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Environmentalists in the US have halted a huge new wave of coal-fired power stations. What lessons can Europe learn from them?
One day, historians might speculate that it was the ambition of the companies that sought to profit by building coal-fired power stations that triggered the beginning of the end for humans' most polluting habit.
Four years ago, campaigners in the US raised concerns over plans to build 150 coal-fired power stations nationwide. Today, nearly half those plans have been defeated in the courts or abandoned, while half of the remaining proposals are being actively opposed. Just 14 of the 150 plants are being developed, and environmental lawyers are all still pursuing them.
"The enormity of what they were proposing to do provided a platform to have that whole debate about pollution, including global-warming pollution, " says Bruce Nilles , director of the national coal campaign for the Sierra Club, America's biggest grassroots environment group.
Firmer action
In a few years, the backlash against coal power in America has become the country's biggest-ever environmental campaign, transforming the nation's awareness of climate change and inspiring political leaders to take firmer action after years of doubt and delay. Plants have been defeated in at least 30 of the 50 states, uniting those with already strong environmental records, such as California, with more conservative areas, such as the southern and central states.
The success of the US campaign is also now inspiring a global wave of protests, many in Europe, against similar schemes that plan to build coal-fired generators before carbon capture technology exists
September 3, 2008 OP-ED COLUMNIST And Then There Was One
As we emerge from Labor Day, college students are gathering back on campuses not only to start the fall semester, but also, in some cases, to vote for the first time in a presidential election. There is no bigger issue on campuses these days than environment/energy. Going into this election, I thought that — for the first time — we would have a choice between two “green” candidates. That view is no longer operative — and college students (and everyone else) need to understand that.
With his choice of Sarah Palin — the Alaska governor who has advocated drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and does not believe mankind is playing any role in climate change — for vice president, John McCain has completed his makeover from the greenest Republican to run for president to just another representative of big oil.
Given the fact that Senator McCain deliberately avoided voting on all eight attempts to pass a bill extending the vital tax credits and production subsidies to expand our wind and solar industries, and given his support for lowering the gasoline tax in a reckless giveaway that would only promote more gasoline consumption and intensify our addiction to oil, and given his desire to make more oil-drilling, not innovation around renewable energy, the centerpiece of his energy policy — in an effort to mislead voters that support for drilling today would translate into lower prices at the pump today — McCain has forfeited any claim to be a green candidate.
The Apollo Alliance, a coalition working to promote green jobs and clean energy, has been struggling with how to offset the global warming pollution that results from its day-to-day operations, especially from its travel.
“Our carbon footprint is ridiculous,” its co-director, Kate Gordon, said referring to the amount of greenhouse gases emitted each year by the organization.
Air travel is its worst offender, Ms. Gordon said. The quest for renewable energy has its employees on the move for speaking engagements and lobbying.
“Our president, Jerome Ringo, is probably on the road 250 days a year,” Ms. Gordon said. “I travel about 25 percent of the time. We do a ton of travel as an organization.”
To help reduce the role it plays in the release of carbon emissions, the Apollo Alliance has tried to develop a two-pronged approach. One, cut back on air travel, seemed obvious.
Air miles are responsible for 3 percent to 13 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, according to various reports. A single round-trip coast-to-coast flight can create about three tons of carbon dioxide emissions, about the same amount as driving a midsize car for six months.
Another, more controversial, option that the Apollo Alliance considered was carbon offsets.
ROME: Ten dollars a gallon may seem unthinkable to American drivers still smarting from the spike in gas prices to around $4 a gallon. But that was nearly the price that Marco Annarumi faced recently when filling his Jeep on his way home from work.
"It hasn't changed my driving at all — not a bit — I just have to work harder," he said with seeming indifference.
High oil prices and high taxes on gas pushed the average price of gasoline to new heights in much of Europe this summer. Yet transportation experts in this laboratory of sky-high fuel prices say that many Europeans, out of necessity, habit or love, have proved surprisingly willing to bear the extra cost of driving. That raises questions as to how effective high prices by themselves can be in achieving the ambitious targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions that European leaders have committed themselves to meeting.
Gas prices have persuaded some people to drive less. Traffic on the Eurostar train that links London and Paris was up 21 percent in the first three months of 2008. Gas purchases in Italy dropped 10 percent compared with the year before. Sales of gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles have plunged across the continent, just as they have in the United States.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/business/27grid.html?em=&pagewanted=print
August 27, 2008 THE ENERGY CHALLENGE
Wind Energy Bumps Into Power Grid's limits
When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing.
That is a symptom of a broad national problem. Expansive dreams about renewable energy, like Al Gore’s hope of replacing all fossil fuels in a decade, are bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands.
The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.
The grid today, according to experts, is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power in small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads.
“We need an interstate transmission superhighway system,” said Suedeen G. Kelly, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
CHICAGO (Reuters) - California's large-scale tobacco control campaign has saved $86 billion in health care costs in its first 15 years, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
The $86 billion reduction in health costs, based on 2004 dollars, represents about a 50-fold return on the $1.8 billion California spent on the program, they said.
"The benefits of the program accrued very quickly and are very large," Stanton Glantz, director of the University of California San Francisco Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, said in a statement.
Unlike many programs which center on teens, the California program focuses its tobacco-control efforts on adults through an aggressive media campaign and changes in public policy, such as promoting smoke-free environments.
"When adults stop smoking, you see immediate benefits in heart disease, with impacts on cancer and lung diseases starting to appear a year or two later," said Glantz, whose findings appear in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine.
NOTE: This is the entire article.
Twelve states, including New York, are suing the Environmental Protection Agency over greenhouse gas emissions from oil refineries.
The lawsuit, led by Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, accuses the agency of violating the federal Clean Air Act by refusing to issue standards, known as new source performance standards, for controlling the emissions.
“The E.P.A.’s refusal to control pollution from oil refineries is the latest example of the Bush administration’s do-nothing policy on global warming,” Mr. Cuomo said in a news release. “Oil refineries contribute substantially to global warming, posing grave threats to New York’s environment, health and economy.”
In a ruling last year, the Supreme Court found that the agency had the power to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Since then, the agency’s director has said it is the job of Congress to regulate them.
Coalitions of states have also sued the agency to require it to set standards for emissions from power plants and to uphold the right of states to regulate emissions from automobiles.
The suit, filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, said about 15 percent of industrial emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, came from the refineries.
It seeks to force the agency to control refinery emissions and adopt the new source performance standards.
Tim Lyons, a spokesman for the agency, said time and money would be better spent by encouraging Congress to take action on environmental legislation.
The other states in the suit are: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. Two cities, New York and Washington, also signed on.
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