If you’re like me and you found yourself heckling the TV set one too many times this election season in response to the countless commercials and candidate plugs for the oxymoron of the century – clean coal
Powervote Activities
So this post has been cross-posted from my other blog (http://madrad2002.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/powervote-efforts/)
Live Stream of MD District 8 Debate
If you missed our very first live streaming event of the candidate forum held between the candidates for Maryland’s 8th congressional district you can now see the full recording here.
Will the Credit Crunch Crunch Coal?
In early February 2008, four major Wall Street banks announced a new reticence to finance conventional coal-fired power plants. Their calculus: The federal government is likely to hit utilities with a cap on greenhouse-gas emissions Continue reading
Gustav: More Extreme Weather for a Nation in Denial
Hurricane Gustav is just the latest example of extreme weather in a nation that’s seen its share this summer. Indeed, the Iowa floods and Southeastern drought and western wildfires all fit the patterns scientists say we should expect with global warming. As we watch the spectacle of two million American refugees evacuating the Gulf coast, it’s important to remember that not so long ago category 3 and 4 hurricanes were a true rarity in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. Now they seem almost routine. Indeed, of the ten strongest hurricanes ever recorded in terms of low barometric pressure, six have occurred in just the past ten years.
Learn more in my 2006 book The Ravaging Tide: The Race to Save America’s Coastal Cities. As for climate-induced sea level rise and it’s affect on the levees in New Orleans, see my recent piece below in Grist magazine.
Mike Tidwell
cell 240-460-5838, mikewtidwell@gmail.com
Fear on their Faces; Hope in their Eyes. VA Citizens Demand Real Solutions for Climate Change
I saw fear yesterday on the faces of the men and women directly affected by the proposed Wise County coal plant who had just driven 8 hours to testify before the Governors Climate Commission. They knew that their land, their health, and their beautiful landscapes were the ones being sacrificed for our runaway energy demands. That fear and concern was most eloquently expressed by Bill McCabe who challenged the commission to actually think and care about the people most affected by dirty energy. To try and relate to the 91 year old woman who could sit on her porch her whole life and enjoy the mountains, worship God with the mountains, and live in a healthy environment with land she has always known. Now the same woman comes outside to her porch to see her familiar mountains flattened and toxic waste left behind.
The nearly 200 citizens that flooded the Governor’s Commission on Climate Change yesterday were concerned about our addiction to dirty energy no matter what part of Virginia they came from. There were the school teachers from NOVA who did not want to use power at the expense of their neighbor’s rights and the college students who could not understand why Virginia’s leaders would blatantly ignore climate scientists about the consequences of building new coal plants. The overwhelming consensus at this hearing was that the commission has to recognize that global warming is real and deal with it aggressively. Residents insisted that VA would be perfect for leading the country in renewable energy and emphasized that its skilled labor force could be at the forefront of the burgeoning green jobs movement to replace dirty industries. Continue reading
An Analysis of "Barack Obama: New Energy for America"
On August 4th the Obama campaign released a comprehensive program for reform of the U.S. energy system. This article is a critical analysis of that program.
Following an introduction, there are seven separate sections.
The Introduction
Obama frames his program as primarily a response to “our dependence on oil.” He calls this dependence “a threat to our national security, our planet and our economy.”
Comment: It is striking that in this introduction, and nowhere else in the 8-page, single-spaced document, does Obama identify our fossil fuel addiction, or the carbon pollution from the burning of oil, coal and natural gas, as the, or even a, problem.
He does say in the concluding paragraph of the introduction that “the nation (needs) to face one of the great challenges of our time: confronting our dependence on foreign oil, addressing the moral, economic and environmental challenge of global climate change, and building a clean energy future that benefits all Americans.”
He lists in a prominent box six things his program will do:
- Provide short-term relief to American families facing pain at the pump
- Help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future
- Within 10 years save more oil than we currently import from the Middle East and Venezuela combined
- Put 1 million Plug-In Hybrid cars Continue reading
Would Orville Wright Drill Offshore?
See below for an Op-Ed published today in the Baltimore Sun by CCAN Director Mike Tidwell. Enjoy.
Let’s make history again
By Mike Tidwell
July 23, 2008
Baltimore Sun
I recently stood on the windy coast of North Carolina where Orville and Wilbur Wright made their maiden flight in 1903. That motorized glider, constructed with bicycle parts, lifted off and flew nearly 900 feet in 59 seconds. Americans, astonishingly, were walking on the moon 66 years later.
The miracle of U.S. air and space travel, achieved in an eye blink, is something we should keep in mind as we once again turn to our coastlines for answers. The same windy Atlantic shore that gave rise to human flight now offers a new fork in the road with two profoundly different technological and moral visions awaiting our national decision.
One vision involves turning thousands of miles of our shoreline – on both coasts – into new havens for oil drilling. Never mind rapid global warming. Never mind our reckless addiction to oil. Never mind federal government data showing it would do little for gas prices. The new drumbeat, even among many Democrats, is, “We gotta get more – offshore, onshore, wherever.”
That’s certainly one vision for our coastlines for the 21st century.
Thankfully, there’s another, entirely different, vision out there. It embraces the pioneering spirit of the Wright brothers. It promises positive, transformative, sky’s-the-limit change. It’s a vision that says: Let’s build along our coastlines, but instead of oil platforms, let’s put up wind farms. And let’s tap the power of ocean waves and ocean tides for energy, rather than climate-wrecking crude oil. In the process, let’s make history so that schoolchildren remember 2008 they way they now remember 1903. Continue reading
Coal is what it is–VP candidates and coal
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Barack Obama shone some of his rays of hope on the climate movement. He named “serious” action on global warming as one of the benchmarks for success in his first term. “If I haven’t gotten combat troops out of Iraq, passed universal health care and created a new energy policy that speaks to our dependence on foreign oil and deals seriously with global warming, then we’ve missed the boat.”
In order to deal “seriously” with climate change, we need a moratorium on new coal plants. According to James Hansen, “it’s just silly to build a new one now.” And yet VP hopeful, our own Governor Tim Kaine, aggressively pushed for his and Dominion’s coal plant in Wise County. As Gov. Kaine says on this video, “There are some who say that you can’t build any new coal plants, and I don’t agree with that.”
Join the campaign at www.chesapeakeclimate.org/nocoal
Another VP hopeful, Kathleen Sebelius, has a record on coal that is much more promising than Gov. Kaine’s. She made herself a hero by standing up to a Republican legislature and strong utilities by blocking a coal plant from being built. Even the Republicans have a strong hero in the VP running. Florida Governor Charlie Crist successfully halted the construction of a new coal plant and stated his strong support of renewable energy. “Coal is what it is and I know it’s been an important source of energy in the past. But you know we have solar, we have nuclear, we have wind and other alternative opportunities for energy in the Sunshine State.”
It’s obvious that Kaine supports coal. He wants coal now, and he wants coal in the future. Is this going to meet up with Obama’s stated goal, to seriously address global warming?
An oil man's clean energy plan
If you haven’t heard, T. Boone Pickens has waded into the clean energy debate. He’s leading the charge for wind energy production in Texas and the Midwest as a solution to our foreign oil dependence. It’s a good effort from the conservative movement to get into clean energy, but from a climate standpoint, it’s just where the new line has been drawn.