One of Al Gore‘s campaigns to save the planet has scaled back its field operations since climate legislation failed earlier this year in Congress.
The Alliance for Climate Protection was operating in about 25 states at its peak, including Florida, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/45985.html
The special committee set up by Democrats in 2007 to study energy and climate issues will disappear in the next Congress, its top Republican said Wednesday.
Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the ranking member of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, said that Wednesday morning’s hearing by the panel would be the last.
Sensenbrenner confirmed that Republicans will let the committee, which was established by House Democrats after they retook the majority in 2007, would fold up shop as had been rumored.
To read the entire article: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/131431-republicans-cut-house-climate-panel
Charleston Daily Mail
President Obama announced in March an ambitious plan to double U.S. exports within five years. “In a time when millions of Americans are out of work, boosting our exports is a short-term imperative,” he said.
If it is, the administration needs to rethink its economically suicidal policy with respect to coal, for which there is robust international demand.
Other nations are making a lot of money and creating a lot of jobs with the reliable, affordable fuel the administration doesn’t want Americans to use
“Coal is the fastest-growing fuel in the world and will continue to be largely driven by the enormous appetite for energy in Asia,” Vic Svec, senior vice president of Peabody Energy, told the New York Times.
“The growth and shifts in coal exports to China are impressive, flowering even during the recession,” wrote Elizabeth Rosenthal of the Times. “Seaborne trade in thermal coal rose to about 690 million tons this year, up from 385 million tons in 2001.
“The price rose to $60 from $40 a ton five years ago to a high of $200 in 2008. Coal delivered to southern China currently sells for $114 per ton.”
Yet China was a net exporter of coal until 2009. It will import as much as 150 million tons this year.
Last year, the United States exported only 2,714 tons of coal to China. That rose to 2.9 million tons in the first six months of this year, but the United States still accounts for what Rosenthal termed “a minuscule fraction” of China’s coal imports.
India is another huge market. It imported 36 million tons of coal in 2008 – and 60 million tons in 2009.
The Chinese and Indian economies are roaring. The pitiful state of the U.S. economy just cost the president much of the support he enjoyed in Congress.
And much of this damage is self-inflicted.
Other regions of the world, including Australia and South America, are supplying the demand for coal. An Australian company signed a $60 billion contract – the nation’s largest export contract ever – to supply coal to Chinese power stations starting in 2013.
Australia exported $508 million worth of coal to China in 2008 – and $5.6 billion worth last year.
Yet the administration has cast its lot with the likes of the Sierra Club, which estimates that it has helped to block 139 proposed coal-burning plants in the United States in recent years.
The administration’s war on coal robs the U.S. economy of the affordable energy it needs to recover. Further damaging the industry here will do even more damage to the U.S. balance of trade, and job creation.
Strangling the coal industry here, while other nations encourage it, won’t help the environment or the economy. It’s time U.S. policy reflected that.
The Sierra Club isn’t responsible for economic well-being. The administration is.
by Wall Street Journal
President Obama is now retrenching after his midterm rebuke, and one of the main ways he’ll try to press his agenda is through the alphabet soup of the federal regulators. So a special oversight priority for the new Congress ought to be the Environmental Protection Agency, which has turned a regulatory firehose on U.S. business and the power industry in particular.
The scale of the EPA’s current assault is unprecedented, yet it has received almost no public scrutiny. Since Mr. Obama took office, the agency has proposed or finalized 29 major regulations and 172 major policy rules. This surge already outpaces the Clinton Administration’s entire first term—when the EPA had just been handed broad new powers under the 1990 revamp of air pollution laws.
Another measure of the EPA’s aggressiveness are the six major traditional pollutants that the agency polices, such as ozone or sulfur dioxide. No Administration has ever updated more than two of these rules in a single term, and each individual rule has tended to run through a 15-year cycle on average since the Clean Air Act passed in 1970. Under administrator Lisa Jackson, the EPA is stiffening the regulations for all six at the same time.
The hyperactive Ms. Jackson is also stretching legal limits to satisfy the White House’s climate-change goals, now that Senate Democrats have killed cap and trade. The EPA’s “endangerment finding” on carbon is most controversial, but other parts of her regulatory ambush may be more destructive by forcing mass retirements of the coal plants that provide half of America’s electricity.
A case study in the Jackson method is the EPA’s recent tightening of air-quality standards for sulfur dioxide. The draft SO2 rule was released for the formal period of public comment last December. Yet the final rule published in June suddenly included a “preamble” that rewrote 40-odd years of settled EPA policy.
The EPA has heretofore measured the concentration of pollutants in the ambient air by, well, measuring the concentration of pollutants in the ambient air. The preamble throws out this sampling and ultraviolet testing and substitutes computer estimations of what air quality might be. The EPA favors modelling because it can plug in the data and assumptions of its choosing, like how often a power plant is running at maximum capacity. Gaming the models will allow the agency to punish states and target individual plants, even if actual measurements show that SO2 is under the new EPA standard.
The EPA is within its legal discretion to reinterpret clean-air laws—but not without any prior warning, and the preamble surprise violates years of case law about federal rule-making. Worse, the agency hasn’t gotten around to detailing how the models should be built or how the analysis must be conducted. Without any ground rules for approval, the permits required for any major energy or construction projects can’t be issued.
The uncertainty created by the SO2 rule and similar rule-makings has resulted in a near-total freeze on EPA permits, imposing a de facto project moratorium that will last for the next 18 months at minimum. North Dakota, Texas, Louisiana, South Dakota and Nevada are already suing the EPA because of the restrictions they now face on their “ability to permit new sources or expand existing sources,” and many more states are expected to join them.
The same goes for the EPA plan to require “maximum achievable control technology” on a plant-by-plant basis to nearly every coal- or oil-fired utility in the country to limit pollutants like mercury. The EPA started writing that rule while the data that will supposedly inform its decision were still being collected. Then there’s the upcoming “boiler rule,” which the EPA’s lowball estimate says will impose $9.5 billion in new capital costs on manufacturers, paper mills, hospitals and the like. There are so many others.
The electric industry in particular is being forced to choose between continuing to operate and facing major capital expenditures to meet the increasingly strict burden, or else shutting down and building replacements that use more expensive sources like natural gas. Either way, the costs will be passed through to business and consumers as higher rates, which is the same as a tax increase. The general consensus is that as much as a third of the U.S. coal-fired fleet will be retired by 2016, costing north of $100 billion—a consensus that includes an important federal advisory agency, as we wrote last month in “The Unseen Carbon Agenda.”
Ms. Jackson responded to that editorial in a letter that waved off any criticism of her industrial policy as merely opposition to “common-sense efforts to reduce harmful pollution.” And it’s true that some of these costs might be justified if they resulted in real environmental improvements like less acid rain.
Yet return to sulfur dioxide: SO2 emissions fell by 56% between 1980 and 2008, despite a 70% increase in fossil fuel-based electric generation over the same period. With current levels so low, the EPA’s own 168-page analysis estimates that the direct benefits of the new SO2 regulations will amount to all of $12 million nationwide in 2020. Liquidating the EPA budget would yield better returns.
At least 56 Senators in next year’s Congress are on record supporting bills that would freeze the EPA’s carbon regulation for a time or strip the agency of its self-delegated powers. But the EPA is still pursuing the same agenda through other means, harming business expansion, job creation and economic growth. A key task for the next Congress will be to start pushing back.
By Dori Hjalmarson
A former Virginia coal company owner has donated $1 million toward Harlan County High School’s new football stadium and the first track and field facility in the county.
The donation toward the $3.2 million project speeds up planned construction of sports fields at the newly consolidated high school.
Richard Gilliam, who earlier this year sold his Cumberland Resources company, parent of Harlan County’s Black Mountain Resources, to Massey Energy, donated the money from his private charitable foundation.
“Coal is a big contributor to the economy in the area. The sale of the company was not just a reflection of his successes; it was because of the contributions of the work force of Harlan County,” said Ross Kegan, vice president of Black Mountain Resources.
The donation to Harlan County School District is an effort to thank employees.
Gilliam did not want to comment for this story, Kegan said. After Gilliam sold the company, he gave about $80 million in profits back to Cumberland Resources employees in the form of retirement plan contributions and cash bonuses, Kegan said. The company had 1,200 employees, about 650 in Kentucky, when it was sold, he said.
“The Harlan County High School project is one that touches a large number of families,” he said. “A lot of employees’ children go there. A lot of the graduates will become future employees.”
To read the entire article click here: http://www.kentucky.com/2010/11/20/1532419/former-coal-company-owner-donates.html
The Associated Press
Wednesday, November 17, 2010; 3:25 PM
WASHINGTON — House Democrats elected Nancy Pelosi to remain as their leader Wednesday despite massive party losses in this month’s congressional elections that prompted some lawmakers to call for new leadership. Pelosi, the nation’s first female House speaker, will become minority leader when Republicans assume the majority in the new Congress in January.
She defeated moderate Democratic Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina, 150-43, in secret balloting in a lengthy closed-door gathering of House Democrats in the Capitol.
Pelosi, 70, overcame a rebellion from party centrists, and even some fellow liberals, who argued that the party needs to offer a new face of leadership after losing at least 60 House seats on Nov. 2. She remains popular among the liberals who dominate the party’s House caucus. But Shuler’s level of support – plus an earlier 129-68 vote against postponing the election that Pelosi wanted to wrap up quickly – underscored the degree of discontent in a party that Pelosi had largely bended to her will in the past four years.
Republicans voted to keep John Boehner of Ohio as their top House leader. Boehner, who celebrated his 61st birthday Wednesday, had no opposition, and will become speaker in the new Congress. Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., will become majority leader.
Many House Democrats defended Pelosi, who said the bad economy and high unemployment were the reasons for her party’s election losses.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/17/AR2010111704150.html
by Jeff Goodell
The coal industry — perhaps the least entrepreneurial, most politically-connected business in America — likes to present itself as a hapless collection of hard-working guys just trying to keep the lights on. In the run-up to last week’s election, the industry skillfully played up the idea that it was under siege by out-of-control federal bureaucrats, including a president unsympathetic to the idea that burning more coal is the surest route to a healthy economy. In the weeks before the election, I saw banners in several West Virginia towns that said “Stop the War on Coal” and, my favorite, “Legalize Coal.” Luke Popovich, a spokesperson for the National Mining Association, went so far as to accuse the Obama administration of carrying out a “regulatory jihad” against coal.
Of course, the idea that the Obama administration is on a mission to kill coal would strike many energy and environmental activists as something like the inverse of the truth. In their view, the administration has been all
From the point of view of the Earth’s atmosphere, the war on coal has been a spectacular failure.
hat and very little cowboy when it comes to the issues that really matter, like reforming mountaintop removal mining and limiting greenhouse gas pollution.
But the biggest irony is that this so-called “war on coal” has never been much of a fight to begin with. Despite all the talk about a clean-tech revolution, the dirty truth is that Big Coal is more powerful today than ever.
You can see this simply by looking at the numbers. In 1988, NASA climate scientist James Hansen stood before Congress and testified that global warming was not only real, but was already happening. It was a turning point in the scientific and political understanding of the risks of burning coal, and, in a broad sense, it helped spark the beginning of a clean energy revolution. What has happened to our appetite for coal since then? In the U.S., annual consumption has increased by 100 million tons. Globally, the trend is even starker — yearly consumption has increased by about two billion tons, to about 7.2 billion tons. Meanwhile, annual CO2 pollution from coal has increased by more than four billion tons since 1988, to 13 billion tons a year. It’s safe to say that from the point of view of the Earth’s atmosphere, the war on coal has been a spectacular failure.
Another example is in the build-out of new coal plants. In order to break our addiction to coal, we obviously need to stop building new coal plants and begin to retire the old ones. That is not happening — not in the U.S. and not internationally. Globally, there are more than 300 new coal plants in 26 countries that are currently either under construction or on the drawing board. Each of these plants is likely to run for 40 years or so, making the push to cut overall greenhouse gas emissions all the more difficult.
An industry ad from the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity
And the new coal plants aren’t all in China. According to Bruce Nilles, who heads up the Beyond Coal campaign for the Sierra Club, 22 new coal plants have been constructed or are under construction in the U.S. since 2002, with another 53 proposed. Nilles points out that the Sierra Club, as well as other activists, have stopped construction of 145 new coal plants — “that’s opened up a huge market for clean energy,” Nilles says. True enough, but slowing up the march of new coal plants is not the same thing as stopping it. Just days after last week’s election, newly-elected Kansas governor Sam Brownback announced he would revive two coal plant proposals that had been blocked. As for the much-touted “clean coal” plants that capture and bury CO2 pollution, there is still not a single commercial-scale plant in operation anywhere in the world.
But maybe the clearest measure of Big Coal’s success is the rise of climate skepticism, especially in the U.S. Congress. According to one analysis, half the newly elected House Republicans deny the existence of man-made climate change, and 86 percent of them are opposed to climate change legislation. Although the coal industry is hardly the only one that is pushing the notion that global warming is, as West Virginia coal baron Don Blankenship puts it, “a hoax” and “a Ponzi scheme,” they are pioneers in the campaign to discredit climate science. The Greening Earth Society, which was largely funded by the coal industry, argued that CO2 pollution is a great boon for civilization because it increases plant productivity.
Indeed, the triumph of coal is deeply connected with an anti-science agenda, and always has been. Over the years, the industry has argued that
The argument that mining and burning coal contributes to energy independence is a false one.
air pollution from coal plants doesn’t cause an increase in heart attacks; that mercury, a potent neurotoxin emitted from coal plants, does not cause neurological damage; that mountaintop removal mining does not hurt the environment; and that burning coal does not heat up the atmosphere. All these arguments fly in the face of science — and, often, in the face of common sense. But it doesn’t matter. Coal is an empire of denial.
The persistence of coal is a subject of much debate among environmentalists and clean energy activists. The simplest answer is that most people don’t know where their electricity comes from and don’t care, as long as their bill doesn’t go up. This ignorance gives coal advocates all kinds of advantages, such as allowing them to get away with the false argument that mining and burning coal contributes to energy independence. (Coal is no substitute for oil — we don’t use coal to power our vehicles, and we don’t use oil to generate electricity.) Another answer is that geology is destiny: The world — the U.S., China, and India especially — has a lot of coal, and so naturally we are going to burn it. Finally, there is a good argument to be made in favor of inertia. Vaclav Smil, an energy expert at the University of Manitoba, Canada, has pointed out that energy systems are not like PCs: Innovation happens over a period of decades, not months.
These answers have merit. But the real reason for the persistence of coal is politics. And I mean that in several ways.
The first and most obvious way that Big Coal gains leverage is simply with money. By any accounting, Big Coal — and by that I mean not just coal mining companies, but also the railroads that haul the coal, as well as the electric utilities and power companies that burn it — exerts a huge influence not only in Washington D.C., but in state and local governments, too. The Southern Company, a large Atlanta-based power company that is one of the largest coal burners in the country and a longtime opponent of global warming legislation, spent about $9 million in federal lobbying fees this year alone — that’s nearly as much as ExxonMobil, a company that is 10 times larger. Peabody Energy, the largest privately-held coal company in the world, spent almost $6 million.
And then there are campaign contributions. As of early October, the mining industry, which is mostly coal, contributed more than $3 million to federal candidates, the great majority of it going to Republicans. The industry backed up its contributions with a major media blitz — the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, an industry front group, spent more than $16 million on ads this year touting the virtues of “clean” coal.
But coal flexes its political muscle in another way, too. Virtually all the big Rust Belt states — Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, not to mention Kentucky and West Virginia — are coal-heavy states, where the mining and burning of coal not only keeps the lights on, but contributes significant (although
Cleaner ways to generate electricity are on the way, and every coal executive I’ve talked to knows it.
declining) revenues to local economies. These states have a lot of throw-weight in Congress, making it difficult to get enough votes to pass legislation that is seen as tough on coal. To make matters worse, politicians from Big Coal states are constantly compelled to demonstrate their loyalty to the industry, lest their campaign contributions stop and media attacks begin. Witness West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin, who understands very well the problems coal has wrought on his state, yet who vigorously defended mountaintop removal mining in his Senate campaign and shot a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill in one of his TV ads.
There is also a third way that coal exerts political influence, and that is through the historic connection between coal and progress. Environmentalists do not like to admit it, but we really do owe a large debt of gratitude to the coal industry. Coal was the engine of the Industrial Revolution, and without the power generated from coal, modern life as we know it today would be impossible to imagine. In the past, it really was true that one measure of progress was how much coal you mined and burned.
Of course, that connection is no longer valid today. In fact, the opposite is true: Mining and burning coal is a sign of a world that has not yet made the leap into the 21st century. But a sentimental attachment to coal remains, especially in places like West Virginia (the state flag has a coal miner on it), where coal mining is not just a job, but a way of life. To many people, coal is a symbol of simpler times, before anyone worried about jobs moving to China or the collapse of subprime mortgage loans. The coal industry understands these cultural connections very well and exploits them at every opportunity — the real point of all those wholesome “clean coal” ads that blanketed the airwaves this year is to remind viewers that coal is as American as mom and apple pie. Only a socialist — are you listening, Mr. President? — would be against it.
In the fight against coal, environmentalists and clean energy activists have yet to figure out a way counter the industry’s overwhelming political advantages. They have made great progress, for example, in highlighting the ravages of mountaintop removal mining, but legislation to curb that destructive practice is unlikely to gain momentum anytime soon. And of course the prospects for legislation that will put a price on CO2 pollution, is, for the foreseeable future, nonexistent. In fact, House Republican leaders have made it clear that one of their top priorities in the new Congress is to strip the federal Environmental Protection Agency of its authority to regulate CO2 as a pollutant.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeff Goodell is an author and contributing editor at Rolling Stone. His latest book, How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate, was published earlier this year. His work has appeared in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, and Wired. In previous articles for Yale Environment 360, he has written about electric cars and carbon sequestration.
A handful of swing-state Democrats hold the cards when it comes to blocking the Obama administration’s climate change policies.
At least 56 senators next year are likely to support efforts to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, a POLITICO analysis shows. That’s just short of the 60 they’d need to overcome a filibuster, but a slew of moderate Democrats facing re-election in 2012 could put that number within reach.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/44809.html#ixzz14hd4tsLK
One of the Obama administration’s most aggressive officials on global warming regulations is stepping down from her post at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Lisa Heinzerling, the head of EPA’s policy office, will return to her position as a Georgetown University law professor at the end of the year, said EPA spokesman Brendan Gilfillan.
Within EPA, Heinzerling is one of the more dogmatic proponents of regulating greenhouse gases to the maximum extent possible under the Clean Air Act.
There are two camps within the agency on climate, said an environmental advocate who spoke on background. The Heinzerling camp, with the mind-set that, “we have the law on our side; let’s go get them.” In the other camp are Administrator Lisa Jackson and EPA air chief Gina McCarthy, who are trying to maintain the support of the White House and Congress.
Heinzerling gained fame in the environmental community for her role in helping to win a landmark 2007 U.S. Supreme Court case that gave EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. At EPA, she’s played a leading role in crafting the agency’s controversial climate policies as Jackson’s senior climate policy attorney and then as the associate administrator of EPA’s Office of Policy.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/44708.html#ixzz14Pypjs3K
