All Posts Tagged With: "coal"

Brad Heavner at Environment Maryland just sent us this email:

This is not the type of "green job" I want to create through President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan. The big coal companies want to build factories — factories that can cook coal at nearly 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit, producing black, gunky coal tars that they can process into liquid fuels for war planes.

During the process, they’d release far more climate-changing greenhouse emissions than an oil company would to drill, refine and transport an equivalent amount of petroleum.

And they want you and me to pay for it.

That’s right, industry lobbyists have conspired with a few key members of the U.S. Senate to tack on $50 billion in loan guarantees to the president’s recovery plan — $50 billion that, instead of creating green jobs building wind turbines, or installing solar roofs , or weatherizing homes and other buildings, would subsidize things like coal liquefaction and nuclear power plant construction.

What am I missing? Didn’t we just work like crazy to elect a pro-environment majority to set a course for the cleaner, greener energy economy of the future? Why on earth would we want to subsidize not-so-clean coal , especially if doing so accelerates global warming?

That’s not the green recovery we’ve been fighting for. And that’s why I’m hoping you’ll join me and thousands of our friends and supporters in calling on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to keep President Obama’s recovery bill clean and green.

As you might have already guessed, this $50 billion giveaway is buried in the fine print of the Senate’s version of the recovery plan, the better to avoid public scrutiny.

Fortunately, our friends on Capitol Hill tipped us off, and now you can help us scrub the recovery bill clean of this dirty provision.

Click here to tell Sen. Reid to take action today.

Dear Friends,

There are moments in a nation’s—and a planet’s—history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction. We think such a time has arrived, and we are writing to say that we hope some of you will join us in Washington D.C. on Monday March 2 in order to take part in a civil act of civil disobedience outside a coal-fired power plant near Capitol Hill.

We will be there to make several points:
#Coal-fired power is driving climate change. Our foremost climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, has demonstrated that our only hope of getting our atmosphere back to a safe level—below 350 parts per million co2—lies in stopping the use of coal to generate electricity.
# Even if climate change were not the urgent crisis that it is, we would still be burning our fossil fuels too fast, wasting too much energy and releasing too much poison into the air and water. We would still need to slow down, and to restore thrift to its old place as an economic virtue.
#Coal is filthy at its source. Much of the coal used in this country comes from West Virginia and Kentucky, where companies engage in "mountaintop removal" to get at the stuff; they leave behind a leveled wasteland, and impoverished human communities. No technology better exemplifies the out-of-control relationship between humans and the rest of creation.
#Coal smoke makes children sick. Asthma rates in urban areas near coal-fired power plants are high. Air pollution from burning coal is harmful to the health of grown-ups too, and to the health of everything that breathes, including forests.

Continued