Few if any issues are as important to the future health, economic sustainability and quality of life of communities around the world than climate change and clean energy. And as we’ve seen at two separate town hall events in Prince George’s County and Montgomery County these past two weeks, Marylanders know it.
POLL: Strong Majority of Marylanders Support Offshore Wind Power
Health & Environment Experts Ask Maryland General Assembly to Embrace Full Benefits of Offshore Wind
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Jamie Nolan Mike Tidwell
240.396.2022 240.460.5838
jamie@chesapeakeclimate.org mtidwell@chesapeakeclimate.org
ANNAPOLIS, MD – Offshore wind power provides electricity with dramatically lower economic, health, and environmental costs than conventional sources, experts testified at a Senate Finance Committee study session today in Annapolis.
By developing just one 500-megawatt offshore wind park, Maryland would save approximately 700 lives and over $4 billion in health costs over 25 years, according to expert calculations.
“Maryland cannot afford to continue paying higher medical bills for largely preventable exacerbations of childhood asthma, heart, and lung disease. We have strong evidence that the air pollution from coal-fired power plants makes these illnesses worse,” said Cindy Parker, Assistant Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, who testified at the hearing.
According to a study published in February by Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Paul Epstein, a “full cost accounting for the life cycle” adds approximately 17.84 cents per kilowatt-hour to the cost of coal power. This accounting includes carcinogens, health-hazardous emissions, global warming emissions, mental retardation cases attributed to mercury emissions, and other damages.
“As Maryland currently generates about 60 percent of its energy from fossil fuels, we should take their full costs into account when making decisions about our energy future,” said Mike Tidwell, Executive Director for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. “Offshore wind power works for Maryland by creating thousands of jobs, reducing the suffering of children with asthma, and helping to solve our climate crisis.”
Since 1950, the U.S. government has provided more than half a trillion dollars in subsidies to the oil, coal, and natural gas industries, according to data published by the National Academy of Sciences. Despite subsidies, Marylanders saw their electricity bills, mostly dependent on volatile fossil fuel prices, roughly double in the last decade, according to the Maryland Energy Administration.
“It’s time that we invest in offshore wind, our state’s largest stable-priced energy resource,” added Tidwell.
The Senate Finance Committee plans to hold three more study sessions on offshore wind power prior to the 2012 General Assembly session. Expert environmental health panelists urged the committee to factor in the full costs of energy and to implement policy that will make Maryland offshore wind power a reality.
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Upcoming Coal Event at Towson University
Event information was sent from Baltimore student Thalia Patrinos
Towson is having a activism panel and screening event all about the issues surrounding coal!
On Thursday, September 15th, 6:00 – 7:30 We will have panel discussions featuring Climate Ground Zero’s Mike Rosell and Antrim Caskey, two key figures in the social movement against Massey Energy. Then from 7:30 – 9 we will have a Community Resource Fair, featuring several organizations committed to working with labor movements.
On Friday, September 16th starting at 4 will be a large teach-in on Freedom Square.
There will also be a film shot, edited and produced by Towson University student David Resiche as well as a photo exhibition by Antonio Hernandez, both exploring the struggles of local communities against Massey.
If you have any questions, please contact Antonio Hernandez:
aherna4@students.towson.edu
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.
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
Is ship navigation more important than solving our climate crisis?
Last week, the federal government released its draft Environmental Assessment for the areas it has proposed for wind power development off the coasts of Virginia, Maryland and other mid-Atlantic states.
Maryland Students Celebrate Going Green
This blog post was written by Emily Saari, a Maryland Intern in the Takoma Park office this summer!
Last Friday, thousands of K-12 students, teachers, parents, and administrators got together on a gorgeous, breezy day for the 2011 Maryland Green Schools Youth Summit at Sandy Point State Park. This annual event of the Maryland Association for Environmental and Outdoor Education commemorates the achievements of the schools that are meeting MAEOE standards for incorporating environmental issues into their curriculums, partnering with green community organizations on local initiatives, and implementing policies to reduce their building’s environmental impact. Mike Tidwell gave the keynote address at the conclusion of the Summit.
Two student volunteers and I represented CCAN at one of the many booths at the Summit working to increase students’ environmental awareness across the broad spectrum of issues. We talked to kids and their mentors about supporting our campaign for offshore wind in the next year. It was fantastic to see such enthusiasm for clean energy initiatives, and I was so impressed with amount of support we got over the course of the afternoon. When speaking about the installation of offshore wind turbines, I heard teachers and parents say to me again and again, “I don’t know why we haven’t done this yet!” Even the elementary school kids were brimming with knowledge about fossil fuels, renewable energy, and restoration of damaged ecological systems like riparian buffers! It’s amazing how easily young kids can grasp this critical information, especially when the facts can be distilled down and taught to them without the complications and blurriness of politics. To them, it just makes sense. We should all take a cue from these inspired green students and remember that at the end of the day, clean energy just makes sense.
Permit Meetings: Wonky but Important
I’ve been on the road the past few weeks in some beautiful parts of Maryland! GenOn, the corporate owners of the Morgantown (in Newburg, MD) and Dickerson (in Dickerson, MD) coal plants, has applied for modifications of their existing water permits, and I attended the first of the public informational meetings.
The meetings are a bit intimidating at first, I kept flashing back to chemistry classes in high school. There are a lot of numbers and discussion of point sources and data collection. But the point of these hearings isn’t to understand every detail.
At the end of the day these plants are in the backyards of communities, so it is important for citizens to have a say in the process and know what Gen On is applying to do to the nearby waterways. If there weren’t public hearings like these, permits would get approved with no one asking critical questions and without community members being able to hold Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) and GenOn accountable.
I was so impressed with the questions local citizens asked in the room, and the commitment they had by showing up to these meetings on weeknights. More folks need to be involved in these issues and MDE should make it easier for them. The meetings should be advertised widely to all the local groups, list servs, and neighborhoods and the meeting space and time should be as convenient as possible for that community.
Until then I’ll be doing my best to make sure folks know about upcoming hearings. I’ll be there as well, my lack of chemistry understanding be damned, because I care about making these permits as strong as possible for the health of Maryland’s communities and environment.
Maryland to Sue Gas Company Over Fracking Spill
It seems the news just keeps getting worse these days for those in the Marcellus Shale gas-fracking business. First there was the damning new Cornell University study which revealed the worse-than-coal climate impacts of the natural gas drilling procedure. Then, the Chesapeake Energy Corporation experienced the mother of all bad press days when one of its Pennsylvania wells experienced a massive blowout, spewing thousands of gallons of frack fluid into a nearby stream. In a poetic touch, the blow-out occurred on the one-year anniversary of the gulf oil spill.
While nowhere near the scale of the BP blowout, the Chesapeake Energy frack-up certainly echoed the massive gulf disaster in terms of the outrageous incompetence and recklessness of the well’s owners.
According to a Pro-Publica article it took the company a full 13 hours to respond to the accident. The reason for the egregious delay: despite widespread fracking activity in the Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale, the state did not have a single team of specially trained fracking accident responders, and instead had to fly in workers from Texas. In the end, thanks to the holdup, it took no less than two days from the time of the accident before workers managed to cap the spill. Continue reading