Statement from Chesapeake Climate Action Network Virginia State Director Beth Kemler on Announced Closure of the Potomac River Generating Station in Alexandria, Virginia

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Jamie Nolan, 410.463.9869, jamie@chesapeakeclimate.org

“We applaud the City of Alexandria and GenOn for their decision to retire the Potomac River coal-fired power plant.

This coal plant is one of the largest sources of planet-warming carbon emissions in the DC area, and retiring it is a necessary step in preventing the dangerous impacts of climate change in our region.

Just this weekend, Irene shined a spotlight on the future we could face if we don’t stop releasing greenhouse gases — one where climate change causes more frequent and more severe extreme weather events. GenOn’s decision is a step in the right direction — it will reduce the Washington, D.C. area’s carbon emissions equivalent of taking 300,000 cars off the roads. However, GenOn owns three more ancient, polluting power plants in the DC region that date back to the Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Johnson administrations: Dickerson, Chalk Point, and Morgantown. These plants must be shut down as well. 

GenOn’s announcement is a sign that the momentum is on our side to move the region away from its reliance on dirty fossil fuels and towards a clean energy future.”

For more information about the coal plant closure, click here.

See photos of CCAN’s April 2011 candlelight vigil at the coal plant here. 

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VICTORY: Alexandria Coal Plant Closing!

We got word this morning that GenOn has agreed to close its Potomac River coal-fired power plant in Alexandria, a victory for CCAN, Sierra Club, Greenpeace and Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light, which have been working together with local residents to convince the company to shut it down. We’ve collected petition signatures, held rallies and even held a candlelight vigil at the plant.

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Five CCANers Arrested to Stop Keystone XL

This week, five CCAN staffers, including myself, were arrested in front of the White House in an effort to compel President Obama to deny a permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

President Obama will decide later this year on TransCanada’s permit for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, which will send 900,000 barrels a day of the world’s dirtiest oil to US refineries, allowing further development of the Alberta tar sands. Mining oil from tar sands creates three times more carbon emissions than conventional oil extraction and our top climate scientist, NASA’s Dr. James Hansen, has said that the development of the tar sands would be “essentially game over” for the climate.

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Maryland Youth Campaign for Offshore Wind

This post was written by Caroline Selle who will be a senior at St Mary’s College of Maryland. It was originally posted on wearepowershift.org

In between bites of pizza and homemade peach and blackberry pie, the members of the Maryland Student Climate Coalition (MSCC) spent the bulk of last Saturday planning our campaign for offshore wind. Clean, job-creating, renewable energy like offshore wind is exactly the kind of resource we want to use to power our homes and our schools.

As a resource, offshore wind is kind of incredible. The wind blows relatively constantly off the coast, including at times of peak power usage. Once the infrastructure is in place, it’s almost completely free to generate wind power. Best of all, wind power is clean and renewable. It reduce emissions of the greenhouse gas CO2 and will help public health by creating cleaner air and cleaner water.

Unfortunately, last year the Maryland General Assembly failed to pass a bill that obligated major Maryland utilities to purchase offshore wind power for the next twenty years. The bill would have helped Maryland reach it’s 20% by 2022 Renewable Portfolio Standard and given wind developers the incentive to build offshore wind projects that create thousands of manufacturing, operation, and maintenance jobs during their lifespan.

This fall, the MSCC is running a campaign to make sure that offshore wind is a part of Maryland’s future. We will petition our school and community leaders to support offshore wind, because it is a way to create jobs, harness clean and safe energy, and reach our renewable electricity goals.

Past MSCC campaigns changed the way Maryland leaders looked at youth. Once again, we are going to use our combined energy, skills, and resources to change the state’s landscape and bring offshore wind to our homes.

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Tropic of Chaos: a book review

“Between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer lies what I call the Tropic of Chaos, a belt of economically and politically battered post-colonial states girding the planet’s mid-latitudes. In this band, around the tropics, climate change is beginning to hit hard. The societies in this belt are heavily dependent on agriculture and fishing, thus very vulnerable to shifts in weather patterns. . . In this belt we find clustered most of the failed and semi-failed states of the developing world.” p. 9

Christian Parenti has written a book about climate change, “Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence,” from the perspective, by and large, of the least of these, of the world’s poor. And it is a very sobering picture.

He has also grounded his analysis in history and economics, placing the climate impacts that are being felt in the countries he visited and reports on within a broader context. In so doing, his book will help readers appreciate that the deadly and destructive impacts of climate change, caused mainly by the world’s burning of fossil fuels, are in many respects a continuation of colonial and neo-colonial policies in effect worldwide for centuries.

As Parenti says, “The current and impending dislocations of climate change intersect with the already-existing crises of poverty and violence. . . the catastrophic convergence.” Continue reading

Fracking Hits Close to Home in Garrett County

Last week I took my first trip out to Western Maryland with our fabulous fellow Emily Saari. The drive was long but really beautiful- and much more relaxing than driving around the city.

We arrived to quite the welcoming party- a group of really incredible women working to protect their homes and communities from dangerous fracking practices. Over lunch we discussed the latest in fracking news and all the issues it creates. It is overwhelming to keep track of everything: drinking water contamination, traffic on small roads, land value decreasing, harm to wildlife, methane leaks Continue reading

Koch brothers declare war on offshore wind

The war over America’s coastal-energy future has officially begun, and the result could determine whether we see wind turbines or catastrophic oil spills along our coastlines in coming years.

The opening salvo came in early July, when everyone’s favorite climate-hating, fossil-fuel-loving industrialist villains, the Koch brothers, released a so-called “cost-benefit analysis” of New Jersey offshore wind development plans through their front group Americans for Prosperity.

The focus on New Jersey is no big surprise. Fresh off their recent success in manipulating the state’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie into backing out of the Northeastern cap-and-trade system known as RGGI, the brothers grim are honing in on what they see as a weak spot in the clean-energy movement’s eastern front. Hoping to score a knockout blow, the duo have packed their offshore wind “analysis” with distortions.

Topping the report’s list of misrepresented facts are the jobs benefits. In fact, forget about misrepresentation; the report actually failed to represent those benefits altogether. Considering the impressive job-creation numbers cited in a range of other studies on offshore wind, it’s hard to imagine how any analysis that wasn’t commissioned as an intentional piece of fiction could have made such a glaring omission. Indeed, a study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory indicates that the 1,000 megawatts of offshore wind power New Jersey is planning to build could result in nearly 5,000 construction and maintenance jobs. Adding to the imbalance of the Kochs’ equations, their report completely discounts wind power’s benefit as a relief valve against foreign-oil dependence or New Jersey’s need to import electricity from other states.

Of course, this parade of misinformation should come as little surprise considering the track record of the key Koch crony in the Garden State: AFP New Jersey chapter director and Tea Party high priest Steve Lonegan. A longtime extreme-right gadfly of the New Jersey political scene, Lonegan earned his Koch-worthy credentials publishing false accusations about political opponents during his time as mayor of Bogota, N.J., and has been accused of violating state election laws and defrauding taxpayers in a 2008 run for governor. What’s more, as chronicled in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, Lonegan was the local force behind the “dishonest scare-campaign” that led to Christie’s retreat from RGGI.

With Lonegan leading the offensive, it’s clear the Kochs are planning to make the fight over New Jersey’s coasts a particularly ugly and bruising one. The situation also bodes ominously for other states up and down the Mid-Atlantic Bight that are considering wind projects, from Connecticut to North Carolina.

Thankfully, for all the dollars and deceitfulness the Kochs have in their arsenal, their victory is far from assured. As their failed attempt to cut down California’s climate law in 2010 proved, the Kochs can be beaten by a well-organized, grassroots-powered opposition with truth on its side. And that’s exactly what they’re up against in New Jersey and up and down the Mid-Atlantic Bight, where a robust coalition involving everyone from Google to the United Steelworkers to the League of Women Voters is ready to stand up for wind and smack down any BS Lonegan and the Kochs serve up.

Game on, boys. Bring it.

This post has been cross-posted courtesy of Grist
Image credit: Gus Ruelas/Greenpeace