Maryland Pumping the Power!

Crosspost from It’s Getting Hot in Here- Caroline Henderson, UMD-College Park

Maryland Power VoteAs a new “Terp”, I’m impressed by the accomplishments University of Maryland has made these past few years for clean energy solutions: playing host for Power Shift 2007, helping pass the carbon neutrality sustainability initiative through the University System of Maryland Board of Regents, collecting thousands of petitions for the Power Vote campaign, and rallying for the Greenhouse Gases Reduction Act (which passed!) in the Maryland legislature.

Thinking back on all the clean energy successes Maryland students have earned, these campaign victories wouldn’t have been as impressive without coordination and resource sharing among Maryland students, enabled by the Maryland Student Climate Coalition. Maryland has been a leader in statewide action and continues to set an awesome example of savvy campus organizing Continue reading

Clean Energy: Betting on the Future

Cross-posted from: here

I have a column out in the Diamondback today about why despite the opposition of the fossil fuel industry, America needs to pass a strong Federal climate bill in order to thrive in the 21st century.

Clean energy: Betting on the future

This past June, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a landmark global warming and clean energy bill called the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Now Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) is doing something exciting for a change by introducing the Senate counterpart to the House bill called the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act.

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Climate, Kyoto, and Council

Cross-posted from: here

There is a very well written column in the Diamondback by a member of UMD for Clean Energy Jesse Yurow, who is also our Outreach Director. Jesse does a good job of explaining how we can’t only rely on the top down approach to make our society more sustainable, but we need to take charge at the community level. The group Jesse alludes to working with the City Council to develop a energy efficiency loan fund policy, is of course..us.

Guest column: Climate, Kyoto and council

Twelve years ago, world leaders signed the Kyoto Protocol, a global treaty that promised to develop strategies to mitigate the perils of global climate change. Epic fail. Without mechanisms of accountability and without the support of Earth’s largest polluter, the United States, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has skyrocketed to about 380 parts per million and is still rising. NASA climatologist James Hansen suggests that, in order to avoid ecological catastrophe, concentrations of carbon dioxide must be reduced and held steady at 350 parts per million (see www.350.org). People sit with their fingers crossed, awaiting climate change solutions to be handed down at the next global summit on climate change this December in Copenhagen.

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Gandhi Today

Gandhi Today

“Somewhere there’s a sweet spot, that produces enough without tipping over into the hyper-individualism that drives our careening, unsatisfying economy. The mix of regulation and values that might make such self-restraint more common is, of course, as hard to create in China as in the United States; far simpler just to bless an every-man-for-himself economy and step aside. But creating those values, and the laws and customs that will slowly evolve from them, may be the key task of our time here and around the world.” Bill McKibben, Deep Economy

140 years today Mohandus Gandhi was born in Gujarat province in India. I didn’t learn this from the New York Times, CNN, or any other mainstream media source. I didn’t learn about it from progressive media outlets, although it is very possible that one or more of them publicized it and I missed it.

I learned about this as a result of being invited to speak yesterday at William Patterson University in northern New Jersey by a professor who organized a program about Gandhi’s relevance for today. Thanks to Balmurli Natrajan, Director of the Gandhian Forum for Peace and Justice, I’ve spent the last few days reflecting on this question.

When I was asked this question directly at yesterday’s forum, what came to mind is this: Gandhi is important, is of continuing relevance, because he wasn’t just a great, if imperfect, leader of India’s successful struggle for independence from colonial Britain. He is important because he understood that it was necessary for him personally, and for his people, to be about the process of personal and cultural change if they were to have a chance of truly lasting, truly revolutionary change, in the best sense of the term.

Gandhi did his best to live a life which reflected the values of justice and love which he understood were central to the teachings of all great spiritual leaders. He went on fasts that were directed not just against the British but for his own people, calling upon them to refuse to mimic English violence and repression in their struggle for independence.

The words of Gandhi that I have used most often over the years are these: “Fasting is the sincerest form of prayer.” I’ve used them as I’ve learned their truth, as I’ve learned about prayer, during long fasts that I’ve undertaken in connection with the campaign to free Leonard Peltier, against the Iraq war and for strong government action to address the climate crisis.

There’s another fast very much in the Gandhian spiritual and political tradition that will be taking place about a month from now, a Climate Justice Fast (http://www.climatejusticefast.org). This is a fast initiated by young people in Australia, Europe and elsewhere specifically directed at the leaders of the world’s governments as they move toward the Dec. 7-18 international meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark to try to come up with a stronger climate treaty than the Kyoto Protocol. As I write, things are not looking good at all that they will do what is needed.

Anna Keenan, youth climate activist and one of the initiators of this fast, wrote yesterday about Gandhi. She began with a quote of his, that “the world has enough for everyone’s needs but not for everyone’s greed.” She went on to “share another great Gandhi quote:

Misleading "Energy Sprawl" Study Pollutes Climate Debate

Misleading “Energy Sprawl” Study Pollutes Climate Debate

This is cross posted from The Huffington Post and iLoveMountains.org

As Congress was returning from the August recess, there wasn’t much news about the climate bill. The only energy-related news breaking through the coverage of the rancorous health care debates and town-hall tea parties was a study on “energy sprawl” published by five staff members of the Nature Conservancy.

“Renewable Energy Needs Land, Lots Of Land” was the headline of an August 28th story on NPR about the study.

“Renewable technologies increase energy sprawl,” was the headline summary on the journal Nature’s website.

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, in an Op/Ed published in the Wall Street Journal, summed up the message that was heard by legislators and the public from the news coverage of the study:

“we’re about to destroy the environment in the name of saving it.”

The interesting thing about the news coverage is that none of it addressed the actual analysis. The study didn’t actually measure the impacts of different energy technologies, but rather compiled estimates from a smattering of reports, fact sheets and brochures from government and industry sources in order to arrive at an acre-per-unit of energy figure for each energy technology. Those figures were then applied to the Energy Information Administration’s modeling of four climate policy scenarios under consideration by Congress.

So the coverage was generated not by the study’s results, but entirely by the assumptions that went into it about the relative impacts of renewable versus conventional energy technologies. Looking at the counter-intuitive findings (wind is 8 times as destructive as coal), it’s no wonder that the media took such an interest.

To put those assumptions in perspective, the habitat impact of the Mount Storm Wind Farm in the first image is assumed to be 25% greater than the impact of the 12,000 acre Hobet mountaintop removal mine in the second image (images are taken from the same altitude and perspective; the bright connect-the-dots feature in the windfarm image is the actual area disturbed):

MtStorm2  Mount Mine Site from 9 miles

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Virginia Coal Industry Moving to Get Vanity Plates

This is cross posted from the Wise Energy for Virginia Blog

This is the vanity plate that the Va Mining Association is pushing for. Virginia law requires the sponsoring organization (in this case the Virginia Mining Association) to collect a minimum of 350 prepaid licenses plate applications. Here is more on this from them.

I’m not even sure what to say about this, its just gross. Maybe we could get “Friends of Sanity” plates? More likely we could get “Friends of the Mountains” or “Stop Mountaintop Removal” plates.

If your interested, email me, seriously: mike@appvoices.org

Want a stronger climate bill? Then pay up!

This past week, on the heels of “Climate Week” and attendant Copenhagen preliminaries in New York, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a nice article in the New Yorker in which she mused over what it would actually take for the US to show real leadership on climate change.

None of the suggestions Kolbert offered at all resembled the Senate climate bill Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry unveiled Wednesday. While an improvement over the Waxman Markey bill, overall the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act falls far short of the high bar of climate leadership the US needs to clear and reminds us that the question we should be asking right now is not what US leadership should really look like. I think we already know the answer to that. No, the question we really have to address is, what is holding US leadership back, and how do we overcome it.

In a word, I think the answer is capital. Oil and coal have deep pockets and they use them well to finance the crippling of federal climate efforts. They’ve been outspending us in the climate fight. And the truth is the only way we’re going to win is by beating them at their own game. Simply put, if we want a stronger climate bill, we’ve got to “buy” it. Continue reading