Evergreene Digest A Journal of Progress for the Rest of Us

pSan Francisco -- I spent inaugural week in DC, but the most interesting stuff happened after I left. Less than a week into the new administration, we can already see the Bush legacy unraveling. President Obama has restored the integrity of the Freedom of Information Act and is bringing the cleansing disinfectant of sunlight to Dick Cheney#39;s Augean stables. And the global gag rule that crippled family planning assistance and increased abortions around the world a href=http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/family-planning-and-the-path-to-progress/ target=_blankhas been canceled./a /ppWhen the House marked up the economic recovery package, the critical changes needed to ensure that wind and solar entrepreneurs could make use of the tax credits even in today#39;s tight credit markets were adopted with support from the new administration -- and with pressure from oilman-turned-renewable-energy-advocate T. Boone Pickens, who a href=http://www.kintera.org/cms.asp?id=683845amp;campaign_id=136295amp;tr=yamp;enString=mmQQTSXTNrKWKbOZJtL5IiOZIoIQLWSKQXQUPqM4InL2IjPZIvFamp;auid=4436782%20 target=_blankmobilized his 1.5 million-person army/a on behalf of the tax credits. /ppAnd in its first response after being freed from the lawlessness of the previous administration, the EPA broke eight years of Bush precedent and a href=http://uk.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUKTRE50N03V20090124 target=_blankopposed a coal-fired power plant permit/a -- this one for the Big Stone II project in South Dakota. As Sierra Club quot;Beyond Coalquot; campaign director Bruce Nilles put it, quot;This is a new day.quot;/ppThen on Saturday, in his remarks to the nation, the President himself laid out a href=http://www.whitehouse.gov/president-obama-delivers-your-weekly-address/more exciting details on his economic recovery package: /a /pblockquotepquot;To accelerate the creation of a clean energy economy, we will double our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy like wind, solar, and biofuels over the next three years. We#39;ll begin to build a new electricity grid that lay down more than 3,000 miles of transmission lines to convey this new energy from coast to coast. We#39;ll save taxpayers $2 billion a year by making 75% of federal buildings more energy efficient, and save the average working family $350 on their energy bills by weatherizing 2.5 million homes.quot; /p/blockquotepFinally, over the weekend, the news broke that President Obama a href=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/us/politics/26calif.html?hp target=_blankwill grant California and the 13 other states/a that have completed the process of adopting California#39;s clean car standards the right to implement them. Another five states are well along into the process, so this means that soon 18 states will have gone ahead of Congress. And Obama has also announced that he will complete the process of setting federal standards that are very likely to be better than what Congress mandated as a minimum./ppThe California waiver was one of the four ingredients in a href=http://action.sierraclub.org/site/PageNavigator/NAT_CleanSlate target=_blankthe Sierra Club#39;s quot;Clean Slatequot; package/a of the most important administrative actions the new President could take to break with the Bush administration. The other three -- regulations on coal-fired power plants, tough interim goals for a climate plan, and an end to lawless dumping of coal-mining waste in rivers and streams -- are still to be done, but let#39;s thank the President for the first step and a href=https://secure2.convio.net/sierra/site/Advocacy?cmd=displayamp;page=UserActionamp;id=1303 target=_blankkeep on urging the next three (http://action.sierraclub.org/cleanslate). br //a/ppAnd just think -- we#39;ve got 1,450 more days to work with -- this is just the beginning./ppI#39;m taking three weeks of vacation in a few days -- so you#39;ll hear only occasionally from me -- but I#39;m leaving with a good feeling about the start we#39;re off to and the change that#39;s underway.font size=2br //font/p

pSan Francisco -- During the past eight years, the idea that people with expertise could make reasonable estimates of quot;what would happen ifquot; has taken a big hit. The Bush administration, of course, was particularly bad at foreseeing consequences in places like Iraq -- so bad that it made light of the whole idea. (quot;Stuff happens.quot;) But the failure to foresee the meltdown of the financial system had the fingerprints of experts from both political parties and several ideological stripes./ppSo does anyone ever get it right? Yes, actually, and in the environmental arena this is particularly true when thoughtful science is brought to bear. President Obama#39;s newly appointed science adviser, John Holdren, is an old friend of mine. I just got a copy of this prediction he made with Peter Gleick 28 years ago -- way back in 1981. Take a look. It turns out that wars in Iraq, the emergence of global warming as a crisis, and the fear of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists were not only in principal foreseeable, they were foreseen:/pblockquotep…the most important environmental liability of oil as an energy source is probably not air pollution or oil spills but the chance that war will be waged over access to the world#39;s remaining supplies. The most important environmental liability of coal is not the occupational toll of mining or the public toll from coal-transport accidents (the most easily quantified impacts of coal), or the direct damage to public health from airborne sulfates (quantifiable in principle, but highly uncertain in present practice); rather it is the threat of global climate change posed by accumulating atmospheric carbon dioxide, the consequences of which (through disrupted agricultural productivity) are potentially enormous but highly resistant to convincing quantification. The most important environmental liability of nuclear fission is neither the routine nor accidental emissions of radioactivity, but the deliberate misuse of nuclear facilities and materials for acts of terrorism and war. (a href=http://www.ajph.org/cgi/reprint/71/9/1046.pdf target=_blankemAmerican Journal of Public Health,/em September 1981/a)/p/blockquotepOf course, what#39;s equally stunning is not that Holdren and Gleick predicted these dangers more than a quarter of a century ago -- it#39;s that so many commentators still deny their relevance today. /p

pWashington, DC -- Forty-five years ago, I stood on the west tip of the Mall and heard the first great speech of my life -- Dr. King#39;s quot;I have a dream.quot; Today I stood on the east end, on the slopes of Capitol Lawn, to hear Barack Obama redeem that dream. quot;The son of the sharecropperquot; that Dr. King envisaged turned out to be the son of an African villager -- but the moment came, I suspect, sooner that any of us dreamed it would during that summer of 1963./ppAnd it was almost unreal that this same historic occasion marked the moment when energy, climate, and the environment emerged from their long status as part of the quot;add on listquot; that our leaders talk about and was instead defined as a central thrust of what we must do as a nation. It#39;s sobering that both milestones came at a time when the nation#39;s old pathways -- economically, environmentally, and in foreign policy -- are crumbling under the weight of their own contradictions and Bush#39;s mismanagement. (And that#39;s all the summing up of the past eight years I#39;ll dwell on.) But the President set the bar for us all and, if the management of his transition is a sample, he#39;s going to ask more of us than any President in my lifetime -- even John Kennedy, whose inaugural address, down to its generational framing, Obama#39;s most resembled./ppAnd judging by yesterday#39;s response to the call by then President-elect Obama for a new spirit of service, I think America is ready. But will the rest of our leaders join us and our new President?/ppStay tuned. /p

pWashington, DC -- Just how green is the new Obama team, anyway? If you read the emWall Street Journal,/em you might think that King Coal was back on top of the roost. The emJournal /emdid a piece this morning headed#0160; a href=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123198153797183981.html target=_blankquot;Coal Industry Digs Itself Out of a Hole in the Capitol.quot;/a (I was interviewed for the piece and am quoted.) But the headline writer seems to have gotten out ahead of the story and the facts. The article points out that both EPA nominee Lisa Jackson and Energy Secretary designate Steven Chu described coal as a part of America#39;s energy future, even though Chu, in particular, has been much harsher in comments he made before his appointment. It also says that in doing so Jackson and Chu were trying to quot;steer towards the center.quot; /ppBut the comments Chu and Jackson made were simply restatements of President-elect Obama#39;s positions during his campaign. Obama always agreed that coal has a future -- if it can be clean, including cleaning up its CO2. But what the emJournal /em(and most of the media) has missed is that truly clean coal is actually the coal industry#39;s worst nightmare, not its salvation. Because if and when scientists figure out a scalable and affordable way to get the CO2 out of the flue gases emitted by coal-fired power plants, public utilities burning coal will be expected to use that technology. And right now they#39;re not even willing#0160; to use the air pollution devices we already have to clean up sulfur, nitrogen, particulates, and mercury from their old power plants. /ppAnd far from digging coal out of the deeper hole created by the disaster at the Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee, the events of the week have been anything but kind. What did Jackson actually say in her hearing about the policies she will pursue? Well, she virtually committed herself to adopting federal regulation of coal ash, something the Clinton administration refused to do back in 2000. She also said that quot;Much of the initial agenda for the EPA administrator and EPA is now set by court decisions,quot; and specifically cited the Supreme Court#39;s April 2007 opinion giving the EPA the obligation to use the Clean Air Act to regulate CO2. She then went on to say exactly what the coal industry feared: quot;The Supreme Court has ordered EPA to make a finding, and EPA has yet to do it. When the finding happens, when EPA makes a decision on endangerment, let me put it that way, it will indeed trigger the regulation of CO2 for this country.quot; She didn#39;t say quot;ifquot; that finding happens -- she said quot;when.quot; /ppThe Bush administration, of course, has hung its whole approach to the problem on ignoring that Supreme Court ruling -- as well as a subsequent EPA Environmental Appeals Board ruling that, yes, a href=http://action.sierraclub.org/site/MessageViewer?em_id=78902.0 target=_blankthe Supreme Court ruling applies to coal-fired power plants./a So today the Sierra Club filed what will be one of our final lawsuits against George Bush, challenging EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson#39;s last-minute issuance of an quot;interpretive memorandumquot; instructing the Agency to ignore its own Administrative Law Judges. quot;EPA Administrator Steve Johnson has acted in brazen defiance our nation#39;s highest court, Congress, his own staff and the law for years,quot; said David Bookbinder, Sierra Club#39;s Chief Climate Counsel. quot;In a new twist, he is now openly and unlawfully ignoring EPA#39;s own judges in order to protect polluters in the waning days of a dangerously irrelevant administration.quot;/ppIf the coal industry really wants to make coal clean, they still have time -- but so far, there#39;s no evidence that they#39;ve learned anything in the past eight years./p

pWashington, DC -- George Bush has one more week in the White House, but the new Congress is up and running. The first fruits of November#39;s election victories came this morning when the Senate broke the first filibuster of the year, on a major new public-lands initiative that would protect 2 million acres of new wilderness. a href=http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=111amp;session=1amp;vote=00002 target=_blankThe vote was 68-24./a /ppThe bill, the Omnibus Public Land Management Act, contains a number of legislative provisions that were blocked in the last Congress. In addition to the more than 2 million acres of new wilderness in nine states, it would establish three new national park units, a new national monument, three new national conservation areas, more than 1,000 miles of national wild and scenic rivers, and four new national trails. It would enlarge the boundaries of more than a dozen existing national park units, and establish ten new national heritage areas./ppThe bill also will protect more than 1 million acres of the Wyoming Range from oil and gas development, and it and includes the Forest Landscape Restoration Act and the San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement Act, as well as important marine-protection bills also held up in the last Congress./ppThe opposition was led by Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, but all the Democrats who voted (as well as an unusual number of Republicans from Western states) voted for cloture because of the broad support in the Senate for public-lands protection./ppDuring the eight years of the Bush administration, for the first time in American history, the extent of quot;protected landscapesquot; in the country actually declined, as Bush stripped conservation protections from millions of acres. We now, it appears, are resuming our historical progress towards protecting our wild legacy. (The bill#39;s not perfect -- it#39;s got two provisions that the Sierra Club opposes and which we hope the House will fix, the most important relating to wilderness areas in Washington County, Utah.)/ppBut the fact that Coburn was able to muster 24 votes to prevent the Senate from even voting on such a popular piece of legislation is a warning sign that Minority Leader McConnell plans to do exactly what his predecessor Bob Dole did after Bill Clinton was elected in 1993 -- filibuster everything as a means of preventing the new President from successfully governing. /p

pWashington, DC -- Here are the first lines of the press release on President-elect Obama#39;s economic-recovery plan:/pdiv style=margin-left: 40px;Today, President-elect Barack Obama delivered remarks at George Mason University where he made the case for urgent action on an American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan that will save or create over 3 million jobs while investing in priorities like health care, energy, and education that will jump-start economic growth. This plan will represent not just new policy, but a new approach to meeting our most urgent challenges.br /#0160;br /President-elect Obama announced that an American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan will jumpstart job creation and long-term growth by:br /#0160;br //divul style=margin-left: 40px;liDoubling the production of alternative energy in the next three years. /li liModernizing more than 75% of federal buildings and improve the energy efficiency of two million American homes, saving consumers and taxpayers billions on our energy bills./li /ul pbr /As he promised in the second presidential debate, Obama has made a green energy future his first priority in helping the economy recover. a href=http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/01/07/obama-energy-efficient-public-buildings-poster-children-for-stimulus-plan/ target=_blankEven the emWall Street Journal/em/a highlighted that Obama used more-efficient public buildings as the poster child for his whole theory of recovery and change. /ppNow it#39;s up to us to a href=https://secure2.convio.net/sierra/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepageamp;page=UserActionamp;id=1355 target=_blankmake sure that Congress supports him,/a and a href=http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/07/BUQT154TGQ.DTL target=_blankalready resistance is building/a#0160; -- not so much resistance to the idea of stimulus as to the idea of combining stimulus with reform. We#39;ve got our work cut out for us. But we#39;ve gotten the leadership we#39;ve been aching for./p

pWashington, DC -- Beginning tomorrow, President-elect Obama will unveil his economic recovery platform. Watch and see how he juggles this challenge: He#39;s trying to be transformational, a change agent -- but he#39;s also trying to keep the existing economic structure from falling apart. This tension was reflected in two statements he made just yesterday. One focused on the need to quot;break the momentum of this recession.quot; That takes him in the direction of greater government investment. The other was that the public, in voting for change, quot;were demanding that we restore a sense of responsibility and prudence to how we run our government.quot; That#39;s a clear call for fiscal restraint./ppThat same dilemma runs through everything he faces. He wants to invest in the infrastructure needed to transform the American economy -- renewable energy; a smart grid; digitized health-care records; high-performance, low-carbon public buildings; innovative transit options. But he needs projects that are quot;shovel readyquot; -- and, too often, what#39;s quot;shovel readyquot; but not already under construction is not the innovative, high payoff stuff but the pork: the bridges to nowhere, the roads to sprawl. /ppHe#39;d probably love to help low-income Americans pay their heating bills by retrofitting their homes for efficiency -- but in the short term he#39;s got to help them pay for those overly high heating bills in a decidedly non-transformative way: by funding subsidies for the fuel they#39;ll need this winter, even if much of that fuel could be saved through retrofitting by next winter. Wind and solar power a big part of his vision of the future -- but they#39;re not easy to scale up fast enough to create jobs in the next six months, because the supply chains that provide the machinery aren#39;t big enough yet. /ppAbove all, Obama#39;s inherited a government badly broken by eight years of abuse -- but that government is the only instrument he has to get the job done. This dilemma isn#39;t new -- Franklin Roosevelt faced it during the Great Depression. In emThe Defining Moment: FDR#39;s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope,/em Jonathan Alter describes how when Roosevelt decided to launch the Civilian Conservation Corps by hiring 250,000 young men to work on the land in a matter of months, he was repeatedly told, quot;it can#39;t be done.quot; FDR refused to take quot;noquot; for an answer: quot;The more his cabinet said no, the more Roosevelt said yes.quot; He gave the job to reluctant Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, who later said quot;he put the dynamite under the people who had to do the job...quot; But Roosevelt did more than motivate -- he dug into the bureaucracy and found the people who could get the job done. He drew organization charts, and personally checked quot;on the location, scope etc. of the camps...quot; /ppAt some point, my gut tells me, Obama will soon face a similar challenge. To combine transformation with recovery, he#39;ll need to break the rules and demand the impossible. To get it, he#39;ll need to engage much more deeply than his cabinet and staff will want -- and that#39;s when America will learn whether President Obama is just good -- or really, really superb. /p

pSan Francisco -- The holidays began with a grim reminder that today's coal industry is anything but clean. The massive (5.4 million cubic yards -- a billion gallons) spill of coal ash at the Kingston Power plant in Tennessee devastated homes, covered hundreds of acres, and threatens rivers, wildlife, and drinking-water sources. And there is plenty of responsibility to share -- a disaster like this doesn't happen without multiple parties behaving irresponsibly -- and they all should have received coal in their stockings. Here's a partial list:/ppstrong1) The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). /strongThis federal government agency, created by Franklin Roosevelt to help the people of the Tennessee Valley, has became a major bad actor based on its careless handling of nuclear power plants (remember a href=http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/brownsferryfactsheet.pdf target=_blankBrown's Ferry?/a) as well as its dirty, polluting, coal-fired power plants (the Sierra Club has repeatedly had to sue the TVA over air pollution) and now its reckless handling of ash and coal waste from those power plants. The waste at Kingston was piled as tall as a six-story building, covered99 acres, and secured in an unlined pond and behind a dike. The TVA knew there were problems and risks at the site a href=http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/01/tennessee-toxic-ash-spill-prevented-fixes-rejected-officials.php? target=_blankbut rejected effective measures to stabilize the waste,/anbsp; apparently because taking remedial action at Kingston would have created pressure to do the same at other ash-storage sites. /ppstrong2) The Environmental Protection Agency. /strongFaced with widespread public concern that the coal ash might be contaminating rivers, particularly given the very high levels of heavy metals typically found in such waste, the agency promptly moved to sample the water and reassured that public that all was well. The EPA reported that its water-quality samples a href=http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/12/29/tennessee.sludge/index.html target=_blankdid find heavy metals in the rivers/a, but that they were below concentrations known to be harmful to humans. The one exception may be arsenic, the agency said in a letter to an affected community. One sample of river water out of many taken indicated concentrations that are very high and further investigations are in progress.nbsp; What the EPA did emnot /emtell the public was that the water-quality samples were not taken in the immediate vicinity of the spill but were emupstream/em from the major source and had no bearing whatever on what was happening to the river downstream!/ppIt wasn't until January 1 that Appalachian Voices, an independent watchdog group, a href=http://www.appvoices.org/index.php?/frontporch/blogposts/preliminary_tests_find_high_levels_of_toxic_chemicals_in_harriman_tn_fly_as/ target=_blankwas able to release its own water-quality results/a from immediately emdownstream /emof the spill. These results were, unsurprisingly, far more alarming than those from the EPA and TVA. They showed that concentrations of eight toxic chemicals range from twice to 300 times higher than drinking water limits. The EPA still hasn't released findings of water-quality sampling it must surely have done from locations closer to the actual spill./ppSo once again we have a cover-up from the federal agency charged with protecting our health./ppstrong3) The Clean Coal Carolers,/strong aka the ad agencies that work for the coal industry. These agencies has been running a very well-heeled, and at times very sophisticated, campaign to persuade Americans that yes, indeed, coal is clean. But they seem to have taken leave of their senses this holidays, putting out a website called a href=http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/12/singing-coal-from-clean-coal-industry.php target=_blankThe Clean Coal Carolers,/a which features such nifty lyrics as: /pdiv style=margin-left: 40px;Frosty the coal man is a jolly happy soul…brThere must be magic in clean coal technologybrFor when they looked for pollutantsbrThere was nearly none to see.br/divpTheir timing couldn't have been more ironic./ppstrong4) LS Power./strong A year ago LS Power teamed up with Dynegy to propose six new coal-fired plants. Dynegy watched what was happening to the market and to public attitudes towards coal and, over the holidays, a href=http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087amp;sid=auUCTML.bn9w target=_blankpaid LS Power $19 million to get out of the joint venture./a Dynegy's stock promptly went UP h by 19 percent, the biggest rise among any of the Samp;P 500 stocks that day, a rise Bloomberg attributed directly to the company's ridding itself of the coal albatross around its neck. LS Power, apparently a slower learner, announced that it would try to bull its way ahead and build the six plants, even in the face of a massive Sierra Club-organized grassroots campaign against all six plants. /ppstrong5) The National Mining Association./strong Faced with a catastrophe, the coal industry simply a href=http://www.platts.com/Coal/News/6068176.xml target=_blankcontinued to deny that anything has changed./a National Mining Association spokesman Luke Popovich, speaking about the spill, glossed over it: We ought to be looking at how do we prevent such accidents in the future, but this is not an indictment of clean coal technology or coal utilization. Perhaps Mr. Popovich should read the clean coal carol above -- and I'll be glad to find him some very visible, easy-to-see pollutants near Kingston, Tennessee./ppstrong6) Lawyers for Duke Energy. /strongA federal judge has a href=http://www.courierpress.com/news/2009/jan/03/dukeenergygoing-backto-court/ target=_blankreopened a lawsuit brought by environmentalists /aagainst Duke over its practice of modernizing power plants without cleaning up their emissions in violation of the Clean Air Act. The Judge ruled that Duke's lawyers had concealed the fact that a witness who testified on their behalf had secretly been paid $200 and hour, a fact that was not disclosed. In addition to reopening the case, the Court ordered Duke's lawyers to appear in court to explain why they should not have their licenses to practice in federal courts revoked. /ppSo does anyone get sugarplums? Well, Dynegy should, for learning. And so should the people of Appalachia, particularly their citizen groups, like Appalachian Voices, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, and individual landowners, for taking on the coal industry and for a href=http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hCuUPH4bNcOtq-0PajMZoG1IbExwD95DAEOO0 target=_blankbringing the lawsuits that may be necessary to return TVA to its original mission/a of restoring, not destroying, the environment of the Tennessee Valley./p