world peace got to do with global warming? As I wrote today in Salon, perhaps everything. Or it will if things don’t change fast—if, in 10 or 20 or 40 years devastating floods and droughts displace millions of refugees and spur nations and tribes to desperate bloodletting no one will have the slightest doubt why members of the renowned Scandinavian foundation thought former US Vice President Al Gore was an obvious choice for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He is, quite simply, the indispensable player in the drama of mankind’s encounter with the possibility of destroying the climactic balance within which our civilization emerged and developed.

 

In 2004, the Nobel Peace Prize went to Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai. She is not a general or president. She was founder of the grassroots Green Belt Movement, which planted over 30 million trees across the country, providing jobs, power and education to women in the process. In the Nobel committee's words upon awarding that prize: "Peace on earth depends on our ability to secure our living environment."

 

The committee apparently sees Gore in a similar light, as someone who has spent his life staving off the conflicts by uniting strange bedfellows behind the common cause of protecting humanity's only home.

 

Gore's co-recipient, the UN's International Panel on Climate Change, sends another message. The Nobel Committee firmly believes that the truth will make you free. Rajendra Pauchauri, the IPCC's chair, was, ironically, the Bush administration's pick for the job. The White House assumed that scientists were political creatures, and that Pauchauri would prove malleable and compliant. Instead, Pauchauri has emerged as a powerful independent voice in defense of scientific integrity—a voice all the more important for hailing from the developing world.

 

In the 20th Century peace was something to be achieved after the horrifying bloodletting began. In the 21st Century, peace must be about identifying and resolving the sources of conflict before battles break out. That’s why no one deserves the Nobel Peace Prize more than Al Gore.

 

The Bigger They Are ...
by Carl Pope
October 19, 2007

Topeka KS—The bigger they are, the harder they fall, and the Sunflower coal-fired power plant fell with a mighty thud today. With the support of a majority of Kansans, state regulators denied Sunflower its air permit, only weeks after Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius came out against it on moral grounds, making her state a leader in the national surge of states rejecting coal power because of its massive contribution to global warming.

"This decision clears the way for a bright, clean energy future in Kansas and across the Midwest," said Bruce Nilles, Director of the Sierra Club’s National Coal Campaign." The Holcomb plant would have locked the state into another 50 years of dirty, polluting coal energy and eliminated the market for the renewable forms of energy that are the future. Kansas, and particularly West Kansas, is now perfectly positioned to develop its abundant clean energy resources, help solve global warming, and create thousands of new family-supporting jobs."

 

The plant, planned near Holcomb, would have mostly served out-of-state customers while emitting more than 10 million tons of carbon dioxide pollution a year. The pollution would have made it one of the three largest new sources of global warming pollution in the United States. And the decision came only a few days after an Iowa economic development board disrupted plans yesterday by LS Power Group to build a 750-megawatt coal-fired plant near Waterloo by voting against an annexation proposal necessary to build the plant.

 

At the same time, a new poll shows that "75 percent of Americans—including 65 percent of Republicans, 83 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of Independents—would 'support a five-year moratorium on new coal-fired power plants in the United States if there was stepped-up investment in clean, safe renewable energy—such as wind and solar—and improved home energy-efficiency standards.'" The poll was full of other bad news for Big Carbon: Only 3 percent of Americans said they would advise their power company to look to coal as a new electricity source; the idea of turning coal into gas or a liquid with federal money got support from only 15 percent; more than 80 percent of Americans felt that fossil fuels were the energy technology of the past, and that it was time for a new, renewable industrial revolution—including 84 percent of Republicans.

 

But while Americans expect that innovation will transform the energy economy—solar taking the place of coal as cars took the place of buggies—this concept has not yet sunk into Big Carbon's archaic consciousness. Indeed, the industry seems to take pride in claiming that coal was a divinely intended power source. (Perhaps as far back as Bishop Ussher's calculated creation of the earth in 4004 BC?) At a Wyoming conference on climate change and energy, Fred Palmer, senior vice president of public relations for coal giant Peabody Energy, declared that "people use fossil fuels because the good Lord put them on earth for us to use."

 

Surprisingly, the stock market did not react to the Kansas announcement—major coal stocks closed slightly higher, which suggests that the market may already have incorporated pessimistic views about future growth in coal-fired electricity, based on the drumbeat of warnings from investment analysts of the risks.

 

The trend is clear: In the last year, 16 coal plants with a capacity of 16,000 megawatts have been cancelled, and another 36 with a capacity of 32,000 megawatts have been postponed.

 

By the Numbers
by Carl Pope
October 22, 2007

San Francisco—Occasionally, it helps when trying to figure out what is really going on to look at the numbers. So this post is just a sampling of four of the more revealing statistics that have crossed my desk in the past month. These facts and statistics, I think, tell a story very different from the conventional media depiction of nuclear and fossil fuel as the mainstays of the future, raising the question, "Who is fooling whom?"

Is the nuclear revival real?

 

The Department of Energy increased the percentage of investments in new nuclear plants that the American taxpayer will guarantee from 67 percent to 80 percent after Wall Street said that it was not interested in investing in nukes if private capital had to come up with one-third of the money.

 

Have we seen the end of the scandals that have plagued the Bush administration?

 

Well, the Inspector General of the Department of the Interior has concluded that after an orgy of oil and gas leasing by the Administration, the "Interior Department's program to collect billions of dollars annually from oil and gas companies that drill on federal lands is troubled by mismanagement, ethical lapses and fears of retaliation against whistle-blowers, the department's chief independent investigator has concluded."

 

The Inspector has warned that the Department may lose $10 billion in revenue from a single error in the leasing process.

Is energy conservation, as Vice-President Cheney says, just a form of personal virtue, or is it the basis for an energy policy?

On August 30 the managers of California's electricity grid warned that a State Two Electrical Emergency was likely that afternoon because of unusually hot weather. Grid managers expected demand of 49,500 megawatts; instead it peaked at 47,643, because consumers used efficiency to save more than 1000 megawatts. The emergency was never declared.

 

How feasible is it to decarbonize our economy fast, for the long-term?

 

Well, the California Public Utilities Commission has proposed that by 2020, in only 13 years, all new residential homes built in California would use zero net energy—no utility bill or carbon footprint at all.

 

Water, Water, Everywhere
by Carl Pope
October 18, 2007

Washington DC—"Nor any drop to drink" was how Samuel Taylor Coleridge phrased it in his "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

Avoiding that risk was why Congress, 35 years ago, passed the Clean Water Act and then overrode President Nixon's veto. For a long time the Act was a great success story. The percentage of polluted waterways fell steadily every year, and by the end of the century about half of the job had been done. But since that time we've been going backwards, and the clean water success story is gradually morphing into a new clean water crisis.

 

Crucial to understanding why is another familiar saying—water flows downhill. As a Sierra Club report made clear this year, it is the headwaters of a stream, the tiny seeps, wetlands, springs and seasonal creeks that drain most of a watershed, and carry either clean, or polluted, H2O to larger tributaries and rivers.

 

But several Supreme Court rulings have left it unclear whether these headland water sources—which generate 90 percent of the water and sediment going into rivers—are fully protected by the Clean Water Act. And in 2003 the Bush administration issued a "guidance document" telling EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers not to protect these headwaters from development or pollution.

 

As a result, drinking water supplies for 110 million Americans are at risk. Congress, alarmed by this threat, has been considering legislation that would clarify that, yes indeed, the headwaters that drain 90 percent of the country are, indeed, part of the Clean Water Act's mandates to safeguard "the waters of the United States." (These are, after all, waters, and they are not on Mars, or even in Luxembourg.) This common sense solution would simply restore the law as it stood from 1972 until 2002.

 

But now a coalition of opponents of clean water—including many state chapters of the Farm Bureau, the Cattlemen. and mining interests—have sent House Speaker Pelosi a hyperbolic, superheated and, frankly, over-the-top letter claiming, among other things, that "The expansive authority assumed by the federal government under the Clean Water Act has been poisonous to the rights of American citizens," and that "A bill is now making its way through the House that would, according to one legal expert, push 'the limits of federal power to an extreme not matched by any other law, probably in the history of this country.'"

 

These ridiculous statements might be funny if the pressure from our opponents were not keeping legislators from supporting the law.

 

And it's clear that the failure to protect headwaters is proving deadly to even the greatest of our water bodies—the Mississippi. A new analysis by the National Academy of Sciences finds that while point-sources—factories and sewage treatment plants—have largely been cleaned up, the Mississippi has become an "orphan" of the regulatory process because of the failure to protect wetlands and headwaters or to deal with run-off from small sources.

 

The US Environmental Protection Agency must take a more aggressive leadership role in implementing the Clean Water Act if water quality in the Mississippi River and the northern Gulf of Mexico is to improve, says a new report from the National Research Council. EPA has failed to use its authority under the act to adequately coordinate and oversee state activities along the Mississippi and ensure progress toward the act's goal of "fishable and swimmable" waters, the report says. States along the river also must be more proactive and cooperative in their efforts to monitor and improve water quality.

 

So from the smallest seep to the mighty Father of Waters, the 35th anniversary of the Clean Water Act is a time for renewed dedication—because, while well more than 90 percent of Americans want the strongest possible protection of clean water, numerically small but well-entrenched interests and influential ideologues don't want the government to respect this public will. After all, they say, we need to get clear "what is ... not to be protected." How sad.

 

Setting the Record Straight... Again
by Carl Pope
October 24, 2007

San Francisco—It's like clockwork: Every time there's a big wildfire like the ones we're seeing in California, our opponents use the tragedy to attack environmentalists. And each time there's a fire, we're forced to point out, again, that we have long supported the kind of fuel reduction around communities that can mean the difference between losing a home and saving it.

 

In fact, these fires have little to do with forest management. The fires are burning in chaparral and brush, not dense forest. And the Forest Service's own tracking site shows that not a single fuels-reduction plan has been appealed in this area in at least a decade.

 

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.

 

Won't Be Water But Fire Next Time, Lord
Carl Pope
October 26, 2007

Santa Barbara CA—The smoke from the fires to the south made it hazy here, and folks with asthma were having a hard time breathing. But by this morning the weather had cooled, the Santa Anna winds were petering out, and mail service had been resumed in San Diego.

There are some pretty clear lessons: