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If you thought this financial crisis was bad…

October 27, 2008 by

Nicholas Stern, formerly of the British Treasury, said over the weekend that the risks of inaction over climate change far outweigh the turmoil of the global financial crisis.

The risk consequences of ignoring climate change will be very much bigger than the consequences of ignoring risks in the financial system… That’s a very important lesson, tackle risk early.”

Suggestion noted.  And just as people were sounding the alarm about the unsustainability of the housing market and the risks in the subprime lending market, so too have people been sounding the alarm about climate change.  We can still tackle the risk early or we can face the consequences.

Stern also warned not to use the current financial problems as a reason to not tackle climate change now.  Investments in efficiency will put people to work immediately and start bringing down electric bills for consumers.  Investing in solar and wind will put people to work in manufacturing, constructing, and installing these new forms of low carbon energy.

We have the technology, we can do it.  We can choose a new energy future and receive the economic benefits of investing in it, or we can face the consequences of inaction, which we are already seeing today.

Now all we need is a catchy slogan, easily shouted at campaign rallies.  Weatherstrip, baby, weatherstrip?

Posted in Global Warming | Tagged , , , , |

Reprocessing nuclear fuel & the Catch 22 Legacy

October 24, 2008 by

Generating electricity using nuclear power includes processing uranium.  After 40 years, the waste from the process can safely be put into containers for storage, though it is still dangerous to living things. After 10,000 years, the leftovers, the nuclear waste, will no longer be dangerous. Currently in the U.S., we leave the waste in ponds at the power plants and then put it in containers and bury it in the ground (a.k.a. “geologic depositories”).

“Nuclear reprocessing” means separating the waste—taking uranium that didn’t get used the first time out of the “trash” so it can be used to generate electricity.  The uranium is chemically separated from the rest of the waste and one of the new leftovers is plutonium, the radioactive ingredient in nuclear bombs.

Other countries, like France, reprocess their nuclear waste even though plutonium is left over, usually in the form of a highly concentrated power.  In the U.S., we’ve recently heard both 2008 presidential candidates say they support Americans reprocessing nuclear waste. (Private companies in the U.S. stopped doing so in 1976.)

One concern about nuclear reprocessing is individuals acquiring the powdered plutonium leftovers with which they can devise a nuclear weapon.  But for reprocessing nuclear waste, it would be extremely difficult for an individual to develop a nuclear weapon. There is disagreement among scientists about whether the plutonium powder is too radioactive to steal.

“. . .Commercial-scale reprocessing facilities handle so much of this material that it has proven impossible to keep track of it accurately in a timely manner, making it feasible that the theft of enough plutonium to build several bombs could go undetected for years,” reports the Union of Concerned Scientists website. Continue Reading »

Posted in Nuclear | Tagged , , |

Supress the Vote!

October 24, 2008 by Public Citizen Texas

Another post from our field contributor Sarah McDonald:

When I was deputized as a voter registrar in Harris County, I was warned to carefully double-check all forms to make sure every box was checked, every “i” dotted and each “t” crossed.  If anyone forgot to check the appropriate boxes, include their full address, or listed a nickname rather than legal name, their registration could be denied.  It made me angry that someone could lose the fundamental right to vote over such a silly mistake, but I figured — that’s bureaucracy for you.

So imagine my shock to learn that many valid, clearly legible, and perfectly completed voter registration applications were being denied by Paul Bettencourt’s Harris County Tax-Assessor Collector’s office.

It is bad enough when the vote is denied due to ridiculous human errors such as typos, misspellings, or nicknames that don’t match up to driver’s license databases.  But when 18-year-olds are told repeatedly that they are too young to vote, and applications with social security numbers clearly listed on carbon copy-receipts are rejected as incomplete due to that “missing” identification information – one has to wonder whether something more sinister is afoot.

KHOU-TV, channel 11 news in Houston, aired an investigative report to that effect which you can watch  here.  So amazing was the response to this story, they followed up with another story last night which you can see here.

Mounting evidence demonstrates that the Harris County trend of voter registration denial may be the result not of incompetence, but actual voter suppression.  An editorial that ran this week in the New York Times claims that Republicans in states across the nation Continue Reading »

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , |

Support Austin’s Retrofit Ordinance; Ask for More

October 24, 2008 by

Austin City Council will soon deliberate on the recommendations from the Energy Efficiency Retrofit Task Force: a group of stakeholders charged with coming up with ways to make more homes and businesses in the city more energy efficient.

The central recommendation of the Task Force is to require energy audits to be performed on all commercial and multi-family (think apartment buildings) properties within two years of implementation of the ordinance. Single-family homes would have a similar requirement, but it would take effect when a home is put up for sale.

Energy audits (which cost about $200-$300) are performed by Austin Energy certified professionals and include a visual inspection plus duct testing to analyze a building’s energy efficiency. Building owners or prospective buyers could then take advantage of a voluntary program of energy efficiency upgrades, that are loaded with rebates and incentives provided by Austin Energy.

This is good news for Austin consumers because Austinites have a right to know about the energy efficiency of a home, and ways they can save money. Housing affordability is not just the mortgage. It’s utilities too. For example. if you were a prospective home buyer, which house would you choose if these were the same price and right next to each other?

Which one would you choose if you knew that the first house paid $200 in monthly utilities and the second one paid $100? Energy audits make this information available so consumers can make more informed decisions like the one you just did.

But what about renters? Renters can’t make energy efficiency improvements beyond changing a few lightbulbs because they don’t own the property they live in. Concurrently, apartment building owners, don’t have a great financial incentive to make energy efficiency improvements because they don’t pay the utility bills.

That’s why, if after two years multi-family building owners are not taking advantage of the energy efficiency incentives from Austin Energy, City Council should make efficiency upgrades a requirement for multi-family properties. By strengthening the task force recommendations this way, Austin will be acting in the best interests of ratepayers…

…oh yeah, and reducing greenhouse gases.

-Matt

Posted in Consumers, Efficiency, Energy | Tagged , , , , , , , , |

Putting Off the Problem

October 19, 2008 by Public Citizen Texas

From our contributor Sarah McDonald:

Usually when a problem suddenly becomes much more severe, you expect whatever is being done to solve the issue to also ramp up a notch.  For example, if a tropical storm in the gulf suddenly turned into a category 3 hurricane, hurricane preparedness efforts would increase dramatically over night.  Or if your Aunt Mildred had been sick for some time and her doctor announced that she was in fact seriously ill, you’d hope that her physician would boost treatment.  And if the EPA announced that Houston had a “severe”, not a “moderate” smog problem, you’d think that region would be required to put extra effort into emissions reductions.

Well, you’d be wrong.

Because the EPA did in fact reclassify Houston’s smog problem as “severe”, and rather than ordering the 8-county regional area to intensify their clean up plans, the agency actually extended the deadline to meet federal health standards for ozone.  Governor Rick Perry requested the change from “moderate” to “severe” – skipping over a “serious” ranking entirely. The region was supposed to have met the EPA’s standards by 2010, but now has until 2019 to come into compliance.  What’s worse, this extension is still for the EPA’s 1997 ozone standard, which is no longer considered sufficient to protect public health.  The EPA reduced allowable amounts of ozone from 84 parts per billion to 75 ppb earlier this year (which is still significantly higher than the 60 – 70 ppb range recommended by the EPA’s science advisory committee as the safest measure to protect human health  — but what do those scientists know anyway?)  Houston may not be required to meet the current standard until as late as 2030.

Now, not that I wouldn’t trust Governor Perry and the EPA with my life… Continue Reading »

Posted in Global Warming | Tagged , |

Gimme! Nuclear industry asks for $122 billion from Uncle Sam

October 16, 2008 by

Call it a preemptive bailout if you like, my Friends…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi5L18ZV_qU]

…but the Department of Energy recently issued a press release stating that they have received 19 applications for federal loan guarantees to build 14 nuclear power plants. The price tag: $122 billion.

http://www.energy.gov/news/6620.htm

I know after the $700 billion bailout package, on top of $100+ billion just for AIG, $122 billion for nukes doesn’t sound that impressive. But it is a little scary when you realize that the feds only appropriated $18.5 billion for loan guarantees. Now children, don’t push in line!

The DoE estimated the total cost to construct the 21 proposed reactors at $188 billion, which they say averages out to around $9 billion per reactor.

Taxpayer-backed loan guarantees would total $5.8 billion per reactor based on DoE’s numbers. That’s a hard pill to swallow for an industry with a notorious history of default. From Bloomberg:

Taxpayers are on the hook only if borrowers default. A 2003 Congressional Budget Office report said the default rate on nuclear construction debts might be as high as 50 percent, in part because of the projects’ high costs.

-Matt

Posted in Energy, Nuclear | Tagged , , , , , |

Nuclear Misenergy

October 10, 2008 by

Nuclear power is not an answer to our collective energy problem.  Essentially, turning to nuclear power as a primary solution to the current carbon-based system is like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.  It is not an “alternative”.  Considering that, in resource-availability terms, we could already be powering most structures in this state with solar power, and that we have not done so out of adherence to constructs and public policies rooted in economic interests, it seems ridiculous to suggest that our power problem demands we dig up metal and devise ingenious was of containing and storing radioactive dust.  For me, there are three levels upon which nuclear power as a primary power source does not work.

1)     Forming a larger industry around the mining of uranium would recreate the oil-based market system that has contaminated the global markets, has instigated war, has tainted laws.  Wind is free.  Sunlight is free.  Yes, solar panels are built with silicon-but the silicon we use comes from sand and is the second-most common element on the earth (after oxygen).  If we want to progress as a planet, we must focus not only on outcomes, but the means of attaining them.  We need a new system that is not primarily driven by mining minerals-because that system can be too easily dominated by a relatively few people with the right land.   In a wind and solar-based system, opportunity to participate and regulate is inherently more accessible.  Wind is free.  Sunlight is everywhere.  So without even considering environmental impacts, a nuclear energy-based system is a repugnant proposition to me.   This is my number one reason for opposing nuclear energy.  We must question advocates of nuclear energy and consider whether they stand to benefit from mining, conversion of coal burning plants, or processing.

2)     We need to recognize and heed the signs (the glaring billboards!) that uranium mining and nuclear power are wrong at a deeper level.  At this point in our global evolution, we know what can lay ahead when indigenous people and “progress” meet.  In hindsight of world history, we now see how many of the worst aspects of contemporary society were foreshadowed in interactions with native peoples at the outset of a progressive undertaking.  So where indigenous people react adversely to something today, we should listen.  To ignore the response of native people to uranium mining would be a monumental failure-the prospect of so doing reminds me of the Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes were Watching God, when the workers watched the Native Americans leaving the land only to later find themselves in the worst hurricane in the nation’s history.  Culture is the heart of the planet.  How can we advocate what causes the heart to bleed?

Continue Reading »

Posted in Global Warming | Tagged , , , , , |

Sparkle, Sparkle, little coal plant…

October 8, 2008 by

Corpus Christi – October 7, 2008

The “Sparkling City by the Sea” has been losing its sparkle through the years, as more and more refineries pollute its air and water. Now a new threat looms to increase the pollution that is damaging and degrading what should be the glistening jewel of the Texas Gulf Coast.

A by-product of the refining industry is petroleum-coke (or pet-coke). It is the toxic-filled waste that is left over after the refining industry gets all it wants out of crude oil. The Las Brisas Energy Center is a proposed facility that will burn this waste in what is, basically, a coal plant on the shores of Nueces Bay.

I attended a public meeting held by the TCEQ on Tuesday that allowed for comments and questions to be asked of the TCEQ and representatives of Las Brisas. Many concerns were raised by concerned citizens and few, if any, of the questions were answered satisfactorily.

The main proponents of the facility seemed to be, as usual, those who were happy at the proposed jobs this facility would create. One of the points I brought up was how green jobs (jobs from energy efficiency programs and from renewable energy generation) would provide far more employment opportunities for the area: permanent jobs (as opposed to temporary construction jobs) which couldn’t be outsourced.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Coal, Energy, Global Warming | Tagged , , , , , , , |

Don’t forget to register to vote!

October 6, 2008 by

Today is the deadline to register to vote in Texas.  If you’re not currently registered and you want to vote in the election, contact your county’s election office and find out where you can register.

Happy hunting!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged |

Wall Street’s crisis shows need for Fair Elections

September 24, 2008 by

Make no mistake about it, we face an economic crisis of enormous proportions. But the rush to bail out Wall Street firms with a “hair on fire” urgency rings so hollow when you consider how much the American people have already gone through. Millions of people have lost their homes to foreclosures. Many are being forced onto the streets, as tent cities are popping up in major cities. But nothing happened to fix the sub-prime mess, brewing for two years now, until Wall Street had a cash-flow problem.

The biggest problem seems to be that the government is now moving, not because they are inclined to make public policy for the good of the American people, but because their campaign donors have asked them to. You can see campaign finance’s fingers in the presidential race as well, as Wall Street donors dominate the upper echelons of each candidates’ major fundraisers and both candidates flounder and walk the thin line between offending their donors and offering real leadership.

As a seeming palliative to the financial crisis, the House introduced yesterday HR 7022, the Fair Elections Now Act, “To reform the financing of House elections, and for other purposes.” This bill would provide full optional public financing for congressional elections. It’s companion bill in the Senate has been mired in Congressional inaction. We can see how quickly Congress can act when it Continue Reading »

Posted in Campaign Finance | Tagged , , , , , , , |

Letting Go of Ethanol

September 24, 2008 by

I’ve been wanting to write a piece arguing that just because ethanol isn’t a complete solution to global warming and oil prices, it is still an alternative to oil and therefore good. Unfortunately, I can’t honestly say that because ethanol isn’t even a partial solution; it’s just a bigger problem.

I really wanted to like ethanol because corn is good.  And I really wanted to quote Hardin from his 1968 article in Science magazine where he said: “. . .we can make a rational decision which will not involve the unworkable assumption that only perfect systems are tolerable.” I love the quotation, however, I sadly cannot honestly say that it applies to ethanol. In my mind I hear that blind Native American in the Oliver Stone film U-turn.

I’m generally wary of arguments purely rooted in economics, so I wanted to address some of those. But it turns out there’s pretty much no good argument in favor of ethanol and if there were one, I wouldn’t want to make it.  Turns out, according to Nobel prize winners and writers for Science and world news sources, ethanol has a pretty big carbon footprint when you take into account the carbon emissions released from burning forests to plant crops for use as diesel fuel. Turns out the amount of nitrogen needed to grow corn or switchgrass for fuel emits atmospheric nitrous oxide in levels that are worse for the planet than ozone. Turns out that the production of corn-based ethanol results in “dead zones” in our water sources, like a huge swath of the Mississippi. Turns out that people starve in-part because selling the crops for fuel rather than food reaps more profit. Turns out that hungry people are rioting around the world. Turns out that the nitrogen reaction used to grow the corn is produced using natural gas, which is not only a non-renewable carbon-based resource but which, in Texas, dictates prices on the energy markets. Yes, ethanol from sugarcane works for Brazil, but who knows what the lasting effects of massive deforestation will be and should we encourage the potential loss of more?

I asked a friend of mine why U.S. and E.U. legislators aren’t doing less to prop up the crop-fuel industry, like halting the subsidies and mandates, and doing more to find real solutions to global problems in the face of the evidence. He said, “They don’t want to find solutions. They want to sell corn for high prices.”

Continue Reading »

Posted in Global Warming | Tagged , , , , |

Abandon All Hope…

September 24, 2008 by

…ye who enter the Turk plant.Turk Site

Last Thursday in Hope, Arkansas there were two meetings. One was widely attended, the other was not… mostly because hardly anyone had heard of it.

They hadn’t heard of it because it snuck in under the wire, with barely (if at all) the proper notices and alerts. It was a quorum court meeting, and on the agenda was a motion to approve a bond issuance “not to exceed” $185,000,000. Aside from one dissenting voice of sanity, the motion was passed.

It was passed without allowing anyone to comment, and upon only one reading.

Hempstead County and Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corporation are now investors in the Turk Coal Plant, meaning residents and taxpayers are now on the hook for nearly 200 million dollars.

Why do they need this public backing? Coal’s dirty little secret is that it is on the way out, and everybody knows this. Power plants are constructed with a budget to pay off the cost of the plant over 20 or 30 years. Coal will soon become so economically unviable that these plants will be forced to close, leaving taxpayers and bondholders to pick up the check. How incredibly irresponsible.

Meanwhile, across town at the University of Arkansas Community College at Hope, I and a few hundred other people were cramming ourselves into the library to listen and submit comments to the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ). They were holding a public hearing regarding mercury and other HAPs that the Turk plant will be emitting.

Employees from the plant were there, wearing florescent yellow t-shirts that said “Support Turk” on them. I wonder how many of those “employees” were contractors: temporary workers who don’t even live in Hempstead County, or possibly even Arkansas. Adding evidence to my suspicions was a documentary film maker present at the hearing who had filmed most of them leaving the plant earlier that day.

There was one local employee of SWEPCO who did give comments, and spoke at length about how much they all needed the plant because he had six kids and he needed his job with SWEPCO to take care of them.

He got the loudest applause of anyone the entire evening.

This same, poor, hard-working employee so concerned with supporting his kids has no concern for the destruction coal is wrecking on the futures of those same children. And not just the future of their health, but their economy too. Carbon legislation is going to happen during the next president’s term, and it will make coal so expensive that many coal plants will have to be shut down. Why, then, are we building new coal plants?

(Read the Entire Original Post on Coal Block)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This reminded me a lot of a BBC special I saw about Chinese coal plants and how the people knew the coal was making them sick but felt they needed the jobs.  Watch it below.  ~~Citizen Andy

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/MoBv9FC7WAM]

(BBC report on a coal plant in China)

Posted in Coal, Diesel | Tagged , , , , , , , , , |

The Wheels On the Bus May Go Round, But What Does the Exhaust Do?

September 22, 2008 by Public Citizen Texas

When I think of cliché images from grade school, I think of two things—apples and big, yellow school buses. Apples aside, school buses are a typical part of the grade school experience. Unfortunately, school buses are also some of the oldest and most polluting vehicles on the roads today.

School buses emit toxic soot, which can lead to asthma, bronchitis, headaches—and over time—cancer, heart disease and premature death for those exposed to diesel pollution. Children are among those most at risk of the hazards of diesel exhaust. While thousands of kids ride school buses every day in the state of Texas, nearly 90% of Texas’ 37,000 school buses emit unhealthy toxins into the bus cabin. In fact, these air toxins are up to four times higher inside the bus cabin than pollution levels outside the school bus.

Luckily, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) received $8.8 million from the EPA to provide grants to Texas’ school districts. These districts can use this money to purchase anti-pollution equipment, such as particulate filters, to reduce the level of toxic emissions released from the buses.

Check out this video where the Ohio Environmental Council (OEC) tests the tail pipes of a retrofitted bus with a conventional bus. The retrofitted bus has a diesel particulate filter (DPF) which reduces diesel soot by as much as 90%.


[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKwjyXjvb6k]

-Cyndi Goodson, Intern

Posted in Diesel | Tagged , |

The Threatdown on Global Warming – Tyson Slocum on Colbert!

September 17, 2008 by

Many of us here at Public Citizen love The Colbert Report. We had to give a brief shout-out to our very own Tyson Slocum who works in our DC office for appearing on Stephen Colbert’s eponymous Report last night.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/184943/september-16-2008/tyson-slocum

Listen to Tyson explain how energy companies are fleecing us while people run amock at the Department of the Interior. Also, stick around for the Threatdown and how global warming is getting rid of the threat from icebergs……

Posted in Global Warming | Tagged , , , , |

Who’s paying for the Hookers and Blow?, pt 2

September 11, 2008 by

Our cohorts at Citizenvox had this to say about the recent scandal breaking at the Department of the Interior.  I think this follow up well what they wrote about the recent GOP and Dem conventions, asking “Who is paying for the Hookers and Blow?”

And these are the people who will be put in charge of the leases if we decide to expand offshore drilling? Insert your own “Drill, Baby, Drill” joke here.  ~~Citizen Andy

Federal officials literally in bed with big oil

September 11, 2008 by Rick Claypool

Charlie Savage of the New York Times reports today:

On one occasion in 2002, the report said, two of the officials who marketed taxpayers’ oil got so drunk at a daytime golfing event sponsored by Shell that they could not drive to their hotels and were put up in Shell-provided lodging. Two female employees “engaged in brief sexual relationships with industry contacts,” the reports’ cover memo said, adding that “sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms’ length.”

On one occasion, the report said, the royalty-in-kind program allowed a Chevron representative who had won a bid to purchase some of the government’s oil to pay taxpayers a lower amount than his winning offer because he said he had made a mistake in his calculations. A report from Mr. Devaney’s office earlier this year found that the program had frequently allowed companies that purchased the oil and gas to revise their bids downward after they won contracts. It documented 118 such occasions that cost taxpayers about $4.4 million in all.

Outrage, anyone?

Posted in Campaign Finance, Consumers | Tagged , , |

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