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Tuesday 30 March 2010

by: Joshua Frank and Christine Shearer, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

If you were told that a coal-fired power plant near your home was going to invest $500 million to upgrade the facility in order to reduce the amount of harmful air pollutants it spews, you would probably think to yourself that it was about time they did something. Air would be cleaned and the risks of pollution-oriented diseases would be reduced. Certainly this has been the position the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has taken throughout the years, with a brief time-out during the most recent Bush administration.

In November of 1999, at the tail end of the Clinton era, the United States Department of Justice on behalf of the EPA charged seven major US utilities with violating the New Source Review (NSR) requirements of the Clean Air Act. The lawsuits were based on the fact that these power companies had updated their plants without installing the most up-to-date pollution reduction equipment, claiming that these pollution machines had been operating for years without proper emission controls.

In all, 17 power plants across the country were targeted by the EPA and all but one ended up being settled. The companies paid millions and most ended up installing scrubbers at their facilities, a technology that reduces the amount of sulfur dioxide released as coal is burned. Most recently, Obama's EPA has picked up where President Clinton's left off and filed a suit against Westar Energy for failing to abide by NSR requirements at their Jeffrey Energy Center coal plant in Kansas.

Sulfur dioxide is a chemical compound that is released in the burning of coal. It contributes to the formation of acid rain and has numerous negative health effects, including breathing problems, respiratory illness and the aggravation of existing heart and lung disease. Groups most affected by sulfur dioxide exposure include the elderly and children.

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Tuesday 09 March 2010

by: Joshua Frank and Jeffrey St. Clair, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

"...even under the most optimistic cost projections for future nuclear electricity, efficiency is found to be 2.5 to 10 times more cost effective for CO2-abatement."

He may soon be called the nuclear industry's Golden Child. No president in the last three decades has put more taxpayer dollars behind atom power than Barack Obama. And there may be good reason why the president is salivating over the prospect of building new nuclear power plants around the country.

It was one of the most important issues of the 2008 presidential campaign. The perceived threat of global warming began to make even the most skeptical of politicians a bit nervous. Both the Democrats and Republicans proposed searching for more domestic oil supplies, promising to drill up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains and even off the fragile coastlines of Florida and California. The future of planet Earth, they claimed, is more perilous than ever.

Al Gore made his impact.

Too bad the Gore effect is like a bad hangover: all headache and no buzz. The purported solution the Obama administration has heaved at the imminent warming crisis, nuclear technology, is just as hazardous as our current methods of energy procurement. Yet, Obama isn't the first Democrat in recent years to tout nuclear virtues.

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Saturday 27 February 2010

by: Joshua Frank, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

If you've tuned in to the Winter Olympics this past week, you likely sat through repeated showings of a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign paid for by Big Coal regarding the potential laurels of "clean-coal" technology. The premise of the 30-second spot is simple: Coal can be clean and America needs to wean itself off of foreign crude and create jobs back home by tapping our nation's vast coal reserves.

Indeed, the effort to paint coal as environmentally friendly is not an easy endeavor, especially when the climate movement has picked up speed and lambasted the industry for contributing more than its fair share to the global warming dilemma.

Activists around the world have targeted coal for a number of reasons. First, coal is still plentiful (compared to gas and oil) so stopping its use will largely curtail carbon output down the road. Second, it is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. Lastly, in the US the fleet of coal-fired power plants is almost old enough to file for Medicare, so these aging plants are sitting ducks for closure efforts.

"NASA climate scientist James Hansen ... has demonstrated two things in recent papers," writes environmental author and activist Bill McKibben about the need to axe coal. "One, that any concentration of carbon dioxide greater than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere is not compatible with the 'planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.' And two, that the world as a whole must stop burning coal by 2030 - and the developed world well before that - if we are to have any hope of ever getting the planet back down below that 350 number."

If this were a prize fight, Big Coal would be the battered boxer in the corner of the ring, shuffling away in an attempt to avoid the repeated jabs anti-coal warriors and scientists have been tossing its way. In 2009, not one new coal plant broke ground in the United States. Over 100 new plants were canceled or abandoned, largely due to the public's awareness that coal isn't the fuel of the future but a scourge of the past.