Will Oregon Close the State's Only Coal-Fired Power Plant?

Will Oregon Close the State's Only Coal-Fired Power Plant?
By Joshua Frank, AlterNet
October 28, 2009 Link to full article below

Polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising and the number of fatal hurricanes may be increasing.

The culprit? That big, malevolent unknown we call global warming. It's out there, the scientists warn, somewhere, and it is destroying our little blue planet with every last bit of CO2 we discharge into the atmosphere.

So we purchase energy-efficient appliances, turn off our lights when we exit the room, drive our vehicles less frequently and shop at our local farmers markets. Even so, the struggle to put the breaks on climate change seems like a fruitless venture.

Not so say activists in Oregon who are attempting to chain and lock the doors of the state's sole coal-fired power plant. Located along the scenic Columbia River Gorge in eastern Oregon, the Boardman Power Plant is owned and operated by Portland General Electric and supplies enough power to support the energy consumption of approximately 280,000 homes.

To read the full article: http://www.alternet.org/story/143432/

Violence Escalating Against Anti-Coal Activists

Violence Escalating Against Anti-Coal Activists
by Mike Gaworecki July 23, 2009 Link to full article below

Coal is the dirtiest fuel around, which is why movements are springing up across the country to end our reliance on this supremely destructive fossil fuel. The epicenter of this movement is Appalachia, which once produced two-thirds of America's coal.

These activists are often being met with hostility and even violence by the coal miners and their families, tens of thousands of whom still rely on King Coal to put bread on the table.

The frontline in the fight is no doubt West Virginia, the heart of Appalachian coal country, where a constellation of small, citizen-led groups have been working to stop environmentally devastating mountaintop removal mining. Among them are some of the environmental movement’s biggest heroes: Maria Gunnoe, of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, received a 2009 Goldman Prize (sometimes called the "green Nobel") for her work to stop mountaintop removal in her native West Virginia. She's pursued this work despite harrassment and threats of violence from coal miners.

Link to full article below: http://globalwarming.change.org/blog/view/violence_escalating_against_anti-coal_activists

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A President Breaks Hearts in Appalachia

A President Breaks Hearts in Appalachia
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Friday, July 3, 2009
Link to full article below

Mountaintop removal coal mining is the worst environmental tragedy in American history. When will the Obama administration finally stop this Appalachian apocalypse?

If ever an issue deserved President Obama's promise of change, this is it. Mining syndicates are detonating 2,500 tons of explosives each day -- the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb weekly -- to blow up Appalachia's mountains and extract sub-surface coal seams. They have demolished 500 mountains -- encompassing about a million acres -- buried hundreds of valley streams under tons of rubble, poisoned and uprooted countless communities, and caused widespread contamination to the region's air and water. On this continent, only Appalachia's rich woodlands survived the Pleistocene ice ages that turned the rest of North America into a treeless tundra. King Coal is now accomplishing what the glaciers could not -- obliterating the hemisphere's oldest, most biologically dense and diverse forests. Highly mechanized processes allow giant machines to flatten in months mountains older than the Himalayas -- while employing fewer workers for far less time than other
types of mining. The coal industry's promise to restore the desolate wastelands is a cruel joke, and the industry's fallback position, that the flattened landscapes will provide space for economic development, is the weak punchline. America adores its Adirondacks and reveres the Rockies, while the Appalachian Mountains -- with their impoverished and alienated population -- are dismantled by coal moguls who dominate state politics and have little to prevent them from blasting the physical landscape to smithereens.

To read the full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/02/AR2009070203022.html


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Tennessee coal ash disaster and the myth of “clean coal”

Tennessee coal ash disaster and the myth of “clean coal”
by David Roberts
3 Jun 2009

Stop what you’re doing and proceed immediately to the current issue of GQ magazine, which contains a blockbuster piece of investigative journalism: “Black Tide,” by Sean Flynn. Here’s the slug:

Just days before Christmas last year, an environmental disaster one hundred times the size of the Exxon Valdez (yes, you read that right) unfolded on a riverbank in Eastern Tennessee. A wave of poisonous sludge buried a town ... along with the myth of Clean Coal.

Flynn traces the history of the people and land affected by the Kinston, Tenn. coal ash spill, and uses that as a jumping off point for a searing look at the damage coal is doing to Appalachia. It’s criminal that there have been so few follow-up stories on this disaster, especially given that the problem of the spilled ash remains unsolved and possibly insoluble. (Thus far TVA has ... sprinkled hay on it.) Some 1,500 similar coal ash storage sites remained scattered across the Southeast, largely unregulated.

Flynn’s piece is comprehensive, precise, and devastating.

To read the full article: http://www.grist.org/article/2009-must-read-new-story-on-the-tennessee-coa

'60 Minutes' Blows it on Coal Segment

'60 Minutes' Blows it on Coal Segment
By Tara Lohan, AlterNet
April 27, 2009

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/138605/%2760_minutes%27_blows_it_on_coal_segment/
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/138605/?type=blog
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/138605/

[Read comments:
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/138605/%2760_minutes%27_blows_it_on_coal_segment/#comments ]

Last night the CBS news program "60 Minutes" did a segment about so-called clean coal. Unfortunately, they missed the boat ... big time.

Here's their intro:

The future of our climate might be summed up in one question: what do we do about coal? Coal generates nearly half the electricity in the United States and the world. But it's the dirtiest fuel of all when it comes to carbon dioxide, or CO2, the leading greenhouse gas.

The entire segment focused on whether it was possible to get carbon capture and sequestration technology (CCS) to trap CO2 gases from coal-burning power plants onto all of our coal plants in time to stave off our climate crisis. To begin with, the technology has serious problems and there is no way that it can be implemented in the time frame top scientists tell us we need to drastically reduce our CO2 emissions -- less than 10 years.

Despite all that, the basis of their segment was also flawed from the get go. Cleaning up coal is not the answer to the climate crisis. In fact, what we should be doing is getting rid of it altogether.

In the segment Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy says, "We can't abandon coal. We have to find a way to keep it and use it in the future. And that means the ability to clean it up."

This is a flat out lie. Transitioning away from coal is the best thing we can do. And one of the main reasons why was never addressed by "60 Minutes." Coal can never be clean. Period. We can spend decades and decades as the Earth warms to try to figure out how to capture carbon emissions and find a way to safely dispose of them, but we can never make the process of extracting it from the ground a clean deal.


To read the full article or more by this author: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/138605/

Dirty Coal to Remain World's Top Power Source

Dirty coal to remain world's top power source: IEA
By Nao Nakanishi
Wed Nov 12, 2008

http://www.reuters.com/articlePrint?articleId=USTRE4AB2QB20081112
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE4AB2QB20081112

LONDON (Reuters) - Coal, the dirtiest source of fuel, will remain the world's main source of power until 2030 and nuclear will lose market share, the International Energy Agency said on Wednesday.

Expectations of slower economic growth have led the IEA to downgrade its 2030 world electricity demand forecast to 23,141 terawatt hours (TWh), but the share of coal generated power would rise to 44 percent by 2015 from 41 percent in 2006.

It would stay at that level to 2030.

"Globally, coal-based electricity is projected to rise ... to almost 14,600 TWh by 2030, giving rise to significant increases in associated CO2 emissions," the Paris-based agency said in its World Energy Outlook.

Most of the growth was expected in non-OECD countries, such as China, which the IEA expected soon to become the world's biggest electricity consumer. Its demand for power doubled between 2000 and 2006.

The IEA urged stronger policies for carbon capture and storage (CCS), saying the world was likely to make only a minor contribution in the period.

"Market mechanisms alone will not be sufficient to achieve the demonstration program on the scale required. Another challenge is financing the necessary CO2 transport infrastructure," it said.

Despite a global nuclear renaissance sparked by efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change, the IEA expected nuclear's share in power generation to drop to 10 percent by 2030 from 15 percent in 2006.

"Over the past few years, a large number of countries have expressed renewed interest in building nuclear power plants," it said. "Few governments, however, have taken concrete steps to build new reactors."

CHINA IN THE LEAD

As of the end of August, China topped the list of countries with nuclear power plants under construction, with 5,220 megawatts (MW), followed by India at 2,910 MW and Korea at 2,880 MW.

On a brighter note, the IEA predicted the share of renewable energy to rise to 23 percent by 2030 from 18 percent in 2006.

"Higher fossil fuel prices, increasing concerns over energy security and climate change are expected to encourage the development of renewable energy for electricity," the IEA said.

The agency said high prices would constrain growth in gas-fired generation, although it remained attractive due to lower capital costs and shorter construction time. Its market share was likely to fall slightly from 20 percent.

Looking into per capita electricity demand around the world, the IEA saw a gloomy outlook for some non-OECD countries, despite overall anticipated strong growth.

"A large number of people living there are not expected to have access to electricity even in 2030. India and Africa have the highest number of people in this category," it said.

Per capita electricity consumption in non-OECD countries was likely to rise to almost 2,400 kilowatt hours (kWh) by 2030, but the IEA saw it rising only to 671 kWh in Africa from 518. It would rise to 4,776 kWh in China from 1,788 in 2006.