There have been a number of amazing posts lately about the growing youth movement against coal. Mattie writes about upcoming Mountain Justice Spring Break in Virginia, Dana reports on what was perhaps the largest rally against mountaintop removal ever down in Kentucky and tells the story of a grandmother’s fight against Big Coal, Leo describes his first direct action protesting coal in Ohio, Morgan takes on the industry in Kansas, and Tom updates us on the fight in Virginia.
This is starting to feel like a movement. Of course, there’s been a national movement against coal for quite a while. Rainforest Action Network has been going after the banks, Sierra Club has assembled a database of fights around the country, and countless community groups have been struggling on the front-lines, sometimes for decades. But something new is in the air if this blog is any indicator. I’ve been dutifully reading IGHIH since it got going in Montreal and I’ve never seen so many posts (and so many actions around the country) taking on coal.
So, the question comes up: what would a national, youth-lead campaign against coal look like?
We’re going to get a glimpse of it in Fossil Fool’s Day coming up on April 1st. If you haven’t signed up an action yet, check out the website and get started. But, what about a longer term, coordinated push against coal plants. I think (as hopefully some people will comment) this is already underway, but it’s still relatively internal. From what I hear, the “No Coal” working group of the Energy Action Coalition is cooking up some great stuff, but it’s not quite out in the public yet.
I’d wager that if a group of students got together, wrote up a bomber proposal for a coordinated summer campaign, mapped out a clear and compelling narrative about green jobs rather than dirty coal, drew up a flashy and easy to use website to act as a portal to community efforts, brought together a coalition of groups, and called up a foundation that has supported youth work in the past (or even just started begging some of the big Enviro’s), you could raise enough money to make it happen.
There were 6,000 students at Power Shift – they can’t all know what they’re doing this summer.
How about getting the discussion rolling right here on the blog. We already know groups like ABEC patrol our site, but what the hell, let’s make them a little nervous too. I know there’s all sorts of stuff that stays behind the scenes, but there’s plenty of thinking that can happen out here in this forum.
What sort of website would you want? What efforts are already out there? Would Energy Action coordinate or should a group of students just go for it? What sorts of activities could students do this summer to build up the issue before the election? How can we bring in thousands of new people, not just those already involved? What other questions should we be asking?
Let’s keep this movement moving.
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Just to add on to that, even us folks in the Pacific Northwest, with all of our hydro power, are stillhaving to fight the coal plants. We’re organizing a stat wide anti-coal campaign for Fossil Fools Day. A unified movement you say? Alright, let’s talk.
hey jamie, this is great. I’m definitely in. We’re fighting new coal plants proposed in GA, NC, and SC right now, and I know that some youth are connecting around a national Die-nergy (aka Dynegy) campaign and fighting local battles against plants. Having some unified resources, website and messaging would be great. An ideal unified website could have maps with updates from all of the different fights, ways for folks to get involved in national and local campaigns, ways to order stickers, t-shirts and other materials, information on candidates’ stances on energy encouraging folks to push them for no coal, no nukes, and that’s just a beginning of a brainstorm on the website!
Any no coal campaign would have to be coupled with a no nuclear message as well, since nuclear is just as dirty (if not dirtier) than coal, and a lot of victories against coal have utilities scrambling to build new nuclear plants.
More on why nukes are so dirty, since someone from the industry is likely to respond that they aren’t. One of the biggest problems is that they are SUPER expensive estimated at $6-8+ billion per 1000 MW reactor [and that's in our so-called free market without accounting for over $150 billion in subsidies over the past 30 years] they use lots of water, life-cycle carbon output is about that of natural gas [due to mining, processing, storage, decomissioning of plants & more], uranium mining is dirty & water intensive, and nuclear waste stays around for FOREVER and we don’t have any thing to do with it! (see a Climate of Hope for more on why nukes are so bad)
A open-source resource website for a united no-coal youth movement sounds like jjust the thing I am looking for. For Fossil Fools day and beyond we are developing stickers, a website, t-shirts and more to stop Cliffside. Would love for a national space to share those and get more ideas from other folks…really build this movement effectively…time is limited.
We are winning our fight against Duke Energy’s coal expansion on it’s Cliffside facility, but are now dealing with the issue that it might take a nuclear to to that. No Nukes, No Coal, no Kidding.
A great nation wide coal campaign website already exists to a degree and is run by the Sierra Club.
http://sierraclub.org/maps/coal.asp
Well, I would not like to disappoint (though I am just an engineer, not anyone official from the nuclear industry.
The ExternE study put nuclear’s total carbon footprint on the order of wind power:
http://www.externe.info/
Even with going to lesser grades of uranium ore, you will not have much effect as the milling occurs near the mine (i.e., most of the transportation is for the yellowcake, not the ore).
But more to a larger point, if nuclear is off the table, and LNG is off, and carbon sequestration is rejected, then there is a large amount of power to replace (~80% of US electric capacity). Without cheap energy storage, that is a significant challenge for renewables. I am also unsure that it is socially feasible to cut back power use enough to get such a reduction. Even Switzerland maintains 70% of the US per capita electric capacity (based on EIA data) and they do not have as significant a manufacturing base as the US. Nuclear has problems (as do ALL the energy sources), but I do not see a way out of the carbon issue without using SOME nuclear to buy time to determine any alternatives that would take more time.