February 21, 2011-Naomi Klein one of the sharpest minds today on the geopolitical scene speaks to and audience sponsored by TED.com in a speech she entitled “Disaster Capitalism.”
[youtube id=”0ZhL7P7w3as” w=”640″ h=”400″]
February 20, 2011-By John Blair, valleywatch.net editor.
A new report, released late last week shows that US power plants increased their emissions of climate change causing, carbon dioxide by 5.56 percent in 2010 over that released in 2009.
Duke Energy's Gibson Generation Station, just west of Princeton is the nation's fifth largest CO2 polluter. File photo © 2010 John Blair
The Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) study, titled Getting Warmer showed that Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky ranked 4th, 6th and 7th nationally in the release of the greenhouse gas and that all three significantly increased those releases in 2010.
Texas was first, by far, with gigantic emissions of more than 256 million tons.
SW Indiana had the dubious distinction of having three power plants ranked in the top thirty-seven emitters.
Duke Energy’s Gibson Station was 5th in the nation and AEP’s Rockport station ranked 10th on the big polluter list. TVA’s Paradise Plant in Central City, KY came in at 20th and Indianapolis Power and Light’s Petersburg Station was 37th.
AEP's Rockport plant was listed as the nation's #10 CO2 polluter. Both Gibson and Rockport serve other areas of the state and country while giving ill health to residents of SW Indiana. File Photo ©2010 John Blair
EIP’s Executive Director, Eric Schaeffer tied the report to the recent congressional attack on the Clean Air Act and other health and environmental protections, saying, “The industry’s allies on Capitol Hill are working hard to turn back the clock by repealing environmental standards for coal plants that are already many years overdue. Congress may weaken or even eliminate EPA’s ability to stop coal plant pollution, and block further study of climate change. But even the most powerful legislature in the world is subject to the laws of science, and global warming will not disappear because our politicians choose to pretend that it does not exist. “ Continue reading
February 17, 2011-By Jim Bruggers in the Louisville Courier Journal.
FitzGerald, director of the Kentucky Resources Council, told both committees that he understood lawmakers’ frustration with the EPA. But he noted widespread pollution in eastern Kentucky and said EPA was doing its job. He told the House committee that only the federal government can define interstate commerce, and that even if mined coal never leaves the state, the pollution from it does.—
The Kentucky Senate could vote as early as Friday to make Kentucky a “sanctuary state” from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s reach on coal mining.
It was one of two actions taken Thursday by committees in the General Assembly intended to blunt the enforcement powers of the EPA over the coal industry.
Mountain tops are removed and everything that is not coal is dumped over cliffs, obliterating headwater streams in much of Appalachia. USEPA is supposed to regulate such practices under the Clean Water Act but now Kentucky law makers claim they can be exempt form federal law and should be able to destroy natural streams and drinking water for people if they so choose. Just last year, an Indiana IDEM official made a similar claim to EPA Region 5 regarding a Peabody mine near Carlisle, IN. The IDEM official who made the claim was a former Peabody official. Photo by John Blair
Senate Joint Resolution 99 defying the EPA passed the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee 9-0 on Thursday, and the chairman of the committee and resolution’s sponsor, Sen. Brandon Smith, R-Hazard, said he would press for quick passage in the Senate.
Smith said the EPA was enforcing “scientifically unsubstantiated standards” for water quality, threatening jobs, the state’s relatively low electricity rates and “one of the cornerstones of the state’s economy.”
Meanwhile, the House Natural Resources and Environment Committee Thursday also unanimously passed a bill that seeks to exempt coal mines that sell coal for use in Kentucky from the Clean Water Act.
The bill’s sponsor, committee chairman Rep. Jim Gooch, D-Providence, said if the coal is mined and burned in Kentucky, it should not be considered part of “interstate commerce,” and subject to federal oversight.
The two votes to prop up the coal industry stood in sharp contrast to a rally outside the Capitol in Monday, when hundreds of demonstrators called on lawmakers to pass a so-called “stream-saver bill” that would end the practice of dumping waste rock from surface mining in eastern Kentucky waterways. Versions of that bill have been tied up in Gooch’s committee for several years.
But inside the Capitol on Thursday, lawmakers fumed about the EPA, some citing “state’s rights.” They were encouraged by David A. Gooch, who described himself as a distant cousin of Jim Gooch, and who runs the Pikeville-based trade group, Coal Operators and Associates. (MORE)
February 16, 2011- by Scott Malone at Reuters
The United States’ reliance on coal to generate almost half of its electricity, costs the economy about $345 billion a year in hidden expenses not borne by miners or utilities, including health problems in mining communities and pollution around power plants, a study found.
Illustration © John Blair
Those costs would effectively triple the price of electricity produced by coal-fired plants, which are prevalent in part due to the their low cost of operation, the study led by a Harvard University researcher found.
“This is not borne by the coal industry, this is borne by us, in our taxes,” said Paul Epstein, a Harvard Medical School instructor and the associate director of its Center for Health and the Global Environment, the study’s lead author.
“The public cost is far greater than the cost of the coal itself. The impacts of this industry go way beyond just lighting our lights.”
Coal-fired plants currently supply about 45 percent of the nation’s electricity, according to U.S. Energy Department data. Accounting for all the ancillary costs associated with burning coal would add about 18 cents per kilowatt hour to the cost of electricity from coal-fired plants, shifting it from one of the cheapest sources of electricity to one of the most expensive.
In the year that ended in November, the average retail price of electricity in the United States was about 10 cents per kilowatt hour, according to the Energy Department. Continue reading
Photo © 2011 John Blair
February 16, 2011- by John Blair, valleywatch.net editor.
Walked out of the house this morning and saw some lilac buds anticipating the coming warmth. Then I heard on the radio that temps were to reach into the mid 60s today and tomorrow. It was almost as if I had just gotten a shot in the arm of a wonder drug.
Swept away were the doldrums of gray skies and chills, replaced by sunshine and hope.
When I got to the Valley Watch office, I quickly surveyed the garden area that serves as our front yard, looking for emerging tulips or daffodils that I thought might push through the moist, warm soil, recently frozen and barren.
Somewhat disappointed, I inspected the whole frontage and there it was, the first real sign of spring, a single yellow crocus hidden beneath some dead leaves, barely visible to my observing eyes.
I brushed away the dull brown leaves to reveal a beautiful tiny flower, similar to others I had seen in the past but special because of its message of renewal and change. I knew I have made it through another winter and that soon the world would be full of color, greens, reds, blues and even more crocuses as we transitioned from bleak to excited.
I hope you enjoy this little flower as much as I did.
February 14, 2011-by Ted Evanoff in the Indianapolis Star.
Indiana’s Senate has handed Gov. Mitch Daniels a setback on the big coal gasification plant he wants to see built at Rockport.
Senators rejected a measure that would have cleared the way for a special pipeline sought by investors to move carbon dioxide away from the southwestern Indiana plant to buyers on the Gulf Coast.
The vote last week marked an unusual defeat for the Republican governor, whose party dominates the Senate.
The bill’s Republican sponsor, Sen. Beverly Gard of Greenfield, said some lawmakers who voted against the bill didn’t understand its significance.
Rockport, IN already has two giant industries that emit more than 30 million pounds of toxic chemicals each year, AK Steel and AEP's Rockport power plant. Now, Mitch Daniels and his friends want Indiana gas ratepayers to assume the risk for a new venture will make his friends very rich, indeed. Photo © 2011 John Blair
Without legislation allowing eminent domain for such pipelines, lead investor Leucadia National Corp. doubts it could secure the federal guarantees on construction loans for the $2.6 billion gasification plant it has proposed at Rockport.
This week, the top Leucadia official in Indiana, Mark Lubbers, once a chief adviser to Daniels, is expected to confer with company and legislative leaders about bringing the eminent domain measure back to the General Assembly.
Backers were stunned when the bill failed Tuesday on a vote of 28-21, with 16 of the chamber’s 37 Republicans opposed.
The defeat is considered a setback for investors and a coal industry counting on a grand energy strategy backed by some of the wealthiest names in American finance, including Goldman Sachs and General Electric Financial.
Plans call for rendering millions of tons of sulfurous Midwestern coal into natural gas, using GE gasifiers in some of the proposed plants in Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky.
Linking those gasification plants would be a seamless pipeline. The resulting carbon dioxide waste would flow across half a dozen states to the Mississippi storage caverns of Denbury Resources.
The Texas-based company sells tons of C02, as the waste is called, to gas drillers probing under the Gulf of Mexico.
Indiana would be a key part of the circuit. Carbon dioxide from Tenaska Corp.’s proposed plant in Taylorville, Ill., would run to Rockport and then to Erora Group’s proposed Cash Creek plant in western Kentucky, reports the trade journal Midwest Energy News. (More)
February 12, 2011-by Jeff Biggers in the Huffington Post.
As the nation’s beloved author/farmer philosopher Wendell Berry settled his 76-year-old lanky frame onto the floor of Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear’s office last night, he picked up a copy of The Tempest. But in joining other protesters in this extraordinary sit-in to halt reckless mountaintop removal mining, including a coal miner and inspector who dedicated 40 years of his life to the industry, a Harlan County activist whose brother was killed in a mine, a nurse who has served black lung-affected coal miners for decades, and some of the country’s top Appalachian labor and history scholars, Berry was not taking part in any Shakespeare spectacle.
Wendell Berry has become an icon against the devastation of Mountain Top Removal Mining in recent years. Here, he is speaking to people seeking to get arrested outside the Capitol Hill power plant in March 2009. Photo© 2009 John Blair
When Prospero commands in the classic play, “We are such stuff, as dreams are made on,” Kentuckians, who have lived among the ravages of strip-mining for a century–and mountaintop removal operations since 1970–were making it clear that they can no longer wait for the elusive dream of coalfield justice and democracy in their own homeland of central When Martin Luther King wrote his game-changing letter for the Civil Rights movement on the need for civil disobedience, “Why We Can’t Wait” from the Birmingham, Alabama jail in 1963, the neighbors and families of these same Kentuckians were already in the throes of a growing movement to stop the devastation from unyielding and increasingly lawless strip-mining operations.
While King sought “to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation,” besieged strip-mined residents in Knott County in eastern Kentucky organized their own sit-ins and protests to keep unchecked strip-miners from destroying their historic homelands and hillsides and watersheds. They exclaimed to the world: “We feel we have been forsaken.”
As early as 1965, a 50-car convey of coalfield residents made the same trek as today’s protesters to the governor’s office in Frankfort, and called on him to enact enforceable laws to keep absentee coal companies from “ruining our farms and fields and streams.”
Yesterday’s meeting between the sit-in activists and Gov. Steve Beshear revealed the state’s still astonishing denial of the human, environmental and economic cost of coal placed on the shoulder of its coalfield citizens. Beshear refused to acknowledge any of the impacts from strip-mining, including the widely documented irreversible and pervasive destruction of federally-protected waterways from mountaintop removal dumping. He dismissed the EPA as a meddler in state affairs.
Later in the day, Beshear’s administration was symbolically reprimanded by a circuit court judge in his decision to include citizen participation in a stunning case of coal industry fraud and violation over the Clean Water Act. Beshear’s administration had attempted to dismiss the citizens groups as “unwarranted burdens.”
In one of the most poignant moments in the meeting, eastern Kentucky coalfield resident Rick Handshoe said to the governor: “I pay a higher electric bill than you: I pay my electric bill, and I pay with my family’s health, my nephew’s health. We pay a bigger price. We’re paying with our lives there.” (Go to Original)
February 8, 2011-by John Blair, valleywatch.net editor.
BREAKING NEWS- The Indiana State Senate today rejected a plan by Governor, Mitch Daniels and others to allow the taking of private land for a pipeline proposed to take carbon dioxide away from a proposed new coal plant in Rockport by a vote of 28-21.
Denbury Resources and the Leucadia National Corp. had planned to use the eminent domain power that was proposed by the bill, SB 072, to seize land from private parties for their pipeline but the Senate rejected the bill soundly, including a vote by new Tea Party backed Senator, James Tomes and former supporter of the plant, Richard Young, whose district includes Rockport.
Illustration © 2011 John Blair
Veneta Becker, District 50, (Evansville/Newburgh) voted for the power transfer and has been a supporter of the plant which has required massive government support including State Government intervention into the private commodities market and a federal loan guarantee just to appear economically sound.
Several regional an statewide groups are fighting the plant including Valley Watch, the Sierra Club, Citizens Action Coalition and Spencer County Citizens for Quality of Life.
The plant and its “one of a kind” financial arrangement which more resembles the Red Chinese model of business than that of free enterprise remains subject to approval by the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission where the fore mentioned groups are intervening to stop it. The fate before the IURC is uncertain but it is clear that this is a project long desired by Mitch Daniels and the socialist wing of state government.
February 8, 2011-by Allen D. Kanner in Tikkun Magazine. Editor’s Note: Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism once determined that the free enterprise system is based on responsible commercial entities and informed consumers. In today’s world, it seems that neither is the case. Corporations routinely escape responsibility through shells that protect their owners from prosecution and public scrutiny while consumers at every level seem to wander aimless through a maze of purchasing decisions unaware of the “fine print” that permeated their supposed contracts with those businesses that may have sold them a bill of goods and nothing more.
Mt. Shasta, a small northern California town of 3,500 residents nestled in the foothills of magnificent Mount Shasta, is taking on corporate power through an unusual process — democracy.
The citizens of Mt. Shasta have developed an extraordinary ordinance, set to be voted on in the next special or general election, that would prohibit corporations such as Nestle and Coca-Cola from extracting water from the local aquifer. But this is only the beginning. The ordinance would also ban energy-giant PG&E, and any other corporation, from regional cloud seeding, a process that disrupts weather patterns through the use of toxic chemicals such as silver iodide. More generally, it would refuse to recognize corporate personhood, explicitly place the rights of community and local government above the economic interests of multinational corporations, and recognize the rights of nature to exist, flourish, and evolve.
Mt. Shasta is not alone. Rather, it is part of a (so far) quiet municipal movement making its way across the United States in which communities are directly defying corporate rule and affirming the sovereignty of local government.
Supreme Court Justices Alito and Roberts extended "personhood" rights for corporations as part of a 5:4 "Citizens United" decision in 2010 allowing corporations to spend endlessly on US political campaigns claiming that corporations had the same free speech rights as individuals.
Since 1998, more than 125 municipalities have passed ordinances that explicitly put their citizens’ rights ahead of corporate interests, despite the existence of state and federal laws to the contrary. These communities have banned corporations from dumping toxic sludge, building factory farms, mining, and extracting water for bottling. Many have explicitly refused to recognize corporate personhood. Over a dozen townships in Pennsylvania, Maine, and New Hampshire have recognized the right of nature to exist and flourish (as Ecuador just did in its new national constitution). Four municipalities, including Halifax in Virginia, and Mahoney, Shrewsbury, and Packer in Pennsylvania, have passed laws imposing penalties on corporations for chemical trespass, the involuntary introduction of toxic chemicals into the human body.
These communities are beginning to band together. When the attorney general of Pennsylvania threatened to sue Packer Township this year for banning sewage sludge within its boundaries, six other Pennsylvania towns adopted similar ordinances and twenty-three others passed resolutions in support of their neighboring community. Many people were outraged when the attorney general proclaimed, “there is no inalienable right to local self-government.” Continue reading
February 4, 2011 – by Thomas Miller, IU School of Journalism web page. “I’ve never seen somebody so passionate,” said Ben Simmons. He said Blair’s lecture reinforced the importance of thinking about new stories.
For John Blair, there’s being fair and there’s being honest.
John Blair spoke to IU journalism students on January 26 and 27. Photo by Tara Bender
The Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist visited the classes of lecturers Steve Higgs and Bonnie Layton last week to talk about his career and his organization, Valley Watch, which aims to protect the environment in the Ohio River valley.
In a J261 Online Journalism class, Blair described how online media provide a venue for advocacy journalism.
Like many advocates, Blair started out in traditional journalism, establishing himself as a photojournalist during the 1970s. Working for UPI, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for his photograph of Indianapolis resident Tony Kiritsis holding his mortgage broker hostage at gunpoint.
That same year, he helped form Valley Watch, an Evansville-based advocacy organization that works to protect the Ohio River valley from environmental harm. Blair said he was drawn to advocacy journalism because he wanted to act on what he had learned from the stories he had reported.
“When people become informed it’s really hard for them not to act on that information,” Blair said.
When his daughter was born, he said he realized he would have to change his life.
“It’s hard to be a father and a photojournalist,” said Blair. “I knew I wouldn’t be able be the photojournalist I was after she was born.”
Soon, Blair was running the Ohio Valley Environment, a local environmental paper. Professional pressures also helped shape his career. During a meeting with the national editor of The New York Times, Blair realized his heart was set on being an advocate.
“He read my paper and said you can write for us, but you have to give this up,” Blair said. “At that time, advocacy journalism did not exist.” Blair opted not to take the job.
Since then, Blair and Valley Watch have worked to help make southern Indiana a more environmentally friendly place by lobbying organizations and working with other groups to educate the public about environmentally dangerous situations. They have fought coal and gas companies, and government plans to store potentially toxic materials near communities.
Blair said the group picks its battles carefully. Continue reading
February 1, 2011-Press Release from EarthJustice–
Just weeks after recent headlines about hexavalent chromium, a cancer-causing toxic chemical, contaminated drinking water systems around the U.S., a new report shows that scores of leaking coal ash sites across the country are additional documented sites for such contamination.
Hexavalent chromium first made headlines after Erin Brockovich sued Pacific Gas & Electric because of poisoned drinking water from hexavalent chromium. Now new information indicates that the chemical leaks readily from leaking coal ash dump sites maintained for coal-fired power plants.
Public interest law firm Earthjustice, Physicians for Social Responsibility and Environmental Integrity Project are pushing for federally-enforceable safeguards from coal ash as this new information is released. Also, in a signal that the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee recognizes the hazards of hexavalent chromium exposure, they have called on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson to testify tomorrow on a hearing about the chemical.
Hoosier Energy's Merom coal ash landfill (toward background), near Sullivan, IN made the EarthJustice et al report. Residents nearby have strongly opposed Hoosier Energy's proposal to build yet another landfill due to widespread contamination, File Photo © 2010 John Blair
“Communities near coal ash sites must add hexavalent chromium to the list of toxic chemicals that threaten their health and families,” said Lisa Evans, senior administrative counsel at Earthjustice. “It is now abundantly clear that the EPA must control coal ash disposal to prevent the poisoning of our drinking water with hexavalent chromium.”
Coal ash, the leftover waste from power plants, contains arsenic, lead, cadmium, mercury, selenium and many other chemicals that can cause cancer and damage the nervous system and organs, especially in children. Hexavalent chromium is a highly toxic carcinogen when inhaled, and recent studies from the National Toxicology Program indicate that when leaked into drinking water, it also can cause cancer.
“The cancer risk from hexavalent chromium is one more serious threat to health from coal ash,” said Barbara Gottlieb, Deputy Director for Environment & Health at Physicians for Social Responsibility. “To protect the public from carcinogens and other dangerous substances, the EPA needs to regulate coal ash as a hazardous waste.” Continue reading
February 1, 2011-by John Russell in the Indianapolis Star. Even the Office of Utility Consumer Counselor seems interested.
Consumer advocates are demanding that the state appoint an outside investigator to look into whether Duke Energy Corp. used undue influence to get state approval to build its massive power plant in Edwardsport.
They say Indiana’s regulatory process has been so tainted with inappropriate and secret conversations between Duke employees and state officials that the public has lost confidence.
The Office of Utility Consumer Counselor compared it to jury tampering and said the matter remains suspect, even though several people at Duke and the state have been fired or resigned.
Illustration by John Blair
“If you tamper with one juror, you don’t have to tamper with all 12” to obstruct justice, said Randall C. Helmen, the deputy consumer counselor. He said he would favor a special prosecutor or other independent agent to examine whether Duke overstepped legal boundaries when several executives contacted state regulators to discuss Edwardsport, company hiring decisions and vacation plans.
Timothy Stewart, an attorney with Lewis & Kappes, who represents large industrial customers of Duke Energy — including manufacturers and shopping centers — said that appointing an independent investigator is “the only way the public will ever have confidence in the outcome of this matter.” Continue reading
January 31, 2011 – by John Blair, valleywatch.net editor–
Reports from Australia indicate that Alcoa is looking to build smelters in the Arctic that would use electricity created by damming the melting ice for hydropower to smelt aluminum from bauxite.
In what would be a really unusual irony the hydropower would definitely be “green” but it is making Greenland environmentalists queasy since it is exploiting a problem that Alcoa and other aluminum companies have helped exacerbate.
Already, according to reports, oil companies are drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic off the west coast of Greenland and mining companies have explored deposits of lead and zinc from rock that has been buried under the melting glaciers for eons.
Alcoa Warrick Operations is the largest aluminum smelter in the US. It emitted more than 4 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the SW Indiana environment in 2009. © 2011 John Blair
It is unclear just how the new frontier of aluminum smelting would impact the same industry in the US since most of the electricity required here depends on coal. Currently the Tri-state region surrounding Evansville is home of three giant aluminum smelters.
Alcoa Warrick Operations is the largest smelter in the US.
Jennifer Alvey gave a speech and received a hero's welcome at the Annual Meeting of the Lincolnland Economic Development Corporation one of the primary supporters of Indiana Gasification on January 28. Photo © 2011 John Blair
Because as Director of the Indiana Finance Authority, she just screwed Hoosiers by negotiating a contract with Indiana Gasification that will make Hoosiers pay more for syngas gas than they would have to pay for natural gas for thirty years. But now Jennifer Alvey has taken a job with Clarion Health which just received bonding authority from the Finance Authority she ran, to the tune of $316 million.
by John Blair, valleywatch.net editor
As most of America turns from new coal due to its release of massive amounts of pollution including global warming gases like CO2, the states of Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky are doubling down on a bet that coal’s future is bright.
Those three states have large reserves of high sulfur coal in what is known geologically as the Illinois Basin, an area rich in fossil fuels including oil as well as coal.
When the Clean Air Act of 1990 passed, the fortunes of Illinois Basin coal dived due to the high sulfur content that was addressed in the 1990 law. But due to a series of new environmental regulations and the prospect of new technology to burn and gasify coal, industry supporters are hoping their fortunes will change as a result of recent elections that placed coal supporters and climate change deniers in the majority of the US House of Representatives and increased numbers in the Senate as well as big increases in state legislatures in coal country.
New regulations to force utilities to scrub sulfur dioxide from their stack emissions has breathed new life into Basin coal since power plants are building scrubbers which again allows them to burn high sulfur coal. Those regulations include the now court over-turned rule known as the Clean Air Interstate Rule offered in the Bush Administration’s first term and the rule that has now replaced it, the Transport Rule which requires power plants in the eastern US to significantly reduce their sulfur dioxide emissions.
Utilities are now assessing the economic veracity of placing expensive scrubbers on their old fleet of power plants, especially in light of several other prospective rules that will force coal plants to spend money to control their emissions, including mercury.
Map by John Blair shows existing coal plants as red dots and proposed coal plants as blue dots.
Now, in the Illinois Basin, coal proponents are looking to alter their technology and build plants that gasify coal to produce both electricity and something called syngas that can be used as a substitute for natural gas in a variety of uses.
All three states in the Basin have serious plans being proposed for two gasifiers in each state.
Of course, proponents seem oblivious to the enormous cost of building the plants and the fact that the added cost of capturing and sequestering (CCS) the huge CO2 emissions that come from this process just like the old plants.
The US Department of Energy has estimated that the costs of CCS adds a whopping 50% to the overall capital cost of building such a plant.
Only one of these plants is actually being constructed. That is Duke Energy’s Edwardsport plant in SW Indiana. When it was first proposed, Duke enlisted political support for the plant by claiming it would cost $1 billion and include CCS in 2004. Two years later the declared price rose to $1.2 billion without CCS. When the plant was given permission to build by the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission in 2007, that figure was $1.985 billion and opponents warned that the cost would continue to rise.
Today, the price has risen to just under $3 billion but that does not concern Duke Energy since the deal struck with the IURC allows them to put their Indiana ratepayers at risk for the entire amount, much to the chagrin of customers since their rates will rise by more than 30% to pay for the plant which opponents offer evidence that the plant is not even needed to serve those same customers.
