It’s Getting Hot In Here

One week ago, Kingston, Tennessee, woke up to find that over one billion gallons of coal ash sludge had surged out of a poorly built and poorly maintained containment pond, one of three at the Kingston Coal Plant, after the dam holding back acres of inky black and toxic coal ash sludge failed. The Tennessee Valley Authority, the federal corporation that operates the Kingston Coal Plant, first reported that 360 millions gallons of coal ash sludge had flooded over 400 acres of local watersheds and river, then the estimate was revised to 540 million gallons, and now the best estimate puts the amount as over 1 billion gallons. This puts the amount spilled as more than 100 times larger than the Exxon Valdez disaster and, in fact, more than every drop of petroleum used in the United States that day. This coal sludge spill is simply unprecedented in size and scale and should become the stunning example of exactly how dirty coal really is.

Numbers aside, as it is impossible to really comprehend the scale of the disaster in words – this is a very dramatic example of how our consumption and reliance on coal is quite literally reshaping our world. Whether by flooding 400 acres of beautiful Tennessee valleys and rivers with six feet of coal ash, or blowing the tops off of literally hundreds of mountains in Appalachia, or changing the global climate itself through massive releases of carbon dioxide – the coal industry has perhaps the greatest impact of any industry in the world – yet we barely know it. Coal plants intake almost 20% of the United States’ freshwater, uses almost half of our freight railroad capacity, and leaves behind scarred landscapes, poor and exploited communities, kills vulnerable people – in fact, the Kingston Coal plant is estimated to cut short the lives of over 149 people a year – and coal is the leading source of global warming pollutants from the United States.

Coal power devours landscapes, poisons the land and water, and yet it remains virtually unregulated in critical areas of impact. Smokestack emissions of sulfur dioxide (SOX), nitrous oxide (NOX), and mercury are regulated – to a certain extent – with SOX regulated through a Cap & Trade system that has been adopted by most large environmental groups as the mechanism to tackle global warming. However, federally mandated scrubbers on coal plants have led to the concentration of pollutants in coal ash, everything from arsenic, lead, mercury, thorium, and uranium. Yet, coal ash is not regulated as toxic waste – although the EPA is ‘considering’ doing so’.

The Bush Administration has even worked at redefining the word ‘fill’ to allow the coal industry to be unregulated by the Clean Water Act and allow the destruction of mountains and pushing the rubble into streambeds and valleys. Carbon dioxide is still unregulated, despite efforts to pass a federal climate bill and the Supreme Court ruling that the Executive Branch is obligated to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Unregulated, unaccountable, and corrupt is the way that many coal companies operate. Little surprise then that TVA announced as a safety measure that residents impacted by the coal ash spill should boil their water – thereby concentrating the heavy metal contaminants – instead of providing safe drinking water to residents. Continue reading ‘Kingston Coal Ash Sludge Spill Over a Billion Gallons: Time to Take a Hard Look at the Coal Industry’

Post by Daniel Vockins from the UK Delegation

Walking through the halls at the UN Climate Negotiations in Poznan earlier this month, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were at the heart of the struggle to defeat dangerous climate change. Top-level ministers from every government in the world met to forge a global agreement, the contents of which will decide how the latter half of this century plays out. But in truth, the real decisions are not made at the UN.

Woven through the endless meetings, lobbying sessions, cocktail parties and plenaries was a palpable sense that we will pass the critical 2 degrees tipping point which puts us into ‘dangerous’ levels of warming. Negotiators repeated ad nauseam the party line about how CO2 concentrations of 450 parts per million will stave off the worst impacts of climate change, whilst being briefed behind closed doors about exactly how out of date this target is. Corner negotiators with questions like these and they will often admit as much. It’s exasperating to watch, because we know that the time left to act is running out. Continue reading ‘The Power Isn’t At the UN’

Here in Oregon, the Uncover Intel Secrets campaign is still pressuring our local branch of Intel Corporation to make good on its green rhetoric by lobbying for renewable energy and solutions to global warming. Thanks in part to those of you who responded to an earlier post on this site by inviting Intel Government Affairs manager Jonathan Williams to the clean energy party scheduled to start in Oregon in 2009, Williams responded to my phone calls on behalf of Uncover Intel Secrets.

The gist of what he said is that Intel is committed to working on clean energy issues, and looks forward to working with Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski to implement a bold agenda in 2009. Well, that sounds good; but it’s important to remember that Intel is also a member of Industrial Customers of Northwest Utilities—a lobbying group that has consistently opposed the most important global warming and clean energy laws in Oregon. If Intel is going to make up for this dubious connection to anti-environmental industry, they’re going to have to work pretty hard to prove their good intentions. Please ask them to join the Cascade Climate Network in lobbying for clean energy in Oregon in February, 2009.

If Intel really wants to stand among the leaders in renewable energy development in Oregon, there can be no better way to prove their intent than by allying with the youth of this region who are calling for massive investment in renewable energy, and for definitive limits on greenhouse emissions. In February of 2008, a group of students from the Cascade Climate Network lobbied our legislators in the capitol, pushing for passage of the only global warming bill up for discussion during Oregon’s 2008 “special session.” In Salem that day, I listened to three college students speak eloquently to a legislative committee, asking them to move forward on global warming for the sake of our generation. However the bill in question—House Bill 3610—sparked vigorous opposition from industry groups like Industrial Customers of Northwest Utilities (ICNU). HB 3610 died in committee during the three-week special session, and never passed into law.

Jonathan Williams of Intel claims his company had no opinion on HB 3610—that Intel neither stood in its way nor lobbied for its passage. As a member of ICNU, however, Intel lent a certain credibility to one of the groups opposing HB 3610. In 2009, the company needs to be better than neutral on the most important energy bills that will come up for passage that year. And there can be no better way to do this than by joining students in the Cascade Climate Network when we return to the capitol to push for clean energy in February. Ask Intel to join us here.

What if, instead of claiming “neutrality” on the only global warming bill up for passage last February, Intel representatives had gone to Salem with the Cascade Climate Network, to lobby in support of HB 3610? What if the largest private employer in Oregon stood up with the student activists of our state to demand a clean energy future for our region and solutions to global warming? Now that would look like a “commitment to working on clean energy issues.”

Ask Intel to Support Clean Energy with the Cascade Climate Network this February!

Cross-posted from WattHead – Energy News and Commentary

Update: [Editor's note] The Tennessee TVA Spill is now estimated at over 1 billion gallons of coal ash sludge, over 100 times bigger than Exxon Valdez. Read our update here.

Let’s see how the “clean coal” PR hucksters at the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity try to spin this tragic news: a retention pond holding toxic coal ash slurry burst Monday in Roane County, Tennessee, releasing over half a billion gallons of potentially toxic sludge that swept into the nearby town of Harriman and contaminated tributaries of the Tennessee River. The resulting flood damaged 15 homes, injured one man as it knocked his house off its foundations, and has left over 400 acres of land covered by several feet of coal ash, mud and contaminated water (see video below).

Coal ash and slurry is the normal byproduct of coal-fired electricity generating, and is usually stored in giant retaining ponds near coal plants. The resulting coal slurry is frequently contaminated by heavy metals, mercury and arsenic.

Yesterday’s tragedy struck at the coal ash impoundment associated with the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston coal-fired steam plant and released about 2.6 million cubic yards of slurry, the Tennessean reports. That’s enough to fill nearly 800 Olympic-sized swimming pools, and is over 40 times more contaminated sludge than the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill.

As usual, a picture is worth a thousand words – and a video is worth even more; you can see scenes from the environmental disaster at the photo gallery here and the video below:

Continue reading ‘This is “Clean Coal”: Massive Coal Sludge Spill Dwarfs Exxon Valdez Disaster’

On December 19 Utah resident Tim DeChristopher took creative and effective action to disrupt an auction that was selling off oil and gas leases on hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands in Utah. As around 100 concerned citizens rallied outside opposing the opening up of wilderness areas to the oil and gas industry, Tim entered the auction and started bidding. Time and again he outbid the speculators, and when he failed to outbid them he managed to drive the price way up. According to local news reports he “caused chaos” in the auction room, costing companies hundreds of thousands of dollars and  prevented 22,500 acres of land from being developed for fossil fuel extraction (at least for the time being). Tim’s actions were extremely effective at throwing a wrench in the works of the oil and gas industry and he is to be applauded.

Unfortunately, federal agents were not as sympathetic and detained Tim for a couple of hours. He may be facing federal charges in which case he will need our support. You can follow the link below to donate to his legal defense.

Continue reading ‘Student Disrupts Fraudulent Oil and Gas Giveaways in Utah by Launching Bidding War’

Update 2: [Editor's note] The Tennessee TVA Spill is now estimated at over 1 billion gallons of coal ash sludge, over 100 times bigger than Exxon Valdez. Read our update here.

Update 1: This Tennessee TVA spill is over 40 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, if local news accounts are correct.  This is a huge environmental disaster of epic proportions, approximately 500 million gallons of nasty black coal ash flowed into tributaries of the Tennessee River – the water supply for Chattanooga TN and millions of people living downstream in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky. We’re “lucky” it was sludgy, or thousands would have died.  Click here to see an amazing aerial video of the spill – the big chunks in the river are mounds of coal ash.

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This is the kind of scary thing that people living with coal worry about every day, while the industry (and some big greens) say that coal will be “clean” if we find out how to sequester the carbon. Just today, 39 groups banded together to ask President Elect Obama to overturn Bush’s recent attempts to de-regulate coal ash even more.

In February 1972, Buffalo Creek Sludge Impoundment, a mere 132 million gallons, killed 125 people, left 5,000 homeless and thousands more with post traumatic stress disorder.  In 2000, a 2.2 billion gallon coal waste dam failed in Martin County, Kentucky.  The largest dam in the hemisphere is the Brushy Fork Sludge Impoundment, which holds 9 billion gallons of toxic coal waste.

So, this is the history coalfield residents hold in our hearts when we open our emails and see “Slurry Pond Bursts.” Last night, 4 to 6 feet of ice cold toxic coal ash and ice cold slurry burst out of the pond and buried 12 homes, 400 acres, and wrecked a train. This spill likely contained mercury, arsenic, and other toxic heavy metals like beryllium and cadmium.

Coal ash is what is leftover when you burn coal.  The “Clean Coal” tools talk about putting “scrubbers” to “clean” the air coming out of the stacks, but that just isolates the toxins in the coal ash, which is generally stored in unlined pits near the power plant.

Coal ash is an enormous problem throughout the US. It is more radioactive than nuclear waste, according to Scientific American and is under-regulated. It is made into concrete, drywall, and as a road building material.  People living near coal ash dumps have 900 times the national cancer rates.

I’m going to guess that cancer figure just increased even more in eastern Tennessee.

Ram Nitesh and his team of Eco(you)th in Chennai have created this powerful video of the impacts of climate change as a part of their incredible work to green the campus at SRM University. Eco(you)th is also involved in creating the solar powered bus for the Climate Solutions Road Tour, removing plastic from SRM campus and starting a green store on campus!

Here’s a pretty grim look at the racial violence that came in the aftermath of Katrina. White militias in Algiers Point, a white enclave in New Orleans, declared war on African-Americans. They viewed African-Americans venturing into their neighborhoods as “fair game” and many homicides resulted.

Many of my friends and comrades in anarchist and anti-authoritarian communities immediately put their mutual aid where their mouths were and went to New Orleans to form Common Ground Relief and provide solidarity not charity. Part of their response was self-defense against these white militias.

This article makes a great case for why we need to transform ourselves from a climate movement to a climate JUSTICE movement.

Lately, when I hear climate activists talk about numbers and percentages in stemming emissions and stopping climate change through legislation and governmental intervention I don’t hear enough about stemming the effects of global warming on the most impacted. Poor and marginalized communities are already suffering the worst effects. While super-hurricanes and erratic weather patterns are a top threat to them, so are reactionary and racist elements that target them in the post-storm chaos.

Video by the Nation Institute of African-Americans describing post-Katrina violence and white vigilantes defending their actions -

It’s good to see the idea of a Green stimulus gaining lots of traction, through EAC’s efforts on Change.org, the Apollo Alliance’s Economic Recovery Act, 1Sky’s letter to Congress, and the memo that Green For All, EAC, 1Sky, and others sent to Obama’s team last week.

Green For All’s take on the stimulus is that it MUST include funding for the Green Jobs Act. For all the talk of Green Jobs, this is the only federally authorized bill that can build “green pathways out of poverty” – if it is funded, that is. Continue reading ‘Dreaming of a Green Christmas?’

Names Two Strong Climate Scientists to other Posts

Cross-posted from WattHead – Energy News and Commentary

President-elect Barack Obama has tapped green jobs and immigrant rights champion Representative Hilda Solis (D-CA) to head his Labor Department, according to the Associated Press.

Representative Solis was the key sponsor of the Green Jobs Act of 2007 and has been a vocal champion in the House of Representatives for investments in a new, clean energy economy that can spark new innovation and offer pathways out of poverty for millions of Americans.

Upon passage of the Green Jobs Act, Representative Solis, who represents heavily Hispanic portions of eastern Los Angeles County and east L.A highlighted the “opportunity to advance not only the energy security of our nation, but also the economic security of our families. Through targeted job training efforts,” she said, “we can support both our nation’s innovation and technological leadership and lift people out of poverty.”
Continue reading ‘Obama Taps Green Jobs Champion Hilda Solis as Labor Secretary’