fyi, paul
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Orli Cotel <orli.cotel(a)sierraclub.org>
Date: Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 3:34 PM
Subject: Big feature story on Beyond Coal in Mother Jones magazine
To: COAL-CAMPAIGN-ALERTS(a)lists.sierraclub.org
Team,
I'm excited to share this lengthy feature on the succeses of the Beyond
Coal campaign that came out today in Mother Jones magazine. This very
thorough article by Mark Hertsgaard shows the strategy and power of the
Beyond Coal effort. This piece was months in the making and involved many
people on the Beyond Coal team - big thank you to everyone who helped out
and talked with this reporter.
I've copied and pasted the whole article below, but I recommend clicking
through to the actual story online so that you can see all the interactive
maps, graphics etc that they've included in the story:
http://motherjones.com/print/169521
Please help share, tweet, and spread the word - and congratulations on all
of the amazing work you are doing that makes a story like this possible.
Orli
--
http://motherjones.com/environment/2012/04/beyond-coal-plant-activism
*
*
*
*
How a Grassroots Rebellion Won the Nation's Biggest Climate Victory
Activists have imposed a de-facto moratorium on new coal—and beat the Obama
EPA to the punch.
By Mark Hertsgaard <http://motherjones.com/authors/mark-hertsgaard> | Mon
Apr. 2, 2012 3:00 AM PDT
------------------------------
By most accounts, the summer of 2010—when climate legislation died its
slow, agonizing death on Capitol
Hill<http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/07/we-know-we-dont-have-votes>
[1]—was not a happy time for environmentalists. So why was Mary Anne Hitt
feeling buoyant, even hopeful? Part of the reason, no doubt, were the
endorphins of first-time parenthood. Baby Hazel, born in April 2010, was
fair like her mother and curly haired like her father. She was also an
11th-generation West Virginian, which perhaps explained her mom's other
preoccupation: stopping mountaintop-removal coal
mining<http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/01/blowing-mountains-not-great-idea>
[2] in Appalachia. Hitt had spent the better part of a decade in Boone,
North Carolina, running an organization called Appalachian Voices that sought
to end mountaintop removal <http://appvoices.org/end-mountaintop-removal/>
[3].
[image: Emission
Impossible]<http://motherjones.com/special-reports/2012/03/emissions-impossible-deposin…>
[4]
- How a Bunch of NIMBYs Won the Nation's Biggest Climate Victory Yet
<http://motherjones.com/environment/2012/04/emission-impossible>[5]
- Map: The Cross-Country Fight Against Coal
<http://motherjones.com/environment/2012/03/cross-country-fight-against-coal>
[6]
- Calculator: How Much Does Using Coal Really Cost
You?<http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/03/calculator-true-cost-using-coal-…>
[7]
- Why Is It So Hard to Clean Up
Coal?<http://motherjones.com/environment/2012/03/clean-coal-myth>
[8]
- Timeline: How We Learned to Love—and Hate—Natural
Gas<http://motherjones.com/environment/2012/03/timeline-how-natural-gas-frackin…>
[9]
- A Photographer's View of Big
Coal<http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/03/coal-photos>
[10]
Wading through her backlog of emails after she returned from maternity
leave, Hitt was struck by how "defeated and despondent" her fellow
environmentalists sounded. She understood why, of course: "We'd just spent
a great deal of money, time, and energy trying to pass a climate bill," an
effort that had cost mainstream green groups more than $100
million<http://climateshiftproject.org/report/climate-shift-clear-vision-for-the-ne…>
[11].
But Hitt's emails were telling other stories, too—stories that were not
getting her Beltway colleagues' attention. Across the country grassroots
activists were defeating plans to build coal-fired power plants, the source
of a quarter of America's greenhouse gas emissions. The movement's center
of gravity was in the South and Midwest, "places like Oklahoma and South
Dakota, not the usual liberal bastions where you'd expect environmental
victories," she recalls. (The defeat of the Shady Point II
plant<http://www.sierraclub.org/environmentallaw/coal/getBlurb.aspx?case=ok-shady…>
[12] in Oklahoma was particularly sweet, coming in the home state of
DC's leading
climate denier, Sen. James
Inhofe<http://motherjones.com/mojo/2009/09/inhofe-climate-skeptic-roadshow>
[13].)
Hitt knew about these victories because she had helped bring them about. In
2008 she had left Appalachian Voices and taken a job as deputy director of
the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign <http://beyondcoal.org/> [14], which
aimed to defeat every proposed coal plant, anywhere in the country. "I
realized the Sierra Club was winning," she explains, "and I wanted to win."
By the time Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) declared the
cap-and-trade bill dead in July 2010, the Beyond Coal campaign had helped
prevent construction of 132 coal plants and was on the verge of defeating
dozens more. It had imposed, noted Lester
Brown<http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2011/update101>
[15] of the Earth Policy Institute, "a de facto moratorium on new
coal-fired power plants."
To be sure, the activists had help. The recession caused electricity demand
to plummet <http://www.eenews.net/public/climatewire/2009/10/29/1> [16], as
did a shift to more energy-efficient appliances, motors, and industrial
processes. Why build a power plant, coal or otherwise, if demand didn't
justify it? Coal was also hurt by its own rising costs—especially as
natural gas, its chief competitor, stayed relatively
cheap<http://205.254.135.24/forecasts/steo/report/natgas.cfm>
[17].
But those economic trends only made coal somewhat vulnerable, argues Tom
Sanzillo, a former New York state deputy comptroller who has worked with
the Beyond Coal campaign; it was grassroots activism that leveraged
vulnerability into outright defeat. The movement's strength was grounded in
retail politics—people talking with friends and neighbors, pestering local
media, packing regulatory hearings, protesting before state legislatures,
filing legal challenges, and more. The movement had no official membership
rolls; it was populated by clean energy advocates, public health
professionals, community organizers, faith leaders, farmers, attorneys,
students, and people like Verena Owen, a self-described permit nerd from
Illinois who was inspired to oppose coal by a friend who died of lung
cancer in her 40s.
Stopping new coal plants may be "the most significant achievement of
American environmentalists since the passage of the Clean Air Act and the
Clean Water Act," says one activist.
"My friend had four boys, just like I do," says Owen. "I never had to read
the news to find out what the air quality was; I could just call her, and
if she was having trouble breathing, that told me all I needed to know."
Owen proved so capable, she was recruited to work with Hitt in leading the
Beyond Coal campaign.
Stopping new coal plants may be "the most significant achievement of
American environmentalists since the passage of the Clean Air Act and the
Clean Water Act" in the 1970s, says Michael Noble of the Minnesota
environmental group Fresh Energy. As this article goes to press, 166
proposed coal-fired power plants have been canceled, legally barred, or
otherwise stopped from going forward in the United States. That means that
each year, 654 million metric tons of carbon, the equivalent of 9.5 percent
of US emissions<http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/usinventoryreport.html>
[18], won't be entering the atmosphere. The proposed cap-and-trade
legislation would, at best, have reduced annual emissions by 16 percent as
of 2020. (That's compared with 2010—though compared with 1990, the baseline
used by scientists and international negotiations, cap and trade would have
achieved only a 5 percent
reduction<http://pdf.wri.org/usclimatetargets_2010-06-08.pdf>
[19] (PDF).)
[image: The River Rouge plant on the banks of the Detroit River emits
enough pollution to cause 44 deaths each year. See more photos of the River
Rouge plant.]See more
photos<http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/03/coal-photos>
[10] of the River Rouge plant.So why does this landmark shift in the fight
against climate change remain unknown to most Americans? Largely it's
because national media and even many environmentalists view the climate
issue through the lens of official Washington. When cap-and-trade
legislation failed, the conventional wisdom became that the US was simply
incapable of taking meaningful action; corporate polluters were too strong,
the political system too dominated by industry money, the public too
confused and apathetic.
But the moratorium on new coal shows that Americans "don't have to wait for
Washington to get the country on the right climate track," Hitt argues.
"This campaign has demonstrated we can do this state by state, plant by
plant, town by town. Not just that we can do it, but we *are* doing it."
That success—a clear demand backed by a grassroots campaign, rather than an
incremental, inside-the-Beltway strategy—presents a lesson for organizers,
but it also presents challenges as Beyond Coal grapples with the
complexities inherent in its name. What will replace the power from the
coal plants not being built? How will communities deal with the loss of the
taxes they pay, and the decent-paying, often union, jobs they bring? How
the movement answers those questions may shape climate politics—including
whatever ultimately happens in Washington—for years to come.
Last year, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg put $50 million into the Beyond
Coal campaign, with the explicit goal of shutting down a third of the
nation's coal plants by 2020.
Beyond coal's one moment in the national spotlight came last summer, when
on a searing July morning, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg stood before a
microphone<http://www.mikebloomberg.com/index.cfm?objectid=520210BA-C29C-7CA2-F3FA50FC…>
[20] in Alexandria, Virginia. Behind him, shimmering in the 100 degree
heat, loomed the five smokestacks of the Potomac River Generating Station.
The plant, which began operating in 1949 and was never required to install
modern pollution controls, has been in the crosshairs of local activists
for years; shortly before Bloomberg's appearance, Beyond Coal had released
a study that showed its pollution was drifting across the Potomac to
Washington, DC. (The plant is now slated to shut
down<http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2011/2011-08-30-091.html>
[21] this year.)
Flanked by Hitt and Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune, mayor
Bloomberg announced that his personal foundation, Bloomberg
Philanthropies, would
contribute $50 million<http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/07/bloomberg-sierra-club-align-agai…>
[22] to the campaign's new push to close existing coal plants. Bloomberg,
who has long been passionate about public health (recall his 2006
restaurant trans-fat ban<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/06/nyregion/06fat.html>
[23]), cited EPA
data<http://www.catf.us/resources/publications/files/The_Toll_from_Coal.pdf>
[24] (PDF) to explain his decision: "Every year, coal-burning power plants
like this one cause more than 200,000 asthma attacks nationwide, many of
them affecting children," he said. "Coal pollution also kills 13,000 people
every year and costs us $100 billion in medical expenses.
"Thirteen thousand people," he repeated, "from something that's *planned*.
And it's going to happen again next year and the year after, unless we do
something about it."
Map: The Cross-Country Fight Against Coal
Bloomberg's donation will enable Beyond Coal to double down on its second
phase—moving beyond blocking new plants to seeking to close a
third<http://www.mikebloomberg.com/index.cfm?objectid=4D1722F5-C29C-7CA2-FCB63853…>
[25] of the roughly 580 existing
ones<http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/pdf/table5.1.pdf>
[26] (PDF) by 2020. The money, says Brune, will help expand the campaign's
paid staff from 102 to 192, including 84 organizers who will be "working on
nothing but figuring out how to shut down these plants and replace them
with clean energy."
But boots on the ground are only as effective as the battle plan they are
executing. Thus, Beyond Coal will also use some of Bloomberg's millions to
develop a detailed blueprint for the challenge ahead. How can communities
that rely on coal move beyond it without committing economic suicide?
It's not an easy task, Beyond Coal leaders concede. And few places
illustrate the difficulty—and the urgency—better than a small town with the
deceptively gentle name of River Rouge.
Five minutes south of downtown Detroit, Interstate 75 crests a rise. Below,
unfurling for miles on both sides of the highway, is a vast industrial
landscape: chemical, steel, and cement factories, a tar sands refinery, a
wastewater treatment facility. Webs of piping and wire glint in the sun;
smokestacks wheeze skyward; trucks and railcars shuffle back and forth.
There are so many factories, packed so densely together, that it's hard to
see the River Rouge coal plant, which sits on the bank of the Detroit River
facing the Canadian shoreline.
An acrid odor invades the car. "Actually, the smell isn't so bad today,"
Rhonda Anderson says dryly. Anderson, who grew up in the neighborhood, is
the Sierra Club's environmental justice organizer in Detroit. At 61, she's
nearly the same age as the plant, which at the time of its construction in
1956 was the largest in the world. "My father used to bring me here to play
when I was a little girl," she says as we pull into a parking lot at
Belanger Park, adjacent to the plant. "It was the only open space we had."
The park consists of a lawn, a handful of trees, a fishing pier, and a play
structure. Towering over it, barely a football field's length away, are
River Rouge's three smokestacks, flanked by a mountain of coal 80 feet
high. Between the park and the plant is a narrow creek whose bank,
incongruously, bears a sign announcing it as a wildlife preserve. It turns
out that in 2007 DTE Energy, the plant's owner, ripped out a sliver of
concrete<http://www.dteenergy.com/dteEnergyCompany/environment/conservation/improvin…>
[27] separating the creek from the loading area and replaced it with
native plants. In return, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality gave
DTE a community service
award<http://www.dteenergy.com/dteEnergyCompany/environment/awards/awards.html>
[28] for making the neighborhood a "cleaner and more attractive place to
live and work."
Each year the River Rouge plant releases enough mercury, soot, sulfur
dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and other toxic chemicals to cause at least 44
deaths, 72 heart attacks, and 700 asthma attacks.
Never mind that each year the River Rouge plant releases enough mercury,
soot, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and other toxic chemicals to cause
at least 44 deaths, 72 heart attacks, and 700 asthma attacks, according to
studies<http://www.catf.us/coal/problems/power_plants/existing/map.php?state=Michig…>
[29] conducted for the advocacy group Clean Air Task Force. The plant also
emits 3.7 million metric tons <http://carma.org/plant/detail/37557> [30] of
carbon dioxide annually. The NAACP has called River Rouge the ninth-worst
plant <http://www.naacp.org/pages/coal-blooded1> [31] in the nation when it
comes to health effects on communities of color.
Vincent Martin, whose family fled Cuba and settled in River Rouge,
graduated from Southwestern High School in 1980. Of his 150-plus
classmates, he says, around one-third have died, "mostly from respiratory
illnesses and cancers." Many of the kids in his neighborhood carry
inhalers, he says, and his father, brother, and sister all have asthma.
Of course, it's difficult to prove that the River Rouge coal plant caused
those illnesses, just as it's difficult to prove that any specific smoker's
lung cancer was caused by cigarettes. And such connections are even harder
to draw in a neighborhood crammed with so many polluters that it qualifies
as Michigan's dirtiest zip
code<http://www.freep.com/article/20100620/NEWS05/6200555/48217-Life-Michigan-s-…>
[32].
River Rouge might seem a natural target for the Sierra Club—but so far the
club has avoided calling for its closure. It comes down to economics, says
Anne Woiwode, the director of the club's Michigan chapter. Instead, the
club is working with unions and community groups to figure out how to
replace the jobs and tax revenue River Rouge provides. "Our common
interest," says Woiwode, "is ensuring that when the company walks away from
the plant, they don't just leave the workers and the community behind."
Meanwhile, DTE seems in no hurry to close River Rouge. John Austerberry, a
spokesman for the company, says the plant's future will be determined by
the economic implications of thestricter pollution
rules<http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/12/epa-delivers-holiday-gift-new-me…>
[33] the EPA issued last December. Can the company bring the plant into
compliance with those rules and still operate it profitably? "I don't
anticipate we would make that deliberation soon," says Austerberry. "The
rules allow three years" to decide. At 44 deaths a year, that's 132 more
lives.
Kevin Parker, a top executive at Deutsche Bank, has called the coal
industry<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/01/AR201101010…>
[34] "a dead man walking"—in part because of the increased cost imposed by
the Obama EPA's new regulations. Tom Sanzillo, the former New York deputy
comptroller, saw the same vulnerability when he started taking a hard look
at the industry. "I knew that if the law was enforced, coal would have a
very hard time," says Sanzillo.
But that was in 2007, when George W. Bush was president and environmental
law enforcement was comparatively lax. Back then, Sanzillo—a cheerful,
Brooklyn-bred numbers whiz—headed one of the biggest institutional
investors in the world, managing $650 billion in assets and serving as the
sole trustee of a $156 billion pension fund. In that role, he accepted the
conventional Wall Street wisdom that coal was a stable source of
predictable profits.
Sanzillo left the job in 2007 and, a few months later, agreed to look into
the economics of coal for the Sierra Club. He found that "there were
changes going on that I hadn't understood." A construction boom in China was
increasing demand<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/business/worldbusiness/10energy.html>
[35] for steel, cement, copper, and other raw materials. Companies like
Bechtel and GE were sending more of their engineers and other specialists
to China, raising the cost of such talent back in the States. "It looked
like price structures were going to change long term, whereas the price of
coal had always been stable," he says. Adding to the uncertainty was what
Sanzillo terms "regulatory havoc"—the new political pressures that stood to
increase the cost of burning coal.
"What does it mean that we celebrate the construction of a $100 million
wind farm when at the same time a 900-megawatt coal plant was being built?"
one environmentalist asks. "That's called losing."
The regulatory havoc had grown out of a 2004 meeting of the Midwest's
leading clean energy activists and philanthropic donors—a network calling
itself Re-Amp <http://www.reamp.org/> [36]. Its members confronted a harsh
truth, says Fresh Energy's Noble. They had been working the wrong problem,
focusing on renewable energy instead of the broader climate picture. "What
does it mean that we celebrate the construction of a $100 million wind farm
in Minnesota when at the same time a 900-megawatt coal plant was being
built?" asks Noble. "That's called losing. If you looked at the problem
through the lens of carbon, all the work we had done was undone by a single
plant—a plant that wasn't challenged by a single environmentalist."
The Midwest is the most coal-dependent region in the country; its states get
an average of 70
percent<https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:q991VR8vw5EJ:www.civilsocietyins…>
[37] of their electricity from coal. (Nationally, it's 45
percent<http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/chapter_executive_summary.cfm>
[38].) At Re-Amp meetings, Noble joined Bruce Nilles—then a Sierra Club
activist in Wisconsin—in arguing that henceforth every proposed coal plant
in the Midwest should be challenged. "We didn't know *how* we'd oppose
them, we just knew we had to," says Nilles.
At 42, Nilles has leading-man looks that belie his history of tough-nosed
activism. Raised in England, he was agitating against nuclear weapons and
cruelty to animals before even reaching puberty. After moving to the States
during college, he helped organize the first recycling operation at the
University of Wisconsin (over administrators' objections) and went on to
serve as an environmental lawyer in the Clinton administration. At one
Re-Amp strategy meeting, he tangled with a program officer at one of the
Midwest's largest philanthropies, the Joyce Foundation, who dismissed the
idea of opposing every coal plant—it made more sense, the funder argued, to
mount tightly focused legal challenges to a few marquee plants.
[image: Rhonda Anderson, with her niece N'Deye, grew up near the River
Rouge coal plant, which the NAACP calls one of the worst polluters in
communities of color.: See more photos of the River Rouge plant.]*Rhonda
Anderson, with her niece N'Deye, grew up near the River Rouge coal plant,
which the NAACP calls one of the worst polluters in communities of color. *
See more photos <http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/03/coal-photos>
[10] of the River Rouge plant.In a universe where activists'
organizations—and paychecks—often depend on the goodwill of foundations, "I
was very impressed that Bruce was prepared to go toe-to-toe with a very
powerful person and tell him he was wrong," says Rick Reed, a senior
adviser to the Garfield Foundation who helped launch Re-Amp.
The test of the dueling approaches came in 2005. In opposing a plant in
Wisconsin, the Joyce Foundation "put all their chips on a big-bucks legal
strategy, with no politics, and lost at the state Supreme Court," Reed
recalls. "That taught us a lesson: You'll never be able to beat these
things without an integrated strategy that includes real people who are
affected by these plants, who'll reject the economic argument publicly."
(The Joyce Foundation, which declined comment for this story, later
embraced this idea as well.)
Sanzillo says he saw the value of such an integrated approach in one of the
first fights he handled for Beyond Coal. Utilities had proposed two large
coal plants in eastern Iowa. Carrie La Seur, an attorney who founded the
group Plains Justice, recalls getting phone calls from local people who
"didn't like the idea that there would be this big belching coal plant in
the midst of prime farmland, and big transmission lines as well."
La Seur began submitting legal challenges to the plants. Meanwhile,
Sanzillo, testifying about one of the
plants<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWiMDQ3HT7c>
[39] before the Iowa Utility Board, made a straight economic
argument<http://www.alliantenergy.com/wcm/groups/wcm_internet/@int/documents/documen…>
[40] (PDF): The project would cost far more than the $1.8 billion the
company had estimated, and those costs would be passed on to ratepayers for
decades. Local activists echoed that message as they met with legislators,
Gov. John Culver, and the editorial board of the *Des Moines
Register*<http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080420/OPINIO…>
[41]. In the end, they persuaded regulators to put a cap on the plant's
cost—any costs above the cap would be absorbed by the company's
shareholders, not ratepayers. Presented with this option, the utility chose
to cancel the project<http://bostonherald.com/news/national/midwest/view/2009_03_05_Utility_cance…>
[42].
Arming local people with economic arguments was critical, Sanzillo argues:
"If the activists hadn't been there talking to the regulators and editorial
boards and making the case that coal was a bad bet, the [utility board]
would have gone forward, because the utilities would say, 'We can handle
the costs,' and the boards are often good-old-boy boards."
The campaign's argument has been straight-up economics: It's getting more
and more expensive to build a coal plant, and ratepayers will get suck with
the bill.
This approach—hard numbers plus grassroots pressure—became the model Beyond
Coal followed in state after state: Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, even
Kentucky, the heart of coal country. In South Carolina, Sanzillo says,
activists "put me in touch with small-business associations, and I was able
to explain how big industrial interests historically got treated better on
these things than small businesses. That was smart, because it got the
small businesses fighting with the big industrials, which was just the
fight we wanted: a business fight rather than an environmental fight."
Even the cap-and-trade battle, no matter how unsuccessful, provided
economic ammunition. A utility company just might be able to manage coal's
rising construction and fuel costs, Sanzillo explains. Add the prospect of
new clean-air regulations from the EPA, and "you might still be able to
manage it, but it's getting dark." Factor in the possibility that cap and
trade might be enacted someday and, "Now, if I'm an investor, Coca-Cola is
not looking too bad," Sanzillo says, starting to laugh. "They give me 10
percent, and I don't have to worry about climate legislation, the cost of
steel in China, and God knows what else."
None of that makes Beyond Coal's next task any easier, though: There is a
big difference between fighting a proposed plant and seeking to close one
that is already providing electricity, jobs, and tax revenues.
"The key is, you don't do things precipitously," Sanzillo says. After a
wave of deregulation transformed New York's electricity markets 10 years
ago, he notes, many power companies paid less in property taxes. State
officials worked with the affected communities "to phase out the loss of
the tax base," sometimes using state money. Nationally, he adds, the same
basic principles were applied in the 1990s to help communities cope with
post-Cold War military base closures. "The federal government just funded
them until the local economies could come back."
Beyond Coal has helped broker a similar transition in Washington state.
When environmentalists first targeted the Centralia coal plant for closure,
they ran into opposition not just from its owner, the TransAlta company,
but also from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which
represents 150 employees at the plant. "There is no way I or the IBEW would
have agreed to shut down that plant," says Bob Guenther, who worked as a
mechanic at Centralia for 34 years before becoming the union's chief
lobbyist, "if we didn't have an agreement to keep this community whole."
As a cofounder of the national BlueGreen
Alliance<http://www.bluegreenalliance.org/about>
[43] of workers and environmentalists, the Sierra Club had experience
working through disagreements with labor, so Beyond Coal made some
compromises. "We wanted a 5-year timeline for closing [the TransAlta plant]
and we settled for 10," Nilles says. "Not because of the company but
because of IBEW."
The agreement was hammered out behind closed doors during negotiations
requested by Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire. "The governor wanted a
deal that would satisfy all sides and avoid litigation," says Keith
Phillips, a senior aide. Phillips spent two days shuttling between rooms
containing representatives from TransAlta and environmental groups, but not
the IBEW. That left the environmentalists to argue labor's case—which they
did. They insisted that the plant's workforce be retained throughout its
closure and cleanup; that workers be trained in the technologies that would
replace coal, especially energy efficiency; and that the company, not the
taxpayers, subsidize the transition. TransAlta agreed, pledging $55
million<http://www.governor.wa.gov/news/news-view.asp?pressRelease=1699&newsType=1>
[44] that will be controlled by the affected communities, to fund economic
development and clean tech. "A lot of it will pay for insulating schools
and other public buildings," says Guenther. In return,
environmentalists accepted
a later closure date for the
plant<http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/201201/kick-coal-save-jobs.aspx>
[45]: One of its two boilers will shut down in 2020; the other, in 2025.
One big question facing Beyond Coal is what happens if electricity demand
begins increasing again. With coal plants so difficult to get approved,
utilities might look to natural gas instead, accelerating the environmental
devastation caused by gas drilling and fracking. (TransAlta, for one, has
announced plans to build a gas
plant<http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2014412221_coalplant06m.html>
[46] as it prepares to shut down the Centralia facility.) That dynamic was
surely on the mind of Chesapeake Energy, one of America's largest natural
gas companies, when it helped pay for the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal
campaign. Between 2007 and 2010, under executive director Carl Pope, the
club secretly accepted $26.1
million<http://sierraclub.typepad.com/michaelbrune/2012/02/the-sierra-club-and-natu…>
[47] from the company; Brune, the current executive director, discovered
and halted the practice shortly after replacing Pope in 2010. "We can't
take cash from companies or industries that…we want to change," Brune told
me. Nilles says he knew about the Chesapeake money "from the beginning,"
noting that the environmental downsides of fracking were not as evident in
2007: "My views on gas have evolved significantly in the intervening years."
Between 2007 and 2010, the Sierra Club accepted more than $26 million from
Chesapeake Energy, a major natural gas company that stood to benefit if
coal lost momentum.
But gas is not the only option for replacing coal. Howard Learner of the
Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago says technological gains in
energy efficiency and renewables are accelerating so rapidly, they may well
outpace increase in demand. "Just as it's hard to imagine a world in which
we're going back to landlines, we're not going to turn back the clock on
energy efficiency," says Learner. "It's the best, fastest, cheapest, and
most environmentally sound way of meeting our energy needs." The global
consulting firm McKinsey has
estimated<http://www.mckinsey.com/Client_Service/Electric_Power_and_Natural_Gas/Lates…>
[48]that efficiency can reduce non-transportation energy use in the US a
full 23 percent by 2020, and that such investments would cost $520 billion
while creating $1.2 trillion in savings.
Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a sustainability expert who
consults with corporations and government agencies around the world, goes
even further. In his book *Reinventing Fire*, he lays out a
blueprint<http://rmi.org/rfexecutivesummary>
[49] for how the United States could stop burning coal for electricity by
2050 while also phasing out oil and nuclear power and still growing the
economy by 158 percent. Already, Lovins points out, costs for renewables
are falling<http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/20/solar-panel-price-drop>
[50] to the point where wind,
especially<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-15/wind-innovations-drive-down-costs-…>
[51], is competitive with
coal<http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/aeo/pdf/2016levelized_costs_aeo2011.pdf>
[52] (PDF) for many purposes.
Not everyone projects quite so rosy a scenario. The US Department of Energy
estimates that coal's share of the country's energy mix will remain
relatively steady for decades. And it's easy to see why: Energy markets
(and energy policy) are dominated by corporations that have sunk a lot of
investment into fossil fuels.
But the energy sector is also heavily
regulated<http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/428>
[53]—which means that political shifts can have a fairly immediate effect.
And on the political front, Mary Anne Hitt believes the Beyond Coal
campaign offers "a fundamental message about how to make change in this
country."
The effort to pass climate legislation, for example, was centered on
Capitol Hill, a battlefield where the power of money rigs the system. Then,
to satisfy inside-the-Beltway definitions of what was politically
realistic, mainstream environmental organizations embraced a policy—cap and
trade—that was incremental in its remedy and incomprehensible in its
mechanism. "We can't go out in the streets about *that*," one grassroots
activist complained at the time. "Most people can't even understand it."
These strategic choices made it impossible to build the kind of public
pressure that could overcome the industry's political power and deep
pockets.
The Beyond Coal campaign, by contrast, organized people around tangible
targets: their air, their water, the climate their children would live
with. This enabled it to appeal to a constellation of allies (public health
advocates, unions) beyond the usual environmental suspects. Finally, Beyond
Coal focused on local and state governments, where popular sentiment can
have a more immediate effect.
With baby Hazel celebrating her second birthday, Hitt finds comfort in
these results. "When you see a coal plant being stopped, that means a
mountaintop removal will not go forward and a large amount of carbon will
not be released into the atmosphere—you can *see* you're making a
difference," she explains. "As a parent, that makes it easier for me to
sleep at night."
--
Orli Cotel
Deputy Communications Director
Sierra Club
(415) 977-5627 office
(646) 522-7751 cellphone
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--
Paul Wilson
Sierra Club
504 Jefferson Ave
Charles Town, WV 25414-1130
Phone: 304-725-4360
Cell: 304-279-1361
"There is no forward until you have gone back" ~Buddha
"In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous" ~ Aristotle
fyi, paul
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Becki Clayborn <becki.clayborn(a)sierraclub.org>
Date: Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 8:31 PM
Subject: Join us for "New EPA Carbon Pollution Standards Webinar"
To: COAL-CAMPAIGN-ALERTS(a)lists.sierraclub.org
New EPA Carbon Pollution Standards Webinar Join us for a
Webinar on April 4
<https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/261414990> *Space
is limited.*
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/261414990 Join us Wednesday night
for this exciting webinar that will explain how the Environmental
Protection Agency’s new carbon pollution standards, NSPS, mark the end of
an era for coal plants and will continue the momentum behind clean energy
advancements!
In this webinar, you will learn the basics about the new standard, why it’s
so important to our work on transitioning the US from coal to a cleaner
energy future, effective messaging around this standard, and how you and
your friends can get involved. We will also introduce tools available to
you.
We expect the coal industry to fight these standards with everything
they've got. So please join this webinar to learn what you can do to
support and defend these new standards. *Title:* New EPA Carbon Pollution
Standards Webinar *Date:* Wednesday, April 4, 2012 *Time:* 8:00 PM - 9:00
PM EDT After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing
information about joining the Webinar.
Looking forward to a great webinar!
Verena Owen and Becki Clayborn
*System Requirements*
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.5 or newer
--
Becki Clayborn
Beyond Coal Campaign
Internal Capacities and Communications Coordinator
Chicago, IL
312-251-1680
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http://www.sierraclub.org/lists/faq.asp To view the Sierra Club List Terms
& Conditions, see: http://www.sierraclub.org/lists/terms.asp
--
Paul Wilson
Sierra Club
504 Jefferson Ave
Charles Town, WV 25414-1130
Phone: 304-725-4360
Cell: 304-279-1361
"There is no forward until you have gone back" ~Buddha
"In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous" ~ Aristotle