the This Is Reality – Come Clean on Clean Coal Campaign: There is no such thing as “clean”coal
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13
Dec
08
This Is Reality
EPA approves mountaintop removal rule changes
By Noelle Straub via earthportal.org
Greenwire: U.S. EPA yesterday (12/2) approved changes to the rule governing mountaintop mining activity near bodies of water, the last step needed to finalize a measure that critics say will lead to irreparable harm to mountain waterways.
The Bush administration needed EPA’s approval to alter the 25-year-old rule because the agency must agree to any mining regulations that could affect air and water quality. The Office of Management and Budget also signed off on the changes earlier this week, and they are expected to take effect before President George W. Bush leaves office next month.
The administration and the mining industry say the rule change is necessary to end litigation over whether Congress intended to allow dumping of huge piles of debris, called “valley fills,” when it passed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, but critics say the move is a last-minute power grab for the coal industry.
Environmentalists and politicians who opposed the change — including the governors of Kentucky and Tennessee — had lobbied EPA in recent weeks, hoping it would refuse to agree to the changes. They now hope that the incoming Obama administration will decide to reconsider the rule.
Continue reading ‘Environmental Protection Agency Allows Environmental Destruction’
Leave it to the radical hippie-liberal Neil Young and motor mechanic Jonathan Goodwin (and not Detroit) to reconstruct the original engine of a 2.5 ton 1959 Lincoln Continental Mk IV convertible into a new series-hybrid system. The car has gone from getting 9 miles to the gallon to now achieving around 100 miles to the gallon, and has been accepted as an entrant in the Automobile X Prize competition.
Neil also offers some advice on the site as to how to save a major automobile company.
The bills are coming due. And not just, or even mainly, the bills from a failed Bush presidency, but the bills from 200 years of burning fossil fuel. Twenty years ago when we started worrying about global warming, we thought we’d have a generation to pay those bills off. But we were wrong — the planet was more finely balanced than we’d realized. The melting Arctic is the call from the repo man. As NASA climate scientist James Hansen has said,
If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleo-climate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 [in the atmosphere] will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm.
from “President Obama’s Big Climate Challenge” by Bill McKibben…
The Reality of Climate Change
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source: The OpenSecrets.org Center for Responsive Politics
Please support The Institute for 21st Century Energy’s Blueprint for Securing America’s Energy Future (PDF full – 4.43Mb) at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO. With more than 75 energy policy recommendations (PDF summary) for the next President and Congress, the Institute’s bold energy blueprint is worth your attention.
The blueprint puts specific recommendations behind the 13 fundamental pillars for a comprehensive energy strategy outlined in the Institute’s Open Letter to the next President and Congress.
Aggressively Promote Energy Efficiency
Reduce the Environmental Impact of Energy Consumption and Production
Invest in Climate Science to Guide Energy, Economic, and Environmental Policy
Significantly Increase the Funding for Research, Development, and Demonstration of Advanced Clean Energy Technologies
Immediately Expand Domestic Oil and Gas Exploration and Production
Commit to and Expand Nuclear Energy Use
Commit to the Use of Clean Coal
Increase Renewable Sources of Electricity
Transform our Transportation Sector
Modernize and Protect U.S. Energy Infrastructure
Address Critical Shortages of Qualified Energy Professionals
Reduce Overly Burdensome Regulations and Opportunities for Frivolous Litigation
Demonstrate Global Leadership on Energy Security and Climate Change
from Biofuel Review: (Posted by Giles Clark, London Friday, 02 November 2007)
Five senior scientists have written to the head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Dr R K Pachauri, to highlight what they see as “serious and dangerous deficiencies” in the notes on biofuels in the recently released IPCC AR4 Mitigation book. The concerns of the scientists, and the letter, were revealed on the Grain website (www.grain.org) yesterday (1st November) ahead of the IPCC Synthesis Report’s which is expected to be approved by national delegations this month.
full text of the letter
Their letter highlights that no proof has been given, even when requested from the relevant Author, of the claim in the SPM (Summary for Policy Makers) that biofuel blending, as a policy, measure or instrument, had been “environmentally effective…in at least a number of national cases.”
That claim, being a Brazilian amendment passed at the last IPCC plenary session, has reappeared in a bolder form in the latest UN Global Environment Outlook.
The Transport chapter, they say, omitted to warn that even modest growth of biofuels, by using up farmland or pasture, often leads to cropland as a whole expanding at the expense of natural forests and grassland. The carbon emissions from such land-use change can negate any benefits for decades or centuries. This was occurring in South East Asia, and possibly now in South America, in partial response to EU and US biofuel incentives.
The studies of biofuel emissions balances used by the IPCC did not model the effects of such outcomes. Yet these would need to be included in any assessment of whether biofuel blending programmes or incentives had been “environmentally effective”, said the five scientists.
They are now calling for the full basis for this claim in the SPM to be revealed, or for the claim to be withdrawn.
The IPCC advice also failed to note that growing biofuels was currently a very inefficient use of land for mitigation, compared with growing solid fuel to replace coal. “That is elementary to any discussion of bioenergy,” said Helmut Haberl of Klagenfurt University.
David Pimentel, of Cornell University, added: “Climate change is a most pressing issue for humanity, and world leaders need to take the issue of mitigation much more seriously than they have to date. Having said that, decision-makers need to be given balanced and justified advice. These particular notes, as they stand, will be used to support erroneous and disastrous decisions, and that is simply not right”.
18
Dec
07
Keeping Warm in Bed with Big Oil
Well, it was mostly business as usual this past week on Capitol Hill. The US Senate voted down a national energy bill which was said to be a comprehensive approach to reducing carbon emissions. The bill included requirements for utilities to produce 15% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020 and provided $21B in tax incentives for the production of clean energy (production tax credit, or PTC) . Both the two-year extension of the PTC and the small wind credit fell one vote short of the 60 needed to avoid a filibuster. Those wind credits, the solar investment credit and most federal renewable energy tax credits are set to expire in 2008. The bill buckled under pressure from Republican minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, who threatened to filibuster the bill due to it’s repeal of $13B in oil company tax breaks.
After negotiation, a revised bill was passed in which a $13B tax increase on oil companies and the requirement for utilities nationwide to produce 15% of their electricity from renewable sources, was left out of the bill.
18
Dec
07
Freedom Fuels film
Freedom Fuels takes an in-depth, solution orientated look at renewable fuel sources, such as biodiesel, ethanol and vegetable oil. It explores the petroleum industry’s suppression of alternative fuels and examines the potential positive and negative impacts of biofuels.
Download the free full version at Mofilms.org
(Running time: 50 min, File size: 196.05 MB)
