Sierra Club Statement on State of the Union

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

January 28, 2014

Contact: Maggie Kao, 202-675-2384 or maggie.kao@sierraclub.org

Sierra Club Statement on State of the Union

Washington, D.C. -- Tonight President Obama gave his 2014 State of the Union address.

Michael Brune, Sierra Club Executive Director, issued the following statement in response:

“Tonight, President Obama laid out his vision of opportunity for our nation and made it clear that our children will hold us accountable for what we do -- or do not do -- to address climate disruption.

“The President has taken significant steps forward by committing to hold dirty power plants accountable for their toxic carbon pollution and to protect our public lands.  We’re also encouraged to hear his plans to help repair and modernize America's infrastructure.  

“Unfortunately, the sum total of the President’s commitments fall short of what American families need to ensure a safe, healthy planet for our children. We can’t drill or frack our way out of this problem.  There is far more potential for good job creation in clean energy like solar and wind, and common sense solutions like energy efficiency.

“Make no mistake -- natural gas is a bridge to nowhere. If we are truly serious about fighting the climate crisis, we must look beyond an ‘all of the above’ energy policy and replace dirty fuels with clean energy. We can’t effectively act on climate and \expand drilling and fracking for oil and gas at the same time.

“To fight the climate crisis, we must resist the temptation to trade away American jobs and public interest policies to foreign corporations. We must walk away from boondoggles like fracked gas. And we must seize on the opportunity and the obligation that the climate crisis has thrust upon us.”

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Leave Carbon in the Ground or Humans Won't Be Around

By Richard Whiteford
Sierra Club Member & Environmental Communications Consultant

Congressional legislators who deny climate change typically focus on free market economics and fail to acknowledge the destructive impacts and associated costs that we experience now from climate driven extreme weather events.

They grouse about the Obama Administration’s request for a 2014 climate change budget of $11.6 billion and the expansion of government agencies to combat climate change. 

While realizing that the Republican party’s platform rests on smaller government and cutting government expenses to the bone, you can’t help wondering why their budget fetish ignores the fact that, according to  the U.S. Treasury Department, between 2011 and the first quarter of 2013 extreme weather events cost us more than $136 billion and that doesn’t count the endless numbers of flood, sand storm, drought, and wild fire damages that happened since then.

They claim that while the President stated a willingness to work with Congress toward enacting a bipartisan, market-based scheme to reduce GHG emissions, the Administration has also taken steps to move ahead with Executive Branch actions to address climate change concerns without Congressional support. 

They express outrage that President Barack Obama has advanced a series of unilateral regulations without appropriate legislative review – including a proper assessment of the cumulative influence, regional effects, and distributional impact of such actions on states and localities – would do more harm than good. 

The Republican Party, while vehemently denying the existence of global warming, ditched every proposed climate bill leaving the Obama no other choice.

At a time when our economy is struggling to recover, increasing the cost of energy and cutting more American jobs is not the right way to move forward.”

Here again, like so many people, these legislators fail to recognize the real issue because their only measure is money, revenues in particular.

The critical issue is: in the past 150 years humans increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere by 117 parts-per-million by burning fossil fuels. For over 800,000 years before that CO2 levels hovered around 280 parts-per-miliion. 

Now because we pump 90 million tons of CO2 up there every 24 hours, CO2 has risen to an average of 397 parts-per-million and actually spiked into the 400 parts-per-million level twice in early 2013. It won’t be long until that will become the average as it continues upward.

Burning fossil fuels has already raised the global temperature from preindustrial levels by 0.8 degrees Celsius (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and we are already experiencing sea level rise, extreme storms, droughts and wildfires around the planet. Even more alarming, 80 percent of the Arctic ice cap melted in the summer of 2012.

Scientist believe that we can’t allow the preindustrial global temperature to rise higher than 2 degrees Celsius or human survival will be very challenging. We are almost half way there now.

The oil, gas and coal industries and their paid henchmen like the Heartland Institute and bought politicians distract the public with red herring issues like claiming that switching to clean energy will hurt the economy, kill jobs, and cause energy shortages while overlooking the job creation that clean energy creates.

What is tragically overlooked by them and the media is that if humans want to survive on this planet we have to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible. Scientists say that we can’t put much more than another 565 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere without disastrous results. At this time, financial analysts calculate that there is already 2,795 gigatons of CO2 contained in readily available oil, gas and coal reserves. 

That’s five times more CO2 than we can afford to burn and expect to survive yet the plan remains drill baby drill; burn baby burn.

There is enough carbon just in the Canadian Tar Sands oil deposits to send the global temperature above the 2 degree limit. That is the reason environmentalists are protesting the Keystone XL Pipe Line. We just can’t afford to burn that carbon and expect to survive.

Again, the critical issue is carbon output. If we keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere jobs and the economy will be a moot point. What good will money be if we don’t live to spend it? 

Our first step should be to tax all carbon at its source of extraction and give that money directly to our tax-paying citizens to cover the increase in price that fossil fuels will go through until we are 100% clean energy and stop burning them. This points to another blind spot. Legislators want to cut subsidies to clean energy but they vote in lock-step to support the $90 billion in tax subsidies that the oil companies get from taxpayers each year in the name of “leveling the playing field.”

The bottom line is, leave carbon in the ground or humans won’t be around.

Originally published in the Patriot News Op-Ed on December 16, 2013. 

Acid Rain: Not Just an 80's Throwback

By Phil Coleman, Co-Editor The Sylvanian

In the 1980’s, the general public became aware of acid rain. Ecologists had been aware of acid precipitation for some time before that, but, as is usually the case, time passed until the term caught on. “Rain” is a better catch word than “precipitation.” And the fact was that sulfur and nitrous oxide compounds were in the air and coming to earth in rain, snow, sleet and plain old dust.

These compounds and a handful of others – especially mercury – were poisoning lakes and stunting trees, as well as giving people health problems. Acid rain was a growing problem because industrial processes were growing. The most serious contributor was the burning of coal. Coal-fired power plants, without adequate emissions cleaning processes, were the worst perpetrators.

Another Look   

But then along came the global climate crisis. Carbon dioxide emissions are affecting the ozone layer, causing the temperature to increase, glaciers to melt, and oceans to rise, and the climate to change, which makes farm land into desert and encourages violent storms. 

Global climate disruption is a serious world problem. And the culprits who produced acid rain are the same culprits who are the principal producers of climate disruption -- coal-fired power plants. Faced with a new problem, the coal industry developed a theory that carbon from coal plants could be “sequestered” by being pumped underground where it wouldn’t harm the ozone layer.

The industry called this “Clean Coal” technology. Sequestering carbon is technically doable if you ignore the expense involved, the energy required to transport and pump the carbon, and the increase in coal burning required to produce a unit of electricity. But the industry loved it. Companies petitioned the government to fund studies and trials to sequester carbon. They didn’t wait for the results: billboards proclaiming “Clean Coal” went up all over coal country.

The industry is much better at advertising than is the environmental community. Our response was vigorous but not as effective. And no one is talking about acid rain anymore.

Juggled

We all admire the juggler who can keep three or more balls in the air at once. But most of us most of the time are not jugglers. We can’t keep two slogans going at once. When we learned about global warming, we lost track of acid rain. The facts haven’t changed, but our attention was diverted. Isn’t it remarkable that the power plant wanted to continue polluting our rivers and lakes and stunting our forests even while they were proclaiming Clean Coal?

Fortunately, not everyone has dropped the ball. Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign has been at work forcing the dirtiest power plants out of business. Using the Clean Air Act, they filed suit just last year against the Homer City, PA, power plant, one of the biggest polluters and one of the slowest to clean up.

The global climate crisis is a serious global problem. But let’s not forget that acid rain is an ongoing and closely-related problem. And Pennsylvania is one of its targets.

Photo Courtesy of glogster.com 

Protect Renewable Energy Policies from Attack

By Tom Schuster, Beyond Coal Campaign Representative

Alternative energy policies are meant to spur innovation and build a clean energy economy, but across the country and right here in Pennsylvania, dirty energy interests are trying to pollute the best clean energy job creator we have.
Cleaner Tier I sources are required to supply at least 8% of our electricity by 2021, which includes 0.5% of total electricity sales from solar.  This law has already helped spur development of enough wind and solar power to more than compensate for the recently retired coal plants in the state, and has helped create thousands of jobs in Pennsylvania's wind and solar industries.

Cleaner Tier I sources are required to supply at least 8% of our electricity by 2021, which includes 0.5% of total electricity sales from solar.  This law has already helped spur development of enough wind and solar power to more than compensate for the recently retired coal plants in the state, and has helped create thousands of jobs in Pennsylvania's wind and solar industries.

Cleaner Tier I sources are required to supply at least 8% of our electricity by 2021, which includes 0.5% of total electricity sales from solar.  This law has already helped spur development of enough wind and solar power to more than compensate for the recently retired coal plants in the state, and has helped create thousands of jobs in Pennsylvania's wind and solar industries.

In 2004, Pennsylvania passed the Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard (AEPS) - our state's most meaningful action to address climate disruption to date. This law requires electricity distributors and suppliers to deliver a minimum percentage of electricity from alternative sources by 2021.  The sources are divided into two tiers.  

Similar laws exist in 30 states, and many have more aggressive targets than Pennsylvania's.  And they are having an impact. So far in 2013, 82% of all new generating capacity, nearly 1900 MW, has been wind and solar. Nine US states now get at least 10% of their electricity from wind, and Iowa and South Dakota both get over 20%.

The recent success of renewable energy has finally caused the fossil fuel interests to see these energy sources as a threat to their polluting business model.  Renewable energy standards are now under attack in many states, as part of a coordinated campaign by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the climate change denying Heartland Institute, and the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity.  Here in Pennsylvania, the Beacon Hill Institute, an ALEC front-group, released a biased report in late 2012 attacking our AEPS, similar to reports in other states that are facing challenges to renewable energy standards. The report's methods and conclusions were thoroughly debunked by Synapse Economics, but the arguments persist.

In April, two bills were introduced in the Pennsylvania House that would weaken or effectively repeal the AEPS in this state. HB 1151 would make energy from garbage incineration eligible for Tier I credits under the AEPS. Tier I credits are reserved for cleaner energy sources, like wind, solar, geothermal, and low-impact hydro power.  This could allow incineration to absorb 30-50% of the credits that would otherwise spur more investment in cleaner sources.  This bill has been referred to the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee.

The other bill would effectively repeal the AEPS entirely if it became law. HB 1073 would make electricity from natural gas an eligible Tier I fuel. Because we already get more electricity from natural gas that the AEPS requires by 2021, the requirement would be meaningless.  This bill has been referred to the House Consumer Affairs Committee.

Incinerators emit extremely toxic air pollutants, like dioxins and furan, and even more carbon and mercury pollution per unit of energy, than coal plants. These pollutants can lead to severe health problems such as cancer, birth defects, and respiratory problems. Composting and recycling can conserve 3-5 times more energy than can be recovered from incineration, so we should be promoting these solutions over burning of trash.  Natural gas, meanwhile, is an established fuel that does not need any government incentives.  It already commands the third-highest market share in the state, and is therefore not an "alternative."  It does not help us address our climate problem because fugitive methane emissions throughout the production and distribution chain make it comparable to coal in terms of total greenhouse gas emissions.  And of course there are the well documented threats to water quality posed by fracking.

Click here to find your Representative and tell him or her that we need to promote true clean energy sources, not garbage incineration or natural gas!