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

“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.”

Of the nine experimental coal facilities that have received tax incentives, none have conducted an environmental impact assessment (EIA) looking at the impact of coal on the environment – as required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The nine facilities include a Duke Energy projects in Edwardsport, IN and in Rutherford and Cleveland Counties, NC; a Mississippi Power Company project; an E.ON U.S. & Louisville Gas and Electric project in Bedford, KY; a Carson Hydrogen Power project in Carson, CA; a TX Energy project in Longview, TX; a Tampa Electric project in Polk County, FL (that is currently delayed); and two anonymous coal gasification projects.

The effort to end mountaintop removal has been gaining steam over the past year. As of today, the leading Congressional plan to end the practice has 129 co-sponsors – dozens more than last Congress, and only halfway through this session.

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.

Duke’s greening of the basketball game could not have happened without the work of STAR Sports for Environmental Change. Star Sports is an amazingly innovative organization helping teams, athletes, and sporting events to use the power of global sports and its powerful media reach to anchor community efforts to reduce carbon emissions by 25% or more in 3 years. (Check out the sweet commercial about sustainability efforts at Alabama and Colorado at Boulder that they ran during the Independence Bowl last fall)

So for the first time in my life, I cheered for Duke (but then damned them all to hell as usual). Go Heels!

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.

According to the NC State Energy Office, there are numerous clean energy options including energy efficiency, solar, wind, biomass and peak power shifting available right now. New public policies combined with economic incentives and enforcement can also help reduce our energy consumption and increase investment in renewable technologies.

Nationwide, plans for dozens of coal plants have been rejected by regulators or dropped by the power companies themselves. Duke, too, could show real leadership during this transition to a clean energy economy instead of continuing to harm our health, waste our water, and threaten future prosperity by burning coal. Despite the misguided issuance of this air permit, environmental, public health and public interest groups will continue to fight against the expansion of Cliffside.

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.

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.
As a result of the momentum created by the call-ins, the direct action, and the Hansen events, the North Carolina DAQ is re-evaluating the Cliffside permit, paying particular attention to the issue of mercury pollution. Coal plants emit 40 percent of the mercury released in the U.S. Mercury is of highest concern because of the known effects the neurotoxin has on women of childbearing age and children. Highly toxic mercury has tainted fish across Eastern North Carolina and already threatens to permanently impair thousands of babies each year. North Carolina advises pregnant women and children under 15 to moderate the number of freshwater fish species caught anywhere east of Interstate 85 (Eastern North Carolina waters more readily form methyl mercury than other waters) and largemouth bass caught anywhere in the state.

The existing facility at Cliffside released 140 pounds of mercury in 2005, according to state records. 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. For more information on the toxic pollutants associated with Cliffside, visit Clean Water for North Carolina).

This re-evaluation is a huge step and marks a victory for the newly formed North Carolina Student Climate Coalition. With only a few months under it’s belt as a coalition, these North Carolina students join the ranks of others around the country forming state and regional networks to fight climate change.

The momentum the NCSCC and other state coalitions have created in such a short time is really phenomenal. Way to go ya’ll!

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.

While our state leaders are living in a fossil-fueled past, we are sitting still and watching as the opportunities to build a clean energy economy pass by. A study by the national Apollo Alliance estimates that North Carolina could gain an additional $6 billion of economic activity and 94,159 new jobs through renewable energy investments. This opportunity far outweighs the paltry estimated 20-30 jobs created by the Cliffside plant. North Carolina needs “green-collar jobs” in the new green economy, not hazardous jobs in a dying industry. The public utilities companies serving our state should begin investing in renewables and energy efficiency now, creating a foundation for economic and job growth far into the future.

Around the country states are standing up against these dirty power plants. They have realized that meeting the power needs of the future using the technology of the past is a losing proposition. In October 2007, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE), denied the air quality permit for the two proposed 700-megawatt generators at the Sunflower Electric Power Corporation plant. This is a landmark decision in which the Secretary of KDHE cited the Massachusetts vs. EPA Supreme Court ruling as the main reason for their decision. “Denying the Sunflower air quality permit, combined with creating sound policy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can facilitate the development of clean and renewable energy to protect the health and environment of Kansans,” said Roderick L. Bremby, Secretary of KDHE.

Earlier this week, Idaho Power Co. abandoned plans to build new coal facilities by 2013. The Idaho based utility “determined that coal-fired generation is not the best technology to meet its resource needs in 2013.”

North Carolina’s elected leaders and public officials should join Kansas, Idaho and the many other states who have been proactive in moving away from the dirty energy of the past and towards a clean energy future.

North Carolina can – and should – do better, especially when cleaner alternatives like energy efficiency, conservation and renewable energy are available.

Join us in solidarity, from wherever you are, as we flood the Governor’s office and the Duke Energy Headquarters in Charlotte with calls, emails and faxes. Urge Governor Michael Easley and Duke CEO Jim Rogers to stop Duke Energy from expanding Cliffside. Demand investment energy conservation and efficiency programs to offset the power this plant would provide, save us money and create jobs. Insist that Duke fund clean, renewable energy for future expansions.

On November 15th, make your voice heard by calling and telling Governor Easley and Jim Rogers that renewable energy is the future of NC and not “clean coal.” Why? Because the future of North Carolina depends on it.

Contact the Governor’s Office TODAY:
Phone: 1-800-662-7952 valid in North Carolina only; (919)733-4240, or (919)733-5811
Fax: (919)715-3175 or (919)733-2120
Email: governor@ncmail.net

Contact Duke Energy Office TODAY:
Phone: (704) 594-6200 (Corporate Office)
Jim Rogers Direct Line: (704) 382-1087
Email: tcwillia@duke-energy.com (Tom Williams, Policy/Energy Efficiency/Environmental Media Relations)
Fax: 704-382-0199

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.

During the past several years it has become clear that the Earth’s climate is nearing important tipping points. Recent global warming has brought the system to a level where only moderate additional climate forcing is needed to cause large climate effects, including loss of all Arctic sea ice, destabilization of ice sheets and thus global sea level rise, and extermination of many species, as well as intensification of regional extremes of the hydrologic cycle, specifically more intense droughts and fires in subtropical areas such the American West, the Mediterranean region including the Middle East, Australia and parts of Africa, and yet, when precipitation occurs, it will tend to occur in heavier downpours, thus increasing the frequency of floods, and storms driven by latent heat will tend to be stronger (that includes tropical storms and thunderstorms).

The upshot is that the scientific community realizes that we are much closer to the dangerous level of atmospheric greenhouse gases than would have been estimated even 3-5 years ago. In turn the implication is that humanity must find some way to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide at a level of, at most, 450 parts per million, and perhaps even significantly less. Based on the amounts of carbon in the different fossil fuels, coal being the largest, an inevitable conclusion is that coal use must be phased out over the next few decades except at truly clean coal power plants that capture and store the carbon dioxide.

In blunter language, it has become clear that in order to avoid creating a different planet with disastrous consequences for humanity and other species, over the next few decades we will need to “bulldoze” old-style power plants that do not capture and store CO2.

Although the legal issues are outside my expertise, officials making decisions today about power plants should be expected to be aware of the implications of climate change for fossil fuel use. It seems unlikely that the public should be held responsible for investments made in new coal-fired power plants, which are surely imprudent if the power plants do not capture and store the CO2.

Sincerely,

James E. Hansen”

Hansen and others have provided ample scientific reasoning to deny Duke the permits to build the new plant at Cliffside. Others at the hearings spoke out on behalf of people who have suffered or have family members who have suffered from the effects of the terrible air pollution in southwestern North Carolina. Amy Carson, a resident of Asheville, spoke of her son whose neurological disorder has been traced to mercury toxicity, a principle pollutant of coal-burning power plants. The proposed Cliffside power plant will annually release hundreds of pounds of mercury into the environment. Children from Charlotte showed the crowds their inhalers and talked about not being able to play outside this summer due to the already dangerous air quality in the metro area.

The room sat in stunned silence as a, short, poignant presentation was projected on a screen relating the scale of CO2 emissions from Cliffside and its effects on efforts being made to reduce global warming impact elsewhere (a la the 2020 Vision). Efforts by Walmart to make all its stores energy efficient, Home Depot to plant 300,000 trees to sequester carbon, North Carolina to get every household to change one lightbulb to a compact florescent, California to dramatically increase automobile mileage and efficiency, all would be negated in a matter of months by the full-time operation of the new Cliffside plant.

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 jobs, new technologies, and new industries are sprouting up in other places, not new coal plants. Meanwhile, North Carolina is left bickering about dirty vs. dirtier.

We cannot stand by and let Duke Energy make a mockery of our future! We have too much to lose!

A third hearing has been organized for Raleigh, next Tuesday, October 23, to allow residents to have their voices heard in the central, highly populated region of the state.

The Department of Air Quality will continue to take written comments about the Cliffside Proposal until October 31st. To take action:
-Mail written comments by October 31 to: Don Van der Vaart, DAQ Permits Section, Re: Cliffside Permit, NC Division of Air Quality, 1641 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, NC, 27699-1641. Email comments to: Donald.vanderVaart@ncmail.net.
-Attend the Raleigh Citizens’ Hearing Tuesday, October 23, 6-8:30 pm
Cameron Village Regional Library
1230 Clarke Street

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.

The North Carolina state motto is “To be rather than to seem.” Duke has done a great job at greenwashing, their own leader Jim Rogers tauting himself as a green CEO. The truth is that Cliffside is a step in the wrong direction – we should not be fooled by these “seemingly” green, but false solutions. We want the real thing. We want better.

The Department of Air Quality will continue to take written comments about the Cliffside Proposal until October 31st. To take action:
-Mail written comments by October 31 to: Don Van der Vaart, DAQ Permits Section, Re: Cliffside Permit, NC Division of Air Quality, 1641 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, NC, 27699-1641. Email comments to: Donald.vanderVaart@ncmail.net.
-Watch for an upcoming online petition
-Attend the Citizens’ Hearing in Charlotte, NC Tuesday October 16th 6 PM Myers Park Baptist Church
-More Info on the Cliffside fight: http://www.cleanenergy.org/programs/hottopic.cfm?ID=71