It’s Getting Hot In Here

Last weekend marked my favorite weekend of the year. No, it’s not because of the holidays (although I do love chocolate bunnies!). Last weekend was the first two rounds of the Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament. This year the tournament is especially amazing for many reasons. First, UNC-Chapel Hill holds the overall number one seed and dominated its first two games, winning each by over thirty points (smells like a title team to me!). West Virginia upset Duke and the Sweet Sixteen is full of double-digit-seeded underdogs like Davidson and Villanova.
But what is most exciting about March Madness this year is that the brackets have gone green! Of the 65 teams that made it into the tourney, 24 have signed the American Colleges and University’s President’s Climate Commitment (ACUPCC). The connection to basketball and fighting climate change doesn’t end there. Schools that have signed on to the ACUPCC have made up 50% of the Final Four over the last ten years, won ten of the last fifteen tournaments, and written one of the greatest Cinderella stories in Final Four history (George Mason, 2005).

Of the sixteen teams left, seven play for signatory schools. You can track their progress at www.greenbrackets.com.

Advocates for the mountains and coalfield residents today opened a new front in the fight against destructive coal mining, filing suit in Washington, D.C. District Court to stop federal investment in new power plants that would enshrine coal for another generation.
The suit, filed by the North Carolina-based Appalachian Voices and Canary Coalition, states that the federal government shouldn’t be in the business of subsidizing coal plants without knowing the true environmental costs – including impacts of ultra-destructive mountaintop removal coal mining. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 included $1.65 billion in tax incentives for new coal plants, $1 billion of which has been allocated to nine projects around the country.

“The fact is that there’s no such thing as clean coal as long as our mountains are getting clear-cut, blown up and bulldozed down,” said Mary Anne Hitt, Executive Director of Appalachian Voices. “Right now, the electricity that powers your home may well come from mountaintop removal coal. We need fewer coal plants, not more.”

Continue reading ‘Mountaintop Advocates Open New Front in Fight Against Coal’

If you know me at all, you know I’m a Carolina basketball fanatic and you know it’s a little painful for me to write about a job well done by Duke basketball fans.

Rivalries run deep here on Tobacco Road and it’s not everyday that the Cameron Crazies (the nickname for Duke students who go to extremes to cheer for their men’s basketball team in Cameron Indoor Stadium) don anything other than their usual dark blue paint. But for the NC State game on January 31st, the Focus the Nation team at Duke (rockstar Kelsey Shaw and company) convinced fans to wear green t-shirts that read “Bleed Blue, Live Green” and cheer for solutions to climate change along with their (overrated) team.

The shirts were not the only green aspect of the game. Students and other fans were asked to sign the Duke Sustainability Pledge, a commitment to researching and implementing climate friendly lifestyle changes. Furthermore, the University Athletic Department purchased carbon offsets equivalent to the electricity, steam and transportation consumed by the game, working in partnership with the renewable-energy company NativeEnergy.

Continue reading ‘Bleed Blue, Live Green: Duke Students rock Focus the Nation and ESPN’

Earlier this week, the North Carolina Division of Air Quality (NC DAQ) issued the final pollution permit required for Duke Energy to begin construction and operation of a new 800-megawatt coal-fired power plant at Cliffside. Major bummer.

As you can expect, advocacy groups and citizens in North Carolina are extremely disappointed with the Division of Air Quality’s decision to grant Duke Energy a permit to build this global warming machine in our backyard. We have been working to stop this outcome for almost two years now.

Cliffside is irresponsible beyond belief—at a time of an impending climate crisis, fish advisories due to mercury contamination, and a statewide drought, the NC DAQ has decided to invest over $2 billion of ratepayer money in a coal plant that could be inoperable soon. We’ve been pushing the DAQ particularly hard on the issue of mercury. When the draft permit came out last fall, students around the state rallied to reject it. The following week, the DAQ announced they were re-visiting the permit to specifically look at the mercury levels. The new and final permit only reduces mercury by .001 pounds for bituminous coal and .047 lbs for sub-bituminous coal. Wow! A whopping .001-pound reduction when they burn Appalachian coal. Talk about a token reduction!

It gets worse. The new permit “requires” Duke to take an equivalent number of megawatts offline in North Carolina (other than the existing units at Cliffside) and invest in carbon offsets so the plant is “carbon neutral” by 2018. Sounds nice, right? Wrong. The 800 megawatts comes from several different facilities throughout the state that are not baseline electricity plants. Duke rarely uses them and therefore they are not do not have the carbon equivalent of the 800 megawatts that will run 24/7 at Cliffside. Plus, Duke had announced plans to take those plants offline in 2007 so there is really nothing new here.

Continue reading ‘NC DAQ approves permit for Duke’s Cliffside coal plant (LAME)’

Students at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill kicked off Focus the Nation with a clever event that brought a little “Love Connection” to the youth climate movement.

Last night, about forty students participated in the first “It’s Getting Hot in Here” Speed Dating party. Because, really, with the climate changing, who has time for the drawn-out pleasantries of real-time dating?

The UNC Focus the Nation team (which has been busting their butts to host an AMAZING Focus the Nation) organized the party as a way to publicize for next week’s main events.

“Speed dating is a way to reach out to people who may not have heard about Focus the Nation and to get the conversation about climate change started,” said Jarrett Grimm, a North Carolina Focus the Nation rock star.

The daters were given a list of icebreaker questions to ease the awkwardness. Questions included from “Do you rock or roll?” to “How many compact fluorescent lights do you have in your house?”

Many of the daters walked about with dates for the “Save the Ales” bar night on the 31st. Siiiigh, climate love.

Due to the amazing work of students and organizers, The North Carolina Division of Air Quality (DAQ) is revisiting the permitting process for Duke Energy’s proposed Cliffside coal facility.

Last Thursday, students from North Carolina spearheaded a national call-in day to the offices of Governor Mike Easley and Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers to stop Duke Energy from constructing a new 800 mega-watt coal-fired power plant in Cliffside, NC. Their efforts garnered over 500 calls to the governor’s office and similar numbers to the Jim Rogers’ direct line at Duke Energy. On the same day, two other students from North Carolina dressed as polar bears were arrested while blockading the entrance to Duke Energy’s headquarters in Charlotte.

Over the weekend, the momentum continued to build. Dr. James Hansen of NASA spoke to a crowd of over 700, including Jim Rogers, in uptown Charlotte Friday evening and to a jam-packed auditorium in Chapel Hill on Saturday afternoon.

“The physics of the problem tells us that we cannot put the carbon from all that coal into the atmosphere,” he said. “It just hasn’t sunk into policy makers.” Hansen also wrote N.C. air-quality officials in opposing the Cliffside expansion earlier this fall.
Continue reading ‘North Carolina Student Climate Coalition Convinces State to Revisit Permit on New Coal Plant!’

Young people across North Carolina are spearheading a national call-in to the offices of Governor Mike Easley and Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers TODAY, in an effort to stop Duke Energy from constructing a new coal-fired power plant in Cliffside, NC.

Duke Energy has proposed to expand its Cliffside coal plant in Rutherford County, North Carolina. The NC Utilities Commission has given them a permit for one 800 megawatt pulverized coal generator. The plant, if built, will emit 312 million tons of carbon dioxide, the primary pollutant responsible for global warming, over its fifty-year lifespan. That’s equal to putting an additional one million cars on the roads for the next 50 years!

Join the ranks with James Hansen of NASA in telling elected and corporate leaders in North Carolina “NO COAL!”

Not only will the new Cliffside plant emit more carbon dioxide into the air, it will also emit nasty pollutants such as mercury, nitrogen dioxide & sulfur dioxide. In addition to many orange and red ozone days this year, Charlotte (downwind of the existing Cliffside facility) even had a purple air quality day this summer, indicating VERY UNHEALTHY air quality. (On purple air quality days, people with respiratory or heart ailments, children, and older adults should avoid outdoor physical activities. Even healthy individuals are encouraged to avoid prolonged or heavy exertion outdoors).

Furthermore, Duke’s own numbers project a 10-fold increase in mercury emissions from the proposed plant over 2005 mercury emissions from the existing units, as well as 13 to 50-fold increases in releases of other toxic metals like arsenic and cadmium. We cannot tolerate the devastating possibilities associated with this dirtiest form of energy known.

Continue reading ‘ACTION ALERT: Call-in TODAY! No New Coal for North Carolina!’

As Kansas and other states take the lead in shutting down the possibility for new coal, citizens across North Carolina are taking all efforts to stop the NC Department of Air Quality from issuing Duke Energy the permit to build a new 800 megawatt coal plant at Cliffside.

Hundreds of people gathered in uptown Charlotte on Tuesday and downtown Asheville Thursday October 18 to voice concern and dismay over Duke Energy’s plan to build a mammoth 800 megawatt coal-burning power plant about 50 miles west of Charlotte/55 miles southeast of Asheville on the Rutherford/Cleveland county border.

The standing-room-only crowd in Charlotte heard first from Deb Arnason, a coal-fighting friend from Florida who read one of the most powerful statements of the evening. Deb read the testimony of Dr. James Hansen, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and world recognized climatologist. Here are his words:

“For the sake of identification, I am director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, Adjunct Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, and head one of the major units of the Columbia Earth Institute.

I express my opinions here as a private citizen, based on my four decades of experience in research on the climate of the Earth and other planets. I am a member of the National Academy of Sciences, have advised the Vice President and his task force on energy and climate (including six Cabinet members) on two occasions, and have received numerous awards for my research on climate change.

I am writing because scientific evidence and understanding about global climate change have advanced rapidly in just the past several years. Indeed, progress has been sufficiently rapid that there exists a gap between what is understood by the relevant scientific community and what is known by those who most need to know, the public and policy makers. The information is particularly relevant to those who are considering the use of coal for power plants, specifically with regard to the way in which coal will need to be used if we wish to avoid creating a dangerous situation in the near future and especially during the lives of our children and grandchildren.

Continue reading ‘Houston to North Carolina: NO NEW COAL!’

The North Carolina Division of Air Quality (N.C. DAQ) heard almost 100 public comments regarding Duke Energy’s proposed 800 mega-watt expansion of the Cliffside coal-burning facility in Southwestern North Carolina last Tuesday evening.

About 300 people attended the public hearing on revisions to the air-quality permit for the conventional, dirty coal plant. Activists from the region – including students from Warren Wilson College, UNC- Charlotte, and Furman University (in Greenville, SC) – urged the N.C. DAQ to consider global warming, health effects, and the already declining air quality in the Charlotte metro area that this colossal plant would only exacerbate.

The Cliffside plant has become a symbol of the fight against dirty energy in North Carolina. It’s a given that Duke should not be allowed to build a dirty, old-style plant that will harm this state for the next generation and beyond, especially not at the expense of NC ratepayers. We don’t need new, dirty power plants to pollute our air and our waters for the next 50 years. We don’t need millions more tons of carbon dioxide contributing to the global climate crisis. And we don’t need more environmental degradation in another rural North Carolina county – we have too much to lose.

One of the most powerful speakers Tuesday evening was a business owner in the renewable energy industry. He told the DAQ about how his company was taking engineers trained in the southeast and giving them jobs in states in other parts of the country that have already taken a leadership role in a clean energy future. He mocked the state for being so archaic that we would even still be having a discussion about new coal. Other states have realized that meeting the power needs of the future using the technology of the past is a losing proposition. As a result, new industries, new jobs, and new technologies are sprouting up across the Midwest, New England, and West Coast, while the Southeast is left bickering about dirty vs. dirtier.

North Carolina can – and should – do better. Truly clean alternatives like energy efficiency, conservation and renewable energy are available and feasible in our state.

Continue reading ‘North Carolina Youth: No New Coal!’