Moran visits Siemens factory, pushes PTC extension

U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kans.) visited a Siemens wind turbine manufacturing plant in Hutchinson, Kans., Monday and expressed his intention to seek an extension of the federal wind energy production tax credit (PTC) by amending a transportation funding bill that is currently being considered in the Senate (see Bennet, Moran continue bipartisan push to extend PTC, Feb. 16).

According to the Hutchinson News, Moran said he and Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) are also gathering signatures of other Senators on a bipartisan letter in support of a longer extension of the credit. Such an extension could come through a stand-alone “tax extender bill,” though the timing for such a bill is uncertain.  Added Moran, “We’re trying to get out front on this, to do it early because of uncertainty in the industry.”

The Hutchinson plant now employs 350 workers and has brought new manufacturing jobs to a city and state that urgently need them (see video, Siemens nacelle factory comes to life, Hutchinson, KS), but those jobs could disappear if the PTC is not extended soon–turbines and other components require lead time for manufacturing, and with the credit scheduled to expire at the end of this year, the optimum time for an extension is as soon as possible.

Moran commented, “Our goal is to extend it [the PTC] long enough that there is certainty in the industry so it can develop on its own and we can gradually phase it out … There’s no doubt in my mind if we extend it that this is a job creator. More people will be working and paying taxes and helping get our financial house in order … There are members of Congress who feel we ought not to pick winners and losers, to let the markets decide. I believe it’s better to get this industry up and running, then let the country decide … rather than pull the rug out overnight.”

Meeting Announcement Details: Preserving, Protecting, and Enjoying Our Vanishing Natural Spaces

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February 14, 2012

We Ain’t Broke, So Let’s Fix It

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The United States is still the wealthiest nation in the world — we’re far from broke. What’s broken, though, is the way we allocate our considerable national resources. Fixing that would put our economy back on track faster than any “supercommittee” rep could posture and bloviate on Fox News.

That’s the message of The Story of Broke, the latest release from the folks who created the short film internet sensation The Story of Stuff a couple of years ago. In just eight minutes, The Story of Broke makes the case that, instead of obsessing about budget cuts, we should be re-prioritizing how our tax dollars are spent. Why are we giving money to highly profitable polluting industries, for instance, instead of promoting clean-energy solutions that would put more people to work and fewer people in the hospital?

The obvious answer is that political priorities are so distorted by the gravitational influence (read “campaign contributions”) of big corporations that what’s best for “we the people” frequently gets overlooked. (Contrary to what Mitt Romney may have claimed in the heat of the Iowa sun, corporations are not people. I’ve yet to see a corporation get cancer from polluted water or asthma from dirty air, for instance. I don’t think you could pepper spray one, either.)

This corporate influence isn’t subtle — it’s blatant. As The Story of Broke points out, U.S. senators who voted to keep Big Oil subsidies in 2011 received five times more in Big Oil campaign cash than did the senators who voted to end the subsidies. And it’s happening again right now, with Big Oil’s senators trying to force the Keystone XL pipeline on the American people any way they can.

One way to tackle these problems might be to end corporate “personhood” with a constitutional amendment — such amendments have been introduced in both houses of Congress. Let’s face it, though, getting one actually passed could take a while. In the meantime, maybe our elected leaders could show some spine and some decency and start acting in the best interests of the real people they actually represent.

For instance, if Congress eliminated outright subsidies to destructive, polluting, disease-causing fossil-fuel industries, it would certainly help reduce the deficit. But more importantly, it would stimulate development of the clean, renewable energy technologies that will generate more jobs, cut healthcare costs, and enable us to keep the lights on without destroying our environment and climate in the process. What’s not to like about that?

The Story of Broke modestly suggests taking the $10 billion in annual subsidies that go to the oil and gas industries and splitting it between rooftop solar (more than 2 million homes) and home energy-efficiency retrofitting. Great idea! Lots of Americans would get good jobs installing and retrofitting. Even more of us would save money on our home-heating bills. A huge bonus: Our communities would become both cleaner and healthier (which also helps the economy, by the way).

The Story of Broke also spotlights a more insidious kind of government subsidy — not holding corporations responsible. Most Americans believe that “polluters should pay.” You make a mess; you clean it up. It’s one of those commonsense things we all were supposed to learn in kindergarten. Corporations don’t go to kindergarten, though — it’s another one of those “people” things. In the real world, corporate polluters never pay the entire bill for their polluting, whether it’s BP in the Gulf of Mexico or any coal-fired power plant in America.

One astounding measure of how insane this kind of hidden subsidy for fossil fuels has become isn’t even mentioned in The Story of Broke. According to a study published in the American Economic Review this year, the costs to our society from the pollution created by coal-fired power plants are actually greater than the value of the electricity generated by those plants. In other words, coal is a vampire industry that, instead of adding value to our economy, does exactly the opposite. (Yes, coal power literally sucks.)

The Story of Broke has plenty of other examples of how we’re allowing what it refers to as “the dinosaur economy” to hold us back. It’s not a catalog of problems, though. It’s more like a banquet of opportunities. It’s like that old joke about the patient who says, “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” You know the punch line. The best way to start fixing our economy is to stop doing things that hurt us.

Michael Brune is the Sierra Club’s executive director.

Sierra Club 85 2nd St. San Francisco, CA 94105 michael.brune@sierraclub.org Update My Profile | Unsubscribe | Manage My Email Preferences Connect with the Sierra Club: Join Our Activist Network Make your voice heard in our Action Center

We have just 24 hours to send 500,000 letters and stop Keystone XL. Tell Congress: Stop any efforts to revive the dangerous tar sands pipeline.

It’s time to pull out all the stops.

Big Oil is asking Congress to ram through the dirty, dangerous Keystone XL tar sands pipeline — and we have just 24 hours to stop them before the vote.

Together we have stopped Keystone XL before, and we can stop it again. Please take 30 seconds right now to let Congress know that you oppose the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline.

Keystone XL would be such a disaster for clean air and water that it could never pass on the merits alone. That’s why certain members of Congress, after taking Big Oil’s big donations, have attached it to “must-pass” transportation bills in both the House and Senate and are forcing a vote on them this week.

Earlier this month, Sierra Club members and supporters sent over 100,000 letters to the Senate to stop a stand-alone Keystone XL bill — and it worked. That vote was all but imminent, but thanks to your grassroots pressure, it hasn’t happened yet.

Now a coalition of over a dozen environmental groups, progressive organizations, and socially minded businesses — from CREDO Mobile to the Sierra Club to Patagonia — are launching a 24-hour emergency campaign with the goal of sending an unprecedented 500,000 messages opposing Keystone XL.

Please contact Congress today and tell them to stand up to Big Oil by rejecting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

Big Oil’s lackeys in Congress haven’t been able to pass the pipeline by itself, so they are attaching it to critical, unrelated transportation legislation instead. One of these bills would even open up the Arctic to drilling and slash critical funding for public transportation and environmental protections.

These transportation bills should be about new policies and ideas to move us beyond oil, not sweetheart deals that only make our addiction worse. But if we’re going to make that happen, we have to speak up now — we have just 24 hours to send 500,000 messages to Congress.
Draw the line against tar sands. Tell Congress today to block any efforts to revive the dangerous Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

Thanks for all that you do to protect the environment,

Sarah Hodgdon
Sierra Club Conservation Director

P.S. After you take action, be sure to forward this alert to your friends and colleagues!

Please note the highlighted words, as they pertain to the Charlotte area. Based on information contained in this report, Gerdau Ameristeel is the 2nd largest emitter of air borne dioxins, the active agent in Agent Orange for which there is no known safe level. See the map below for schools, parks, and other facilies surrounding this piont source for this deadly toxin.

As environmental health advocates call on Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson to release a long-awaited report on the health impact of dioxins, an analysis by Facing South finds that Southern communities bear a disproportionate burden of industrial dioxin pollution.

A class of toxic chemicals that persist in the environment and build up in the food chain, dioxins have been linked to a host of health problems including immune-system damage, hormone disruption and cancer — and at very low levels of exposure. Environmental dioxin pollution has been declining since the 1970s, but the EPA says current exposure levels “remain a concern.”

That’s why the agency has undertaken a reassessment of the chemicals’ effects on human health. The EPA has said it would release the non-cancer portion of the reassessment this month, with the cancer portion to follow “as expeditiously as possible.” The reassessment has been delayed for decades amid political pressure from industry.

EPA is expected to recommend an intake limit of 0.7 picograms of dioxin per kilogram of body weight per day, The Atlantic reports. (A picogram is one-trillionth of a gram.) The anticipated limit is lower than the 1 to 4 picogram limit set by the European Union for various foods.

Americans get most of their dioxin exposure from eating dairy products, meat, fish, poultry and eggs, which shows why blood dioxin levels are much lower in vegans, who do not eat animal products.

So how does dioxin get into the environment in the first place? Some is produced by natural events such as volcanoes and forest fires. Another source is open trash burning. But most dioxin pollution is a byproduct of industry, with plants producing chemicals, steel, cement and paper topping the list of the heaviest dioxin polluters in the United States. Wood preservation plants are another major dioxin source as some use chemicals similar to dioxins in the preserving process.

The chart below — click on image for a larger version — lists the 30 U.S. industrial facilities that released the highest levels of dioxins and dioxin-like compounds to the air and surface water in 2010, using self-reported data from EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory.

Some observations:

* The South bears a disproportionate burden of dioxin pollution, with 25 of the 30 worst dioxin polluters located in Southern states. There are six major dioxin-emitting facilities in Alabama, five in Louisiana, four in Texas and three in North Carolina.

* The worst dioxin polluter in 2010 was Westlake Vinyls in Calvert City, Ky., which reported releasing over 14,000 grams — more than 31 pounds — of dioxins and dioxin-like compounds to surface waters in 2010 alone. Calvert City, located on a heavily industrialized section of the Tennessee River, has been called a “national sacrifice area” by environmental justice advocates because of its unusually heavy concentration of polluting industry.

* Michigan-based Dow Chemical owns the second and third-biggest dioxin emitters, in Texas and Louisiana respectively. And the Kansas-based conglomerate Koch Industries through its Georgia-Pacific subsidiary owns three of these top dioxin-emitting facilities — two in Alabama and another in Arkansas.

* Several other major industrial emitters of dioxins are owned by foreign corporations, including companies based in Brazil, Germany, Taiwan and Canada.

The February workday was really productive due to the usual enthusiastic hard work of our volunteers.

These hearty individuals weren’t deterred by the light rain and considerably muddy conditions.  A good deal of progress was made against the kudzu field that morning.

Special thanks to the Boy Scouts of Troop 120 and their leaders for their spirited attack on the invasive vegetation.  We were joined this month by a young man working on his community service commitment for school and some retirees who want to use their new found free time to make a difference in our community.  First time volunteers pitched right in beside our regular attendees.

Mecklenburg County Parks and Recreation staffer Laura Domingo will be joining us every workday from now on, providing some tools and supervision.  We learned that pick axes are especially effective for root removal.  Laura shared her knowledge of RibbonWalk’s plants and animals and pointed out activity in the forest since our last visit.

The morning kicked off with coffee and biscuits and a great chance to socialize.  These workdays are wonderful opportunities to meet new people and enjoy being outdoors.  Get your tools, work gloves and boots ready and plan to join us!  The next RibbonWalk workday is Saturday, March 3 from 9:00 to 12:00.  If you would like coffee and conversation before going to work, arrive between 8:30 and 9.  Sierraclub.centpiedchair@gmail.com for more information.

Written by: Renee Reese

Laura Domingo

Frack, Baby, Frack?

By: Allison Fisher

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Barack Obama embraced the development of unconventional natural gas. In step with the theme of the address, the president highlighted both the abundance of the domestic resource and its job creation potential.

President Obama Overstates the Benefits of Natural Gas

In response, anti-fracking groups including the National Grassroots Coalition, United for Action, Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy and Protecting Our Waters immediately challenged the resource supply and job statistics cited by President Obama, saying in an email to supports,

He was referring to industry-produced studies predicting 600,000 jobs as estimates from “experts”, but the real experts — the Bureau of Labor Statistics — predict less than one-fourth that numbers by 2018.

And the president, like the industry, fails to estimate how many jobs will be lost — far too many farmers, for example, have already lost their livelihoods due to extreme pollution and animal deaths caused by shale gas drilling.

The President overstated the amount of shale gas believed to be recoverable: proven reserves will provide 7 to 11 years, and unproven (speculative) reserves may provide up to 20 years, which does not add up to 100. The federal Energy Information Agency just dropped its estimate from Marcellus reserves down to 6 years from its previous estimate of 17 years.

Disagreement about the amount of natural gas that can be recovered from shale and how many jobs could be created by this industry is certainly an important discussion, but it is secondary to the discussion of whether or not extracting this resource can be done safely.

Chemical Disclosure Requirement Would Only Apply to a Small Percentage of Wells

President Obama followed his endorsement of natural gas development by stating that he will require all companies that drill on public land to disclose chemical use “because America will develop this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk.” This proposed disclosure requirement, which is currently making its way through the Department of Interior rulemaking process, seems intended to soothe public anxiety around the practice of hydraulic fracturing or fracking. However, the rule referenced here would apply only to gas drilling on public land.

According to the Bureau of Land Management, only about 11 percent of all U.S. natural gas production occurred on federal land, and the department estimates that hydraulic fracturing is used for about 90 percent of gas wells drilled on public lands.

The vast majority of fracking is done on private land, and only a handful of the 33 states where fracking occurs have adopted some kind of requirement that the chemicals used be disclosed to the public. In fact, according to a report prepared by the Wilderness Society for the Department of Energy’s subcommittee on natural gas, “only one [state] requires full public disclosure of the chemical components of hydraulic fracturing fluids: Wyoming. Three other states (Arkansas, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee) provided some disclosure of chemicals, but not to the public or in sufficient detail.”

Disclosure Requirements are Not Enough

And while it is clear that we need a national standard for disclosure of fracking chemicals, this alone would not safeguard the public against the risks associated with fracking. Many questions about the safety of this practice remain unanswered. There have been more than 1,000 documented cases of water contamination near drilling sites around the country. Meanwhile, the industry is drilling new wells at an alarming pace. According to a ProPublica investigation, between 2003 and 2008, the number of new wells drilled in fracking states increased 42 percent. Aside from the rulemaking for drilling on public lands being undertaken by the Department of Interior, the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency are conducting studies on the safety and impacts of hydraulic fracking.

At the minimum, fracking should be halted before the conclusion of these studies. And it goes without saying, that the president should not be promoting an underregulated and unproven technology as a central component of his energy platform.

Photo courtesy of Flickr

Are you getting the Power2Charlotte eNewsletter? It’s got a ton of information! Sign up to get your monthly email.

The January issue contans information about:

• Project Highlight: Commercial Building Retrofit: Belvedere Family Denistry Building
• NEC Neighborhood Spotlight: Plaza Midwood Holiday Light Balls
• Apply now for the Power2 Live Green Grant
• Project Update: Electric Vehicles Arrive
• Project Highlight: Commercial Building Retrofit: Mechanical Contractors Inc.
• Project Update: Electric Vehicle Charging Station installations begin
• Neighborhood Spotlight: EcoDistrict: Retrofits Energy Efficient House
• Students Learn From Local Energy Leaders at Mayor’s Youth Employment Program Event
• Local Initiatives: CMGC Parking Deck Solar Tree
• Local Initiatives: Airport receives funding to support sustainability efforts
• Mayor’s trip to China
• Did you know?
• Project Update: Center City Recycling for 2011 Totals
• Envision Kiosks; Follow ‘Smart Energy Now’

“Yes, I am the Lorax who speaks for the trees, which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please. I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues. And I’m asking you sir, at the top of my lungs – that thing! That horrible thing that I see!  I am the Lorax, and I’ll yell and I’ll shout for the fine things on earth that are on their way out!”

We have worked very hard for over 8 years and have finally gotten a 15% tree save requirement in Charlotte. We also have worked hard to get and won a commitment for a 50% tree canopy goal for 2050. We  won’t stop work on this issue.

Law gives billboard companies power to cut down trees

Watch the video here

By Robyn McGlohn

CHARLOTTE,  N.C. —