Still time to Stop Billions in Coal/Nuke Subsidies

Ethanol train derailment in western Pennsylvania, Oct 2006… one of many.

Well, if you haven’t heard yet, we lost on the Energy Bill… big time. We won a whopping 35 mpg by 2020 CAFE standard… something appropriate if it were still 1970. We didn’t get the big boosts for renewables that were originally in the legislation (though the dirty energy in those sections got cut out with it, thank goodness). We DID get a huge five-fold increase in the ethanol mandate, which is going to mean massive food price hikes, more biotech crops, serious water and soil depletion and hundreds of additional communities being targeted for polluting ethanol biorefineries, including “advanced” biofuels, which will include even more use of biotechnology and which will clear our forests and crop lands to liquidate them to fuel vehicles. Even more troubling is that much of this will create a demand to try to turn trash, sewage sludge and other contaminated waste streams into liquid fuels. We’re already busy enough trying to help communities fight these things and our work is going to get FAR bigger. The more we succeed in stopping these insane “biofuel” schemes in the U.S., the more we’ll end up importing it and contributing to deforestation and global hunger in other countries.

OK… enough on the tragedy of the energy bill. Here’s what you can still affect:

There are still HUGE coal and nuclear subsidies in the Appropriations and Farm bills.

The Farm Bill has provisions in there for coal-to-liquids (coal-to-oil refineries). Tell your Senator to take this out! (and the ethanol promotions, too… didn’t they just get enough in the Energy Bill?!?)

Billions for Nukes and Coal in Appropriations Bill

The Omnibus Appropriations Bill (which funds the entire government to operate for 2008) is in negotiation right now. A vote on the omnibus spending package could come as early as December 17. Final details could be released December 16.

The House-Senate Appropriation negotiators have tentatively agreed to giving an UNLIMITED loan guarantees to the nuclear industry (no legally-binding cap).

While there’s no statutory (legally-binding) cap, the report language (indicating congress’s intent) is to spend these amounts:

$25 Billion for New Nuclear Reactors
$10 Billion for Renewables
$10 Billion for Coal-to-Liquids
$2 Billion for Uranium Enrichment
$2 Billion for Coal-to-Gas

It would also include Iraq War spending with no restrictions!

While the $10 billion for renewables might be welcome (if it’s defined in clean way, which is never the case), the package as a whole reflects misplaced priorities and a lost opportunity to address the climate crisis. Such an energy policy would make things far worse and make it much harder to reduce carbon emissions or reduce toxic and radioactive pollution in affected communities.

Throwing taxpayer money at wealthy utilities is not the way toward a sane, sustainable energy future.

Please call your Senators and Representative today! No loan guarantees for nuclear power (nor coal!)! Tell them to reject the entire omnibus appropriations bill if it includes such loan guarantees.

Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121

If you’ve already called them this week, or can make an additional call, then call Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and tell him to stand up to the polluting energy interests and not to allow such a parting gift to retiring Senator Pete Domenici and the outgoing Bush Administration. Senator Reid’s office is 202-224-3542.

Mike Ewall
215-743-4884
Energy Justice Network

About Mike

Mike Ewall has been involved in grassroots environmental justice organizing since 1991. He is founder of ActionPA and the Energy Justice Network, working in Pennsylvania and globally to help grassroots community groups tackle polluting energy and waste industries. Through his research and networking, Mike has educated many students and community groups on the hazards posed by a wide range of energy and waste technologies and has helped them work together in campaigns to protect vulnerable communities from these dirty industries. His accomplishments include defeating two incinerator projects in his home county near Philadelphia, helping halt a nuclear waste dump that was to be built in Pennsylvania in the 1990s, stopping a mandatory water fluoridation law in Pennsylvania and stopping the nation's most urban proposal for a liquefied natural gas terminal (in Philadelphia). Through his grassroots support work, many communities have achieved victories against power plants, landfills, incinerators, medical waste facilities and other polluting industries. His experiences range from fighting for environmental justice in rural and suburban communities in Pennsylvania to helping protest environmental racism in the state's urban centers (primarily Chester, Harrisburg and in Philadelphia, where large polluting industries exist and where more have been proposed). In his 16 years of involvement, Mike has been a leader in student and anti-corporate movements, serving in various roles in the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC). He is one of many co-founders of the Energy Action Coalition that runs this really cool blog. Through this student organizing, he has field organized and spoken on over 100 campuses in over 25 states. Since Pennsylvania deregulated its electric industry in 1999, Ewall has been focusing on energy marketing issues. That year, he launched a boycott of Green Mountain Energy in order to call attention to their marketing of dirty and deceptive energy products. He's been a national leader in exposing the perils of biomass incineration, biofuels and other dirty energy technologies which masquerade as clean. He is the author of the nation's strongest and cleanest Renewable Portfolio Standard legislation, introduced in Pennsylvania's state senate in 2003.

3 Responses to “Still time to Stop Billions in Coal/Nuke Subsidies”

Feed for this Entry Trackback Address

1 Charlie Peters Dec 14th, 2007 at 8:31 pm

Does corn fuel ethanol policy increase oil use and oil profit?

* Some folks think so.

* Clean Air Performance Professionals
2 eesolutions Dec 14th, 2007 at 8:44 pm

Mike, Great information!! I’m involved in local energy politics in Cheltenham, PA and I support your thinking regarding the most appropriate energy approaches. We should reduce our energy usage through conservation and encourage more use of solar and wind energy. Also, we should stop subsidizing the corporate energy industry – big oil and big ethanol (the extremely inefficient use of corn to produce ethanol will cause food prices to rise and exacerbate the pending global resource wars). Let’s encourage “subsidy shifting” from the oil industry to the alternative energy folks. We have started an Environmental Advisory Committee in Cheltenham to work on some of these issues.

Thanks,
Tom Petersen
eesolutions.wordpress.com
http://www.eesolutions.net
3 G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert Dec 14th, 2007 at 11:14 pm

Guaranteeing billions in nuke loans is actually a pretty
good idea because it gets the feds onside in new nuclear
development.

If they can derail a new nuclear plant that would
have given uranium miners $40 million of work per year,
they win a lot of money, because natural gas used
in uranium’s place costs $650 million a year, both
at current prices.

But if by that derailment they stick themselves
with paying off billions in construction loans
that they have guaranteed, that cancels their
ill-gotten natural gas gains for quite a few years.

If it doesn’t pay, they won’t betray the earth
as they did in the 70s.