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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The options of a renewable energy future

 

Yes, there are those who still curiously regard fossil fuels as the only realistic energy sources for our world. It is a dead-end if there ever was one; an idea largely propagated by the fossil fuel biz and their political front men and women. Thankfully, for those who understand the inescapable necessity of renewable clean energy, the options just keep growing.

Meet the solar tower, a solar-based energy source that is an intriguing mix of solar and wind energy. A company named “Enviromission” has its sights on Arizona to build this massive tower. It’s essentially an enormous greenhouse that traps air heated by the sun’s rays. Hot air naturally rises, and as the air does so it is funneled through a central point (the tower), the base of which sports an array of fans that are turned by the current just like a windmill.

A detailed description of the tower can be found here including its numerous advantages. For starters, it is low maintenance, continues to work at night, has zero GHG emissions, makes use of essentially useless desert, and the list still goes on. This earlier, smaller version in Spain recently achieved the huge milestone of generating twenty-four hours of uninterrupted supply, proving solar energy can provide power well into the night!

This is just one of many options that are currently available and make the reality of renewable energy all the more imminent. Add some wind energy, solar thermal and solar PV, some geothermal for good measure, and we’re well on our way to a cleaner, sustainable future.

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Oh, Canada: The Tar Sands is a disaster

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Many people have heard that the Tar Sands Project in Alberta, Canada is one of the most environmentally destructive oil projects ever, but it’s hard to appreciate until you hear the details. I can’t imagine what it’s like to see in person. Just how far will we go for crude? Consider this excerpt from a telling article published in National Geographic:

“To extract each barrel of oil from a surface mine, the industry must first cut down the forest, then remove an average of two tons of peat and dirt that lie above the oil sands layer, then two tons of the sand itself. It must heat several barrels of water to strip the bitumen from the sand and upgrade it, and afterward it discharges contaminated water into tailings ponds like the one near Mildred Lake.”

Cutting down forest, moving 4 tons of earth, using lots of water which is heated by natural gas, and then finding somewhere to store all the waste water, and we still haven’t transported it (all this effort for one barrel mind you) to market!

The next phase involves the construction of the appropriately controversial “Keystone XL Pipeline,” which thankfully is drawing disapproval in the wake of the recent pipeline spill in Montana. The project is a proposed extension of existing pipelines that will carry the Tar Sands crude all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.The two pipelines are “very similar,” notes Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) International Program Director Susan Casey-Lefkowitz. The EPA also released a negative critique of the State Department’s analysis of the Pipeline, citing numerous concerns including likelihood of spills (especially as they relate to groundwater), increased refinery pollution, global warming pollution, wetlands destruction, risks associated with migratory birds

Dangerously Subtle

Lately, the news is ablaze with reports about the wildfires burning out west. Climate scientists, to the chagrin of many climate change deniers, have published studies that indicate how climate change is exacerbating wildfires, as noted recently in the Huffington Post and New York Times, just for starters.

Surely, environmental activists have been repeatedly frustrated by the denial crowd’s steadfast rejection of anything implying a more complicated dynamic in nature than they would allow, as a means of abasing concern and therefore action on environmental issues.

No academics are saying explicitly that global warming caused this fire, that drought, or those tornadoes. In the world of anthrogenic climate change, change happens over time, one subtle increment after another resulting in different long-term trends. And, as we all know by now, in the world of politically tainted discourse, subtlety knows no quarter. Perhaps debating with deniers is a lost cause, but what about the many who are “on the fence” so to speak, and the many more who are simply apathetic to the necessity of renewable energy?

The thing is, for the sake of conveying urgency in climate and renewable energy action, there exists an abundance of not so subtle, perhaps even ridiculous examples of environmental degradation that tie directly into fossil fuel consumption and thus global warming. From entire mountains disappearing in Appalachia and the ensuing toxic runoff, to people apparently being able to ignite their tap water on fire as seen in the 2010 documentary, “Gasland”, to the now infamous Gulf Spill, what exactly does it take to get people to engage?

Unfortunately, a major hurdle appears to be that only when a community is unambiguously and dramatically affected by some form of environmental issue do they take action. But, massive grassroots action is needed immediately to curtail the eventual dramatic consequences of say, a subtle increase in global temperature. Icecaps and glaciers worldwide are already melting at alarming rates, threatening our coastal cities. By the time these cities are inundated and there is no room for apathy, it will be too late. Ideas anyone?

Charged Up After Energize Virginia!

150 Virginia citizens, 5 strategic ways to take action, one purpose: moving Virginia toward a future of clean power and good jobs from offshore wind energy. That was the Energize Virginia summit that CCAN proudly hosted this past Saturday in Richmond!

If you were among the many activists that joined us on Saturday, thank you! We hope you had as much fun and felt as inspired as we did! If you couldn’t be there, hopefully these pictures can begin to capture the day’s palpable excitement!

Energize Virginia was foremost about Virginians coming to the state capitol from as far as Alexandria and Virginia Beach, from the Valley and from the Southside and everywhere in between, to learn and to take action to bring affordable, carbon-free energy online in Virginia. But we did even more than that.

We took a stand demanding that the leaders in our state act faster and more decisively to begin changing where Virginia gets its energy. With help from experts like business leader Terry McAuliffe, Joe Bouchard, Oceana’s Jackie Savitz, and Sierra Club Beyond Coal’s Vanessa Pierce, we made the case for large investment in Virginia’s best renewable, efficient energy source and how our state can become a leader in our region. It’s crucial that we keep it going full blast this year and continue to creatively and clearly demonstrate the need for installing wind power off our coast.

Feeling energized? Share it with the world! You can join our Virginia offshore wind power photo petition right from your home. Saturday produced dozens of great images to help put a face on this issue, like the one on the right, and you can Do-It-Yourself right now!

Check out our photo petition here, then download our signs or write a personal message or draw a picture about why you want an offshore wind farm for Virginia, and add your smiling face to our petition! Please email these pictures directly to us at virginiaoffshorewind@gmail.com. You can find out how to do more by contacting your local CCAN organizer for upcoming summer volunteer opportunities!

Appalachia Keeps Rising

Without question, one of the most rewarding organizing experiences I have ever been a part of was the “Appalachia Rising” mobilization in late September of last year. Appalachia Rising consisted of three very successful days of action in Washington, D.C.: a two-day weekend conference, followed by a Monday morning march of 2,000 people to the White House demanding an end to mountaintop removal coal mining. At the White House 118 people were arrested in front of it.

The next morning there was a huge color picture on the front page of the Washington Post of the nonviolent civil disobedience action, and there was extensive news coverage from other media outlets. This was an action that had an impact, and not just via the mass media. Continue reading

The Facts: Offshore Wind = Clean Power

Recently, a few individuals have published questions about offshore wind power. Some of their main concerns were:

1) Does it really reduce emissions?
2) Will it help us achieve a future zero-carbon grid?
3) Will it be affordable for ratepayers?

Thankfully, ample scientific evidence and real-world experience provide answers to these questions. Indeed, wind power can and will continue to reduce emissions by displacing fossil fuels, wind power can be part of a future zero-carbon grid, and other states have found long-term offshore wind power contracts to be affordable for their rate payers. Offshore wind power in particular is one of the greatest answers for Maryland and the world’s energy future.

The following post provides answers to these questions based on reliable data and studies. More information about offshore wind can be found on the Marylanders for Offshore Wind website.

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What is the 1000 Megawatt Challenge?

What can clean energy activists learn from the world of physics?

For starters, they might consider a well known precept called the law of the conservation of energy. Simply put, it states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it’s forever undergoing conversion from one state to another. For instance, for much of the past 200 years we’ve been converting the chemical energy in fossil fuels into the mechanical and electrical energy we need to power our cars and homes.

Of course, by now we know that CO2 pollution from these energy conversions has started to result in the conversion of the sun’s energy into some not so useful forms like hurricanes and wildfires. In addition to electricity, we’ve generated climate change and to make things right we need to quickly accelerate a different type of conversion: the switch from a dirty energy economy to one powered by clean sources like wind and solar. Continue reading