Dumping The Astroturf

Ed Markey keeps finding forged letters sent to members of Congress, sent to moderate Dems and made to look like citizen groups opposed the climate and energy bill that passed the House. So the clean coal front group who hired the astroturfers just had to fire them.

The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) is dumping Bonner & Associates, the Astroturf firm that forged letters to Congress attacking clean energy legislation on its behalf. Bonner, an organization with a long record of deceptive practices, sent letters this June purporting to be from black, Hispanic, women’s and senior citizen’s groups to several members of Congress telling them to vote against the American Clean Energy and Security Act. ACCCE spokesman Joe Lucas told National Journal that his organization “did nothing wrong”:

"We will not be working with Mr. Bonner again. ACCCE did nothing wrong. Looking back, there would be many things we would do differently."

ACCCE did plenty wrong. They hired a known astroturf group with a history of this behavior and tried to keep quiet about it when they were informed of the forging.

I hope this doesn't stop the ongoing investigation into Bonner and Associates, nor should it stop criminal investigations (is this mail fraud?). Can't Bonner have their lobbyist registration stripped at this point?

Constituent Letter Grifting

Last week, we learned about astroforging, the practice of corporate lobbyists forging letters from local advocacy groups that line up with corporate goals. More evidence has been uncovered today showing the widespread nature of this practice.

Joseph Richardson received a letter from Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) in reply to a letter that he never sent:



Richardson never wrote such a letter, and he never would. Calling himself a “vocal member” of the North Dakota Alliance for Renewable Energy, Richardson told ThinkProgress that he is an ACES supporter and even wrote a letter to Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) calling on the congressman to support clean energy reform.

Bonner and Associates, the company nailed initially, has been engaged in this deception for well over 20 years. And as long as they got away with it, I'm sure they'd continue. It turns out that Bonner is linked to the clean coal lobby:

The Sierra Club today urged Attorney General Eric Holder to launch an investigation into the activities of a lobbying firm that has been linked to fake letters urging Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.) to vote against the climate bill [...]

The request stems from a newspaper report last week that Bonner & Associates sent letters to Perriello's office that were made to look as if they came from Creciendo Juntos, a Charlottesville-based Hispanic advocacy group. Perriello staffers also received similarly worded letters that were designed to look as if they came from the Albemarle-Charlottesville branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The letters, which urged Perriello to oppose the House climate bill ( H.R. 2454 ), used the letterhead of the two groups but were signed by individuals who are not affiliated with the organizations ( E&ENews PM , July 31).

The group American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity acknowledged this afternoon that it had contracted Bonner & Associates earlier to perform "limited outreach," but the advocacy group denounced the firm's actions.

It's insane that Democratic lawmakers are going out of their way to label the August recess as "consequential" for health care based on the reaction of constituents in districts, when this nasty little episode shows how it's all just theater and lies.

UPDATE: Think Progress has corrected this story. Conrad's office miscategorized their response letter. The Perriello set of letters, however, are certainly real, which is to say fake. Brad Johnson has more.

Waxman: Focus on the Cap

The EPA today took a major step in declaring greenhouse gas pollution a danger to the public, increasing the urgency to regulate CO2.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson is officially confirming today that greenhouse gas pollution endangers the health and welfare of the American public, finally obeying the mandate set down by the U.S. Supreme Court on April 2, 2007. Following a review from the White House and agencies across the administration, Jackson is announcing this morning that she has signed the Clean Air Act endangerment finding for six greenhouse gases. By the time the decision is finalized after two months of public comment, it will have been nearly two years since the EPA was blocked by the Bush White House from issuing such a finding.

The implications of this ruling loom large over proposed climate and energy legislation under consideration in the Congress. I agree with Barbara Boxer that this finding will provide a serious boost to those efforts, because now the EPA is obligated under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions.

The EPA's endangerment finding will open the door for the Obama administration to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions under the 1970 Clean Air Act.

Although the president would prefer not to tackle this issue through his administration's regulatory power, the threat of EPA regulation could be used as a hammer to persuade moderate senators of both parties to get behind cap-and-trade legislation.

"What it says to the senators on the fence is that it's not really a question of whether regulation is happening. It's a question of how it will happen," a senior aide to Boxer told ABC News.

Call it "blackmail," as the corporate lobbyists do in this piece, or call it what it is, a requirement under the law mandated by the Supreme Court. So the obstructionists can block legislation in Congress and watch the EPA enact strict mandates, or they can have a say in the regulation. Their choice.

Respective of Congressional legislation, I recently had a great opportunity to sit down as part of a lobbying delegation with Henry Waxman, my Congressman and the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, to discuss the Waxman-Markey clean energy legislation introduced on March 31. There are actually two bills, one in Energy & Commerce and one in the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, both following similar tracks and expected to be out of committee by Memorial Day. And it can be argued that this provides a wealth of options for Congress to consider in pricing carbon, and thus the multiplicity of bills makes sense. But clearly, by virtue of its expansiveness and impact on a host of energy/climate issues, not just carbon pricing and hard caps but energy efficiency and renewable energy standards, the Waxman-Markey bill will be the template for energy legislation in this Congress.

Waxman brings an interesting perspective to the debate. He believes that the best way to get energy legislation through the Congress is to just start moving it, with tight deadlines, and dare the Republicans to stop it. He frames the issue as one of national security, to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy; of environmental imperative, to mitigate the catastrophic impacts of climate change; and of economic necessity, to move the country into a renovated, clean energy economy.

There's a lot of talk about how the cap and trade portion of the bill will be handled. The bill is somewhat murky on these points. The potential exists in the bill for offsets that would give a substantial portion of the carbon permits away for free. And the bill has no mention of how the revenues gained from what permits are auctioned off would be used (Waxman said that he would like to see some money directed to ratepayers, and some money directed to R&D for innovation in the energy space, and he would like to see the money targeted rather than applied as a broad tax cut). But Waxman de-emphasizes these concerns in favor of looking at the cap part of cap and trade. If the cap is firm and based on what the scientists have set as a goal to mitigate the effects of climate change, he reasons, the rest will fall into place. He used the example of acid rain, which used a similar cap and trade system in the 1980s. Industry feared that they'd have to spend billions for compliance, but lawmakers focused on the cap, and the problem was resolved for 1/10th of the expected cost. The goal, then, must be the cap. Waxman believed that offsets would have to be verifiable, and in exchange for the offsets there would have to be more reductions (a 1-to-1 1/2 ratio rather than 1-to-1). But if that's the cost to make the bill more politically attractive, Waxman is content to focus on the cap. Waxman also responded to a question I had about Europe's cap and trade system, which was marred by offsets and giveaways, by saying that the committee worked with Europe's regulators in drawing up the legislation, and that they will not fall into the same traps.

Waxman also played up the economic possibilities of the legislation, that only the innovation unleashed by having to get under the cap will be sufficient to actually create valuable goods for America and "get us out of the recession." Dozens of new industries can be developed and tremendous potential realized through innovation and technological advancements.

The other problematic element of the bill, for the progressive citizen lobbyists in the room with me, was the inclusion of clean coal technology in the bill, something that has been accepted by the White House and the Department of Energy as part of the solution. The typical response to this is that India and China will keep using coal even if the Western world stops, and we'd better come up with a way to capture and store the carbon produced or else our efforts will come up lacking. Waxman said that "we have to figure out if we can keep coal in our future." Obviously, the cap will eventually be too stringent for coal to remain a going concern in the United States without capture and storage technology advancing. And hopefully, the cap can force that, and develop new industries and new exports in the process. I don't know that I totally agree with that, but it's the party line on this, anyway. And besides, renewable energy has its own trade-offs.

Overall, I am far more optimistic about the prospects of climate and energy legislation coming through the Congress than I was before walking into that meeting. We still need to work hard to make the bill stronger, but the combination of the EPA ruling and the deliberate pace of the legislation moving through the House could provide the necessary momentum. We have to get this done, and hopefully we can create that sense of urgency. Also, we need to use the leverage of the EPA ruling to ensure this bill doesn't get weakened as it goes through the legislative sausage-making.

Electric, Not Ethanol

Via Matt Yglesias, here's a CBO report on ethanol showing that increased production of ethanol using corn has dramatically increased global food prices, and in both the short run and the long run could increase carbon emissions through more clear-cut forests coverted into cropland and the emissions use for producing corn. We pay tens of billions of dollars in subsidies for the pleasure of this, as well. All of this points to the need to create electric cars and transportation if we really want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not alternative fuels that deplete additional resources. This especially makes sense if we robustly ramp up renewable energy production. Carbon capture and sequestration may be a priority for the Obama Administration, but spending decades looking for the magic bullet to keep coal production going seems less likely than just making solar and wind profitable. The Administration strategy is to sell CCS technology to China and India, and I get that, but renewables already work in this context and we don't have the time, frankly, to wait for the technology to mature when there's already a paradigm-shifting solution on the table.

Meanwhile, China's electric cars strategy includes payouts to consumers to buy the cars instead of production subsidies, which makes sense to me. We have large subsidies for electric car purchases in this country, as well.

Waxman-Markey: Could Be Better

Some big news today on the climate change front, as Henry Waxman introduced a bill that would cut greenhouse gas emissions dramatically by 2050.

Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the House energy panel, will unveil draft legislation to reduce U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 percent, according to two people familiar with the measure.

The California Democrat, who heads the Energy and Commerce Committee, will release the proposal today, according to the people, who declined to be identified before the plan is made public. Utilities will be forced to rely on renewable energy for some of the power they sell, the people said.

“The Waxman bill is the opening shot in the battle about what we do about global warming,” said Daniel Becker, director of the Washington-based Safe Climate Campaign. “So it’s pretty important.”

President Barack Obama has called for the U.S. to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050, and get a quarter of its electricity from renewable sources by 2025. Waxman’s proposal would follow those goals.

These goals are actually somewhat in line with the targets of the group Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy (BICEP), which includes Nike, Starbucks, eBay and a bunch of other corporate partners. Those businesses are worried about the direct results of climate change to their materials and suppliers. In fact, the BICEP plan is BETTER than Waxman's, because they are calling for a 100% auction, while Waxman's bill would give some carbon credits away to polluters:

The Waxman plan doesn’t specify whether any allowances will be given for free, as some companies have requested. The committee staff favors auctioning a majority of them, according to the energy lobbyist.

The proposal will allow industrial emitters such as cement makers and utilities to buy and hold emissions permits, then use them to meet their targets any time in the future. Polluters may also use permits from “offsets,” projects that absorb carbon dioxide from the air or produce energy with fewer emissions, to meet part of their obligation.

The Waxman plan will allow offset credits covering 2 billion tons of emissions annually, or about 27 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gases in 2007. The government will hold some permits in reserve to help industry keep transition costs down, under the draft plan.

Waxman's plan hews much closer to the U.S. Climate Action Partnership plan, which includes in the coalition ConocoPhillips and General Motors along with mainstream enviro groups. Ed Markey, the go-to on climate change in the House and a co-sponsor of the bill, admitted that some credits would be given away on a conference call today.

Good for Greenpeace for speaking out that this bill doesn't go far enough.

After more than a decade of denial and delay by U.S. leaders, Chairmen Waxman and Markey have placed clean energy and global warming at the very top of Congress's agenda as the world looks to the United States for leadership in the run-up to Copenhagen. The draft bill is a good first step in the right direction, but the bill must be strengthened to ensure that it will achieve the goals of transitioning to a clean energy economy and solving global warming.

Key short-comings that must be addressed include:

• Two billion tons of pollution offsets, a virtually unlimited amount equal to a quarter of all U.S. emissions. If all the offsets in the bill were used, the bill's emissions reductions could be met without any reduction in fossil fuel emissions for more than 20 years. We cannot solve global warming by simply planting trees and continuing to pollute forever.

• The coal industry receives untold billions dollar in handouts for the false promise of carbon capture and sequestration, with American ratepayers and taxpayers footing the bill.

Finally, the discussion draft is largely silent on how auction revenue will be used. We urge the committee to dedicate this revenue to the short-term up-front investments needed to transition to a clean energy economy, including investments in clean energy development domestically and in the developing world as well as adaptation efforts for countries and communities most directly affected by climate change.

Giving away credits makes absolutely no sense and will delay perhaps forever the transition to a clean energy economy. It should be a bright line for progressives. And obviously, the so-called "clean coal" industry shouldn't be getting a bailout in this bill.

What's problematic is that Waxman-Markey is likely to be the best climate bill coming out of Congress this year. The Senate version will be even more compromised. So improving on this one before it goes to a vote is crucial.

Grassroots Success On Coal Plants

The Capitol has a power plant that heats and cools all federal buildings in Washington. And it is a carbon-spewing, dirty-energy, coal-fired power plant. On Monday, there will be a mass civil disobedience action in Washington, with over 2,500 protesters descending on the Capitol Power Plant for a nonviolent sit-in. Prior to that, the top two Congressional leaders called for a 100% shift to natural gas at the power plant by the end of the year.

Today, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Leader Harry Reid released a letter asking the Capitol Architect to switch the Capitol Power Plant from coal to 100 percent natural gas by the end of 2009. Pelosi and Reid’s call comes just three days before more than 2,500 people from across the country are coming to converge at the power plant for the biggest civil disobedience on climate issues in U.S. history. Prior to the announcement of the Capitol Climate Action, pro-coal legislators had been able to prevent the switch from coal to natural gas.

“Speaker Pelosi and Leader Reid’s dramatic action shows that Congress can act quickly on global warming when the public demands it,” said Greenpeace Deputy Campaigns Director Carroll Muffett. “This move demonstrates that they recognize the urgency of the climate crisis and the need for a switch to cleaner energy sources.”

In other words, Congressional leaders were pushed by a grassroots action to call for sweeping change.

Coal makes people sick and this country can't afford more coal burned into the atmosphere, from an environmental and a public health standpoint. Oscar-winning directors Joel and Ethan Coen have released a new satirical video aimed at the coal industry's deceptions on "clean coal."



Pass it around and maybe before long, your local or federal representatives will start calling on switching power plants near you away from coal. Industry and their PR spinners will never stop trying to keep the old, dirty energy structures in place. We can't stop either.

Time To Burn The Coal Industry

Fantastic news for the environment and efforts to reduce climate change.

The Obama administration on Tuesday agreed to review whether it should regulate carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, portending a major reversal of the Bush administration's policy on global warming.

The Environmental Protection Agency granted a petition from environmental groups seeking to overturn a Bush-era EPA memo that prohibited controls of those emissions.

"I am granting this petition because we must learn more about how this memo affects all relevant stakeholders impacted by its provisions,” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a statement.

Sierra Club lawyer David Bookbinder welcomed the move, saying it "stops the Bush administration's final, last-minute effort to saddle President Obama with its do-nothing policy on global warming."

"With coal-fired power plants emitting more than 30 percent of our global warming pollution, regulating their carbon dioxide is essential to making real progress in the fight against global warming," he said in a statement.

The industry is busy doomsaying this decision (Higher prices! Inflexible standards!), but it's too bad. We simply cannot do what is necessary to control emissions if 30% of the emissions are shielded from reductions. Coal makes people sick and Americans are actively fighting them. If the industry wants to stay in business they can abide by the restrictions.

To be clear, I support research and development solutions that would make coal feasible, if only because China and India are likely to keep burning it. That's just pragmatic. But there is no way that coal should be burned in this country at current levels. If they can't make it clean and profit-generating, they can't stay in business. The cost of the externalities outweigh the additional costs in energy.

Losing The Climate Spin War

I don't really know what quite went on here, but TPM followed all day this effort to delay President Obama's environmental nominees, terming it "the first shot" in the battle against action on climate change. Elena Schor claimed that an anonymous Senator was holding up Nancy Sutley (for head of the Council on Environmental Quality) and Lisa Jackson (for head of the EPA), with the actual pressure being put on the "climate czar" Carol Browner:

... it's about Carol Browner, the incoming White House climate and energy adviser. As Sen. Jim Inhofe (OK), senior Republican on the environment committee and the leading fly in the climate change ointment, told the Washington Times:

"I'm quite concerned that [Sutley's] role has been diluted by the addition of former EPA Administrator Carol Browner as White House climate and energy czar. The new Senate-confirmed CEQ chair will be expected to have the full authority to represent the White House on all matters before this committee."

By holding up Jackson and Sutley, Senate Republicans are doing more than just signaling their discontent that they won't get to question and vote on Browner -- although Sen. Bob Corker [R-TN] suggests to the Times that Browner be called in for a "quasi-confirmation" hearing. They're previewing their strategy to knock down the climate regulation bill that Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), environment committee chairman, will release later this year.

Then Schor claimed that Wyoming Senator Tom Barrasso was behind the delay; then it wasn't him; then the nominees could be cleared by tomorrow; and then, they were confirmed along with several other cabinet heads (I think only Geithner, Solis and Holder are left, though I could be missing one or two, and of course there is no nominee for Commerce Secretary).

Exactly what the hell happened here? Between Schor's over-reporting and Matt Cooper's thousand-word musings about Caroline Kennedy, I'm thinking of turning away from the new TPMDC.

However, it would be silly to ignore that the Republicans will stop at nothing to halt meaningful action on climate change. And, that they're winning. Not because nutcase James Inhofe says so, but because the issue is simply not a tangible enough concern to force it into Washington's power centers:

the latest Pew poll on priorities contains grim news for those of us who think we're rapidly destroying out planet: the public couldn't care less. Global warming, once again, ranks as the lowest priority from a list of 20, and the more general category of "protecting the environment" fell 15 percentage points from last year.

And as if that's not bad enough, Revkin also points to a new Rasmussen poll, which finds that 44% of U.S. voters don't believe humans are the cause of global warming, compared to only 41% who do. That's even worse than last year's results.

In one sense, this is because the economy and jobs have superseded the environment and everything else as the biggest concern. (People should listen to Van Jones more, who solves both of these vexing problems with the promise of green jobs). But the need for action grows larger every year, and yet the willingness to do so wanes. I think part of this is the PR machine being global warming denial. I mean, this memo from the coal industry tells you about everything you need to know:

A Virginia-based public relations firm called the Hawthorn Group sent out a newsletter to their "friends and family" outlining the work they did on behalf of a coal industry lobby group called the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.The newsletter outlines in quite a bit of detail about how Hawthorn spindoctored coal during the Presidential election.

The newsletter starts:

"We thought the most fixated of the political and communications "junkies" might find interesting some highlights of a recent grassroots campaign Hawthorn created and managed for the American Coalition of Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE)."

Hawthorn celebrates the fact that their coal-is-clean campaign was a success:

"In September 2007, on the key measurement question—Do you support/oppose the use of coal to generate electricity?—we found 46 percent support and 50 percent oppose. In a 2008 year-end survey that result had shifted to 72 percent support and 22 percent oppose. Not only did we see significantly increased support, opposition was cut by more than half. Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain addresses a crowd wearing "Clean Coal hats" in Pennsylvania."

Instead of actually demostrating that somehow coal is clean, Hawthorn used age-old PR tactics to create the image instead:

"Building on our existing 200,000-strong grassroots citizen army, we leveraged the presidential candidates' own supporters, finding advocates for clean coal among the crowd to carry our message. We got these on-the-spot advocates to show strong public support to the candidates and to the media, and enhanced that visibility by integrating online media that created even more of a buzz. We did this by sending "clean coal" branded teams to hundreds of presidential candidate events, carrying a positive message (we can be part of the solution to climate change) which was reinforced by giving away free t-shirts and hats emblazoned with our branding: Clean Coal. Attendees at the candidate events wore these items into the events."

Polluting industries have a huge megaphone and lots of money to deny the problem, deny that anything can be done, warn that job loss and economic contraction would ensue, and on and on. And yet with each passing day, the landscape is charred by the effects of a warming planet. The trees are dying, the ice is melting, the planet still has that fever. And we aren't gaining much traction to get us out of it.

President Obama, if you care about this, it's time for one of those stemwinders of a speech.

Dirty Little Secret

It turns out that those giant ponds of coal ash, toxic sludge created by coal-fired power plants, which can pour into local reservoirs and contaminate drinking water, are unmonitored and unregulated.

The coal ash pond that ruptured and sent a billion gallons of toxic sludge across 300 acres of East Tennessee last month was only one of more than 1,300 similar dumps across the United States — most of them unregulated and unmonitored — that contain billions more gallons of fly ash and other byproducts of burning coal.

Like the one in Tennessee, most of these dumps, which reach up to 1,500 acres, contain heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium, which are considered by the Environmental Protection Agency to be a threat to water supplies and human health. Yet they are not subject to any federal regulation, which experts say could have prevented the spill, and there is little monitoring of their effects on the surrounding environment.

This is a function of effective regulation of smokestacks and air pollution - the coal companies are just moving the pollution to a hidden corner away from regulator's prying eyes.

The amount of coal ash has ballooned in part because of increased demand for electricity, but more because air pollution controls have improved. Contaminants and waste products that once spewed through the coal plants’ smokestacks are increasingly captured in the form of solid waste, held in huge piles in 46 states, near cities like Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Tampa, Fla., and on the shores of Lake Erie, Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River.

Numerous studies have shown that the ash can leach toxic substances that can cause cancer, birth defects and other health problems in humans, and can decimate fish, bird and frog populations in and around ash dumps, causing developmental problems like tadpoles born without teeth, or fish with severe spinal deformities.

“Your household garbage is managed much more consistently” than coal combustion waste, said Dr. Thomas A. Burke, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who testified on the health effects of coal ash before a Congressional subcommittee last year. “It’s such a large volume of waste, and it’s so essential to the country’s energy supply; it’s basically been a loophole in the country’s waste management strategy.”

The loophole is actually allowing coal-fired power plants to continue to exist. The incident in Tennessee is among the worst-case scenarios, but with more power generation from coal, it's inevitable. And over half of Americans live within 30 miles of one of these kinds of power plants.

Enough. We need to shut down coal plants in the name of public health. The massive PR machine that the coal industry bakrolled to the tune of $45 million last year is pernicious and threatens the safety of the nation. There is no clean coal. Only sick people.

Dirty Coal Creates More Suffering

That horrible coal ash spill in Tennessee is proving to be even bigger than expected.

Officials at the authority initially said that about 1.7 million cubic yards of wet coal ash had spilled when the earthen retaining wall of an ash pond at the Kingston Fossil Plant, about 40 miles west of Knoxville, gave way on Monday. But on Thursday they released the results of an aerial survey that showed the actual amount was 5.4 million cubic yards, or enough to flood more than 3,000 acres one foot deep.

The amount now said to have been spilled is larger than the amount the authority initially said was in the pond, 2.6 million cubic yards.

A test of river water near the spill showed elevated levels of lead and thallium, which can cause birth defects and nervous and reproductive system disorders, said John Moulton, a spokesman for the T.V.A., which owns the electrical generating plant, one of the authority’s largest.

Some would call it "larger" than the amount originally thought to be in the pond, others would say "twice as much." And now it's in the drinking water.

Coal ash (or fly ash) is really nasty stuff, with multiple carcinogens and heavy metals and even radioactive elements like uranium and thorium contained in it, all of which can create a public health hazard. In addition, it's generated when coal is burned, and no matter what is done with the carbon, the residue remains and must be put into landfills or captured and stored at the plant. Power plants generated 71.1 million tons of fly ash in 2005. Incredibly, some of it is recycled and used in things like footpaths, leading to contamination. But I don't think we've ever seen levels like this released, and certainly not into a reservoir. Scientific American has more.

Regardless of whether we have developed "clean coal" technology to mitigate the effects of carbon, the problem of fly ash would persist. Which is why it is so stupid for prominent politicians, including the President-elect to speak laudably of the promise of clean coal. I just saw an ad this week featuring Barack Obama put together by the coal industry, using campaign footage of him in coal country:

"Clean coal technology is something that can make America energy independent!...We put a man on the moon in 10 years. You can't tell me we can't figure out a way to burn coal that we mine right here in the United States of America and make it work!"

There's campaign rhetoric that is relatively harmless and there's this validation of a dirty industry that has very real effects. Big Coal spent $45 million dollars this year to promote their product, which is currently to blame for one of the biggest environmental disasters in American history. Coal is not clean, nor will it ever be. Anyone who says otherwise is part of the problem.

Coal In The Stocking - And The Drinking Water

The water main break in Montgomery County, Maryland had some compelling visuals to it, with water pouring from the ground and drivers trapped in their cars, so it received some treatment on the cable shoutcasts today. It's a good thing, too, because the rupture of a 44 year-old pipe causing this kind of chaos does show the need for infrastructure repairs, not only as part of a larger fiscal stimulus, but to avoid catastrophes and their ancillary costs, and to maintain vital services which will have tangible benefits for years to come.

But a massive coal ash spill like we saw today in Tennessee - the result of a burst dam at a private coal processing plant - is actually far more dangerous with far more lasting consequences, even if the visuals aren't as stellar.



You're talking about hundreds of acres of toxic sludge, the residue plants create by burning coal to produce energy, which includes mercury, arsenic and lead, spilling into the tributaries of the Tennessee River, poisoning the water supply for multiple communities, including Chattanooga.

And it's a direct result of our continued reliance on an industry that makes us sick but uses slick PR terms like "clean coal," happily parroted by politicians of both parties, to maintain viability.

“This spill shows that coal can never be ‘clean,’” said Kate Smolski, Senior Legislative Coordinator for Greenpeace. “If the Exxon Valdez was a symbol of pollution 20 years ago, the Tennessee Coal Spill of 2008 is the symbol of it today.”

Incredibly, this spill occurs at a time when the Bush Administration is trying to loosen environmental rules that would allow the coal industry to dump rock and dirt from mountaintop mining into nearby streams. In other words, they want to make a disaster like this the norm. Environmental groups are suing to stop them, but what will stop the coal companies from their inattention to basic safety?

It's key that we use the opportunity of major fiscal stimulus to improve crumbling infrastructure. It would also be nice if, in the process, we started taking a critical look at companies whose very existence threatens public health and the future of a sustainable planet. And making sure that existence doesn't continue. Coal is not clean.

I Am A Scientist

(apologies to Thers for borrowing his shtick)

Here's the expected energy team for President-elect Obama:

Obama will name Steven Chu his choice for Energy secretary, Lisa Jackson for EPA administrator and Carol Browner as energy "czar" reporting to the president.

It is unclear whether the Browner position is cabinet level.

This will not be officially announced this week.

No Blagojevich in there? Proof that he was all set to hire him before the scandal broke. When will Obama resign???!!one!?questionmark???

Carol Browner is a former regulator who administrated at the EPA under Bill Clinton, and believes that government action to regulate the climate can create economic opportunity. Lisa Jackson was New Jersey's environmental protection head and then chief of staff to Gov. Jon Corzine.

But I want to focus on Steven Chu because he's something quite novel for Cabinet-level government work: a scientist.

If you look at the history of the Department of Energy, you'll find that there's never been a Secretary who actually was an expert on energy. The closest we've ever gotten was Charles Duncan who had a chemical engineering degree and had a cup of coffee out of school at Humble (later Exxon). For some reason it just never occurred to the President to install a person who was qualified for the position.

Instead we've been subjected to a long line of career politicians, military men and folks that were as far away from energy as you could get (Reagan's first Secretary of Energy was an oral surgeon) . Is it any wonder that our energy policy is set by industry since the person who is supposed to do that doesn't have a clue?

Not only does Chu have a clue, he's a Nobel-prize winning scientist and is already working under the auspices of the Department of Energy at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. A scientist, ya'll. As the Secretary of Energy. Oh. My. Gawd.

He moved from the arena of quantum physics to political advocacy for admirable reasons.

Consider this. There’s about a 50 percent chance, the climate experts tell us, that in this century we will go up in temperature by three degrees Centigrade. Now, three degrees Centigrade doesn’t seem a lot to you, that’s 11° F. Chicago changes by 30° F in half a day. But 5° C means that … it’s the difference between where we are today and where we were in the last ice age. What did that mean? Canada, the United States down to Ohio and Pennsylvania, was covered in ice year round.

Five degrees Centigrade.

So think about what 5° C will mean going the other way. A very different world. So if you’d want that for your kids and grandkids, we can continue what we’re doing. Climate change of that scale will cause enormous resource wars, over water, arable land, and massive population displacements. We’re not talking about ten thousand people. We’re not talking about ten million people, we’re talking about hundreds of millions to billions of people being flooded out, permanently.

And he is optimistic about what we can do about this crisis, through energy efficiency, through developing new technologies for fuel, through building a new energy economy at home. This is a guy who is rooting around in bug entrails looking for new sources of energy, with decent results. And this is a godsend of a quote:

Applause broke out when he described how companies, after claiming efficiency gains and lowered costs were impossible, “miraculously” achieved them once they “had to assign the jobs from the lobbyists to the engineers.”

There has been no greater sea change in Obama's cabinet selections than this choice of an engineer, a scientist, to head the Department of Energy, after eight years of an Administration that waged war on science. It's the difference between having a serious conversation with the American people about a new Apollo Project for renewable energy and a post-carbon future and "Frosty the Coalman."



Yes, that's real. Go ahead and look.

Keeping Up With The Jones

Let's continue my look at various cabinet and White House staff appointments by taking a look at the new national security advisor, James Jones. By all accounts Jones, a former Marine general, is fairly apolitical, although he supported John McCain in the election and has been tapped to head at least a couple studies by the Bush Administration. He has commanded NATO forces in the past and has a keen understanding of both military and diplomatic issues. By all accounts, he's a smart, committed public servant, and his views on some major issues have been decent, particularly on Afghanistan, where he is an advocate for improving both reconstruction and diplomatic efforts.

Many are justifiably concerned about Jones' most recent job at the US Chamber of Commerce, advising on energy issues. Energy is absolutely a national security concern, so his new position will be at least tangential to that issue. And the Chamber's energy policy, in a word, sucks.

Jones sits on the board of Chevron Corp., and since March 2007 has been president and chief executive of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for 21st Century Energy, which has been criticized by environmental groups.

"They have a reprehensible record," said Frank O'Donnell, the outspoken leader of Clean Air Watch, of the institute led by Jones.

The institute calls for the immediate expansion of domestic oil and gas production, nuclear energy and clean-coal technology, in addition to investment in renewable and alternative energy sources.

O'Donnell criticized institute reports under Jones that challenged the use of the Clean Air Act to combat global warming and the right of states, such as California, to impose environmental standards that go beyond those set by the federal government.

"Since global warming is a security threat, this selection raises a real eyebrow," O'Donnell said in an e-mail. "Will Jones be predisposed to compromise the new administration's environmental agenda, both at home and in the international arena? . . . Stay tuned."

We cannot think in the mindset of the past, where we use the military to provide safe passage for oil and fight resource wars. The future of energy has nothing to do with "Drill baby drill" or clean coal, which doesn't exist. Hopefully Jones' views on this subject will be taken with massive amounts of grains of salt. At this point, the jobs of Energy Secretary and EPA Administrator had better be far to the left of Jones to balance this out.

D-Day Asks, The Environmental Coalition Offers

Wow, when I wrote this brief yesterday about the dangers of clean coal, I honestly had no idea that an entire campaign was being readied by Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, the Sierra Club, The League of Conservation Voters, the NRDC and several other enviro groups, in a coalition they call The Reality Campaign. Their first TV ad is sharp and to the point.



There are some solid quotes in their press release:

"The reality is that there's not a single home or business in America today powered by clean coal," said Brian Hardwick of the Alliance for Climate Protection. "If coal really wants to be part of America's energy future, the industry can start by making a real commitment to eliminating their pollution that is a leading cause of global warming."

Hardwick continued: "It is high time for the coal industry to come clean and admit to the American people that today clean coal is not a reality. No matter how much they say it in their advertising, coal can't truly be clean until the plants can capture global warming pollution. With so much at stake, we can't afford to hang our hats on an illusion."

While the single-issue enviro groups haven't been entirely effective, on coal they have started to get it, with the Sierra Club's legal team winning a major recent ruling at the EPA making it virtually impossible for them to approve new coal-fired power plants. This ad campaign goes after the court of public opinion, and pushes back on the pervasive use of "clean coal." The coal industry sponsored every single debate on CNN this election season. We can no longer allow these poisonous, PR-friendly phrases to be injected into the discourse without serious pushback.

You can sign up to help The Reality Campaign at their website.

Still President Bush

I know that he appears to be doing one interview after another and spinning reporters on how good his Presidency was, but George Bush is keeping busy by stripping collective bargaining rights from federal employees and throwing more dirt into drinking water. These may not SEEM like vital national priorities, but then again, you don't personally profit from them, do you?

...by the way, this is the danger of validating claims to "clean coal".

In giving his blessing to the new regulation, Mr. Johnson, the head of the E.P.A., noted that Mr. Bush had promoted the use of clean coal technology as a way to reduce dependence on foreign oil.

“Americans should not have to choose between clean coal or effective environmental protection,” Mr. Johnson said. “We can achieve both.”

Clean coal technology refers to the capture and sequestration of carbon. It has nothing to do with allowing rock and dirt to cascade into valleys and streams. In fact, clean coal is a myth on its own terms. But you repeat the word enough and you give polluters and anti-environmentalists the ability to use it.

Partitions

Stoller is accurate that progressives are somewhat marginalized here. Actually I think it's that all sides go to their corners. If you wanted to have a fully progressive convention and see great progressive speakers and meet with them and brainstorm, you certainly can. I ran into Jane Hamsher and Ned Lamont yesterday and out of that might come a great counterpoint to Joe Lieberman's RNC speech. There are also insiders and lobbyists, and that's a different convention that has better food and a decent view of the action. And they don't let progressives in.

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, it’s amazing. And essentially, we probably tried to interview twenty-five, thiry people going in, and every last person refused to even give their name, identify themselves, say what they’re here for, what the event is for. It’s more secretive than like a Dick Cheney energy council meeting. I mean, it’s amazing.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what are you here for? Why do you want to interview people?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, because, I mean, it’s extraordinary that the same Blue Dogs that just gave this extremely corrupt gift to AT&T are now attending a party underwritten by AT&T, the purpose of which is to thank the Blue Dogs for the corrupt legislative gift that they got. So AT&T gives money to Blue Dogs, the Blue Dogs turn around and immunize AT&T from lawbreaking, and then AT&T throws a party at the Democratic convention thanking them, and then they all go in and into this exclusive club.

There isn't a party thrown not sponsored by some corporate behemoth, so it's hard for me to get worked up about any individual one. What does bother me is all the corporate signage that really swamps the convention. The coal industry has a bunch of young kids passing out fans with "clean coal" messaging on it. Interesting, they're giving me something that harnesses the wind to create energy. It was a hot day, so I took it from them to use for a few seconds. Then I gave it back, saying, "Here, it's renewable."

Interestingly, one of the most prominent corporate presences here is Trojans.

To spin it out and see the partitioned convention as an example of an Obama Administration hostile to progressives takes a little bit of extrapolation, but it's clearly true that any leader of a party is going to mold it in his image. Obama is stage managing the podium speeches, for example. And as progressive power in Washington isn't exactly strong, then progressives will be shoved to one side as well. Our challenge is to collectivize our power and grow it from the bottom up, making ourselves impossible to ignore.

Pander Bears In Pennsylvania

Western Pennsylvania has a large coal region, particularly around the Appalachian chain. And West Virginia is on the horizon. This has transformed into an opportunity for both candidates to talk about liquid coal and generally include coal in "clean energy" solutions.

Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) told an NPR affiliate in West Virginia Wednesday that we need to “make sure that coal plays a major role” in the future and when asked about mountaintop removal, said “maybe there is a way to recover once they have been stripped of the coal.” Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) told a crowd in West Virginia Thursday that “clean coal jobs” are “green jobs.”

Mountaintop removal not only shocks the conscience, it bleeds jobs from the region and unecessarily disrupts the environment. Liquid coal projects, which the Air Force wants to run their planes on, are very bad for the environment, generating a ton of carbon dioxide per BARREL of fuel. And "clean coal" is just a misnomer, a name for something that does not now exist and arguably never will:

“Clean coal” is a shorthand term for “technologies designed to enhance both the efficiency and the environmental acceptability of coal extraction, preparation and use.” This includes established technologies used to capture methane emitted during coal mining and to “wash” coal before it is burned to separate toxic impurities, as well as technologies to capture and geologically store its greenhouse emissions (CCS) that are “expensive, experimental and not in commercial use.”

The coal industry, with the assistance of the current administration, has been fighting regulations to establish or enforce the use of existing technologies to reduce traditional air pollutants produced by coal-burning like mercury and sulfur dioxide. In climate scientist James Hansen’s analysis, the only way to avoid climate catastrophe is to establish “an immediate moratorium on additional coal-fired power plants without CCS.”

No matter how advanced coal technology becomes, a coal-industry job is simply not in the same class of ecological responsibility as one that involves renewable energy or actually restores carbon and health to the soil.

It's primary season (still) and I expect a certain amount of regionally-focused pandering, but for two candidates that actually have very good energy policies, to talk about "clean coal" and liquid coal projects in this facile and self-serving way kind of hurts. How about telling the truth for the change, or boldly promoting congestion pricing or a corporate carbon tax, giving the appropriate seriousness to the task of mitigating the effects of global warming? We're beyond the point with the climate that we can afford these little white lies.

UPDATE: Grist has more. And I do appreciate Obama's proposed active role in the oil markets, for what it's worth.

So Much For That 52 Straight Months Of Job Growth

This is the surest sign of recession.

The U.S. unexpectedly lost jobs for the first time in more than four years, increasing the odds the economy will fall into a recession and making it likely the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates another half point next month.

Payrolls fell by 17,000 in January after an 82,000 gain in December that was larger than initially reported, the Labor Department said today in Washington. None of the 80 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News predicted a decline.

They can make the interest rate negative-8, it's not going to help a whole lot.

Additionally, the revised figures show 376,000 less jobs for the year 2007, which means in 2007 the United States did not keep up with the rate of population growth.

You would think this would be the time to get that green jobs program going and start using the American innovation advantage to offset this downturn, but actually you'd be wrong.

President Bush has long touted clean coal technology as a potential solution to global warming. In 2006, he insisted that the United States is “spending quite a bit of money here at the federal level to come up with clean-coal technologies.” During Monday’s State of the Union address, Bush said, “Let us fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions.”

Yet just 24 hours after his SOTU declaration, Bush’s Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman indicated the White House was pulling the plug on the ambitious FutureGen project, a clean coal plant that was touted as “the cleanest fossil fuel fired power plant in the world.”

Is this Presidency over yet?

Today's Fires Are a Symptom, We Must Press for the Cure

Forest fires like those we see sweeping the Southland today are a collateral piece of damage from an environment that has grown more vulnerable through overdevelopment, neglect, and the continued harm from climate change. There is no question that a hotter, drier climate makes the land more susceptible to wildfires which can expand and change direction in a split second. We have had drought-like conditions all year in Southern California, which makes things worse. The state has made efforts to reverse this pattern through strict regulation of tailpipe emissions, but has been stymied by a slow-walk from the EPA, who since December 2005 has refused to grant the waiver necessary to make this regulation law. On Wednesday, California's patience will run out, and they will sue the Bush Administration over this obstructionism. The US Supreme Court has already ruled that states can regulate greenhouse gas emissions, now the EPA must relent and allow the states to govern their own regions in the manner they see fit.

This is more than an abstract concept. We're talking about lives and property and untold destruction. And this lawsuit will hopefully spur Senate Environmental Committee Chair Barbara Boxer to move quickly at the federal level on a global warming bill that is not a massive giveaway to coal companies, but which takes definable steps to solve the problem. Fortunately, there is real movement toward a carbon-neutral future and away from the delaying tactics and greenwashed "solutions" that have characterized the past decade. The terrible fires today should be a powerful reminder of what we must do for a better environment in California and around the world.

Et Tu, New York Times?

This headline, "Global Warming Starts to Divide G.O.P. Contenders," made me chuckle. As far as I can tell, the divide is between how much to give in subsidies to the coal and nuclear ower industries. John McCain's call for cap-and-trade is weak, and reflected in this bill that used to have his name on it. Lieberman-Warner, formerly Lieberman-McCain, would give maybe trillions of dollars in subsidies to polluting industries.

There is no divide because there is a fairly broad consensus on the right when it comes to global warming. It doesn't exist, it should be used as a element of mockery when it's cold in winter in Minnesota, as well as a reminder that Al Gore is fat, and to the extent that anything at all should be done, those actions must protect and reward polluting industries while expanding other potentially dangerous industries like nuclear power and dissembling about the myth of "clean coal." Oh yeah, and lots and lots of ethanol, because the Iowa caucuses are right around the corner.