It’s Getting Hot In Here

As a tribute to the inspiring Climate Generation series, I thought I would re-publish this early history of Energy Action, originally written in December 2005.

A History of Energy Action

We each arrived on the scene from different beginnings. Billy Parish, Adi Nochur, and Meg Boyle were taking time in and out of school to pull together a powerful new climate coalition in the Northeast U.S.. Maureen Cane, Arthur Coulston, and Marcia Winslade were establishing their own sustainability network in California after a major clean energy victory at one of the nations’ largest university systems. Lindsay Telfer and Jeca Glor-Bell were spearheading an innovative sustainable campuses initiative in Canada as part of the Sierra Youth Coalition. Nick Algee and Liz Veazey were storming through the American Southeast shouting “Green Power” in the heart of coal country. Tricia Feeney and I were building a national student clean energy campaign with the Student Environmental Action Coalition. We were joined by networks, campaigns, and individuals from all corners of the US and Canada, all committed to bringing about a clean energy revolution. With relatively little national organizing experience and few of us over the age of 25, we set out to tackle the beasts of global warming and dirty energy by creating a North American youth and student clean energy and climate coalition rooted in unified action.

Thanks to the efforts of more than 20 environmental networks and organizations and more than 300 student campaigns for clean energy across the United States and Canada, the student and youth clean energy movement has become a powerful force for change locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. As is so often the case with important movements, our network grew out of several small, but forceful local examples initiated by students and young people. In the mid to late 1990s, Middlebury College, Tufts University, Northland College, and University of Vermont all made significant clean energy achievements. Students played an important role at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 where the seeds were planted for a concerted international response to the problem of global warming. Between 1997 and 2001, University of Vermont, Tufts University, Cornell University, and Lewis and Clark College in Oregon had all committed to or achieved the greenhouse gas emission reduction levels called for in the Kyoto Protocol. By 2001, 55 colleges in New Jersey had committed to reducing greenhouse gas levels to 3.5% below 1990 levels. The student campaign, “Kyoto Now!” at Cornell was particularly important for the growth of the national movement.

Continue reading ‘Climate Generation: A History of Energy Action (2005)’

Last week, Eric Blevins came down from a nine day tree-sit on Coal River Mountain. He then spent a couple of days in jail. While in jail, he wrote this letter to the Register-Herald in Beckley, WV and then dictated it over the phone to a support person at Climate Ground Zero.

This week, we commemorated the 50 year anniversary of the Greensboro sit-ins that were an integral part of the civil disobedience phase of the civil rights movement.  Many of the students that participated in those sit-ins were trained at the Highlander School in Tennessee near Coal River Mountain tree-sitter Eric Blevin’s home.

As we ponder our next steps in the climate action and climate justice movements, we need to remember that this sort of large scale change requires sacrifice.  With sacrifice, we need support. The civil rights activists risked their lives fighting segregation in the south.  Many spent long periods of time in jail. During the Greensboro sit-ins, violence and harassment of protesters often escalated.

So far, the coal industry and their political allies, inside and out of Appalachia, are fighting the anti-mountaintop removal legally (both criminal and civil), often resulting in jail time and fines.  There have also been threats and acts of violence directed at community members, organizers and activists in the coalfields.  Eric and his fellow tree-sitters sat in 60 ft. trees for over a week while coal company employees harassed and abused them with constant noise, bright lights, tree shaking and threats of spraying them down with fire hoses.  At the end of their tree-sit, Massey Energy has sued them for $75,000 and filed for a temporary restraining order in federal court. Continue reading ‘Letter from a West Virginia Jail’

Authored by: Lydia Courtright and Julia Peckinpaugh – student interns with the Kentucky Beyond Coal Campaign.

Over one year ago the Tennessee Valley Authority’s coal ash storage facility in Kingston, TN gave way – spilling over one billion gallons of toxic coal ash into the surrounding community.  Even today, the devastating impacts of the coal slurry spill on nearby family homes and surrounding ecosystem have imprinted our memories.  The incident also leads us to beg the question, “what happened urgency sense of commitment to remedy the issue so that other communities would be safe from future spills?”.

TVA coal ash spill Dec, 2009

We know that over the past year – since the disaster – the has EPA concluded that coal ash and other coal plant waste materials, are highly toxic, and should not be stored in wet ponds or discharged into ground or surface waters. According to the agency, coal ash contains heavy metals, including selenium, mercury, arsenic, and lead, and has caused documented damage to community health and ecosystems across the country. Continue reading ‘Administration Must Act to Classify Coal Ash As Hazardous Waste’

While Eric Blevins is holding out up in the trees with fellow activists Amber and David to successfully halt blasting at Coal River Mountain, I’d like to share with you some inspiring words which he delivered this past December at a protest at the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection in Charleston.  Eric spoke on behalf of Mountain Justice, and was joined on the stage by the likes of former WV congressman Ken Hechler and Robert Kennedy Jr.  The genuine and profound framing and delivery of Eric’s speech has stuck with me since that day.  And as he sits up there, defending this mountain, I hope his words inspire you, as well.

Mountain Justice is a regional movement, moving to abolish mountaintop removal. And this region unites us. Whether we live in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia or Alabama, we are united by these mountains.  Appalachia unites us.

These mountains are divine creations.  They deserve our love and respect.  The people who live in these mountains are divine creations.  They deserve our love and respect.  The plants and animals who live in these mountains are divine creations.  They deserve our love and respect.   The fresh mountain air and fresh mountain spring water are divine creations.  They deserve our love and respect.  We must love the creator and all of the creator’s creation.  If we all give them the love and respect they deserve, then they will heal us every day, for generations and generations into the future.  If we continue to desecrate and destroy them, they will leave us, probably within a generation.

Coal River Mountain is a divine creation.  It deserves our love and respect and it deserves to live.

Continue reading ‘These Mountains are Divine Creations’

Written by Lance Brisbois, Holly Jones and Juliana Williams

While Robert Kennedy Jr. and Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy, debated mountaintop removal coal mining last night, the momentum against coal is building across the country and world.  Beginning yesterday, three activists with Climate Ground Zero halted blasting on Coal River Mountain, and they are continuing their tree sit today despite Massey’s intimidation efforts which include felling trees near the activists and deafening noise machines.  Delhi, India, with a population of over 12 million residents, announced that it will shut down all five of its coal-fired power plants over the next four years.  Earlier this month, Rising Tide in Australia blocked coal trains in protest of the weak outcomes of Copenhagen.

When I was a younger man than I am today, I had a vision of the Great Plains transformed: buffalo roaming across great tracts of tallgrass prairie studded with wind farms that powered the whole Midwest. Tribal communities, farmers and ranchers and young people all working together to develop an economy that could sustain the people and restore the land. Maybe even a little folk school, something like the Highlander Center in east Tennessee, to bring everyone together to sing and dance and strategize together.

As I’ve learned, usually the hard way, big visions only become reality through perseverance, hard work and often a bit of luck or good timing. I only lasted six months in Grand Forks, North Dakota, all of which were somehow during the winter, but one of the things I remember best was that any of the plans we devised had to contend with the 800 pound gorilla in the state. Basin Electric, a rural electric cooperative with 2.8 million members across Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming was the populist face of big dirty coal. Headquartered in Bismarck, ND, they seemed to run state politics and they weren’t interested in wind.

So when I saw the headline “Rural Electric Cooperative Completes $240 Million Wind Farm in 4 Months” I almost couldn’t believe my eyes. This 115.5 MW project will be the largest wind project entirely owned by a consumer cooperative, AND IT WAS COMPLETED IN JUST 4 MONTHS!! Basin, which got 94% of its power from coal in 2005 (and only 1% from wind) now has a goal to reach 20% wind by the end of the year.

As we work towards a rapid and massive ramp-up of clean energy across the country, we should look to consumer cooperatives and municipally-owned utilities, both of which are non-profit, community-controlled structures with jobs and revenues that stay in the communities they serve. In 2008, rural cooperatives expanded wind energy capacity 65% compared to just 25% nationally, and municipal utilities, like in Long Island and Austin, are implementing some of the most innovative and aggressive renewable energy and energy efficiency programs in the country. Check out the American Public Power Association, which represents over 2,000 community-owned utilities, for more information.

Early Thursday morning, local climate activists dropped a banner reading “Save Coal River Mtn.” from the 18th Street overpass above the Vine Street Expressway. The banner contrasted images of a wind farm and a bulldozer; the bottom read, “Coal Is Over.”

Massey Energy Company, one of the largest coal producers in the country, began blasting at Coal River Mountain last Friday, in Coal River, West Virginia. Last year the state issued permits to conduct mountain top removal on the site, despite protest by local residents. Witnesses saw blasts and smoke on Friday near the Brushy Fork coal slurry impoundment.

Continue reading ‘Philly Activists Protest Blasting On Coal River Mountain’

Fantastic new article in the Nation by Jeff Biggers about the uprising in the coalfields.

And this is just the beginning.  The fight is now spreading out of the hills and hollers of Appalachia to New York, Washington D.C., Atlanta, Philadelphia and San Francisco.  New York is home to the biggest funder of coal on Wall Street–JPMorgan Chase, and DC, Atlanta and Philly are the locations of key EPA offices making decisions on mountaintop removal permits.  On Oct. 30 will be a nationwide day of action to end mountaintop removal.

The Coalfield Uprising
By Jeff Biggers

When the Environmental Protection Agency declared this year on September 11 that all pending mountaintop removal mining permits in four Appalachian states stood in violation of the Clean Water Act and required further review, Lora Webb didn’t have time to join in any celebrations. As she and her husband, Steve, a coal miner, packed up their possessions and left his family’s ancestral property outside Lindytown, West Virginia, Lora was more concerned about finding a place to sleep that night.

For the past few years, ever since a massive twenty-story dragline landed on a ridge near their home, the Webbs had endured twice-daily, bone-rattling explosions and the quasi-apocalyptic storms of coal dust and fly rock that blanketed their home and garden. Lindytown’s creeks and mountain hollows no longer exist, and a once-thriving community has been reduced to a ghost town. “It’s unreal. It’s like we’re living in a war zone,” Lora Webb told a local newspaper last fall.

By the spring of this year, the Webbs were one of the last holdouts in the area. Hoping to avoid displacement, they pleaded with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) and various federal agencies to enforce mining laws. Lora Webb even toted a jar of coal dust to Capitol Hill. In the end, though, they threw up their hands in bewilderment at the government’s inaction and sold their beloved home to Massey Energy, the Richmond-based corporation that runs the nearby Twilight mountaintop removal site. Then they were issued a sixty-day order to evacuate. Continue reading ‘The Nation:The Coalfield Uprising’