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McCain Scores Zero on Environmental Report Card

Hillary Clinton Scores 73, Barack Obama 67

John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has scored a stunning zero out of 100 on the latest League of Conservation Voters Scorecard, which rates elected officials on their votes in the most recent Congress.

McCain skipped every one of the 15 votes that the League of Conservation Voters deemed critical measures for the environment, including votes where the Arizona Senator’s yea would have meant passage by a single-vote margin.

McCain has won support from many environmentalists, including Republicans for Environmental Protection, because he has championed action to combat global warming since 2003 and was the only serious presidential candidate to take such a strong position on the defining environmental issue of our time. But his absenteeism on important votes this session calls into question his reputation as a maverick who might buck the party line on some energy and environmental issues.

“Out of 535 Members of Congress, John McCain is the only one who chose to miss every single key environmental vote scored by the League of Conservation Voters last year. When it came time to stand up and vote for the environment, John McCain was nowhere to be found,” said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. “Every other Member who received a zero from LCV last year at least had the temerity to show up and vote against the environment and clean energy time after time. And unlike John McCain, I doubt any of them would claim to be environmental leaders or champions on global warming.”

The Democrats running for president scored better.

Sen. Hillary Clinton scored a 73%, having lost points for missing four votes.

Sen. Barack Obama scored a 67%, having lost points for missing four votes, and for voting against a failed measure to establish a Water Resources Commission that would have prioritized water resources projects in the United States. Clinton voted for the measure.

The rush to build power plants slows as worries grow over global warming, building costs and transportation.
By Judy Pasternak, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 18, 2008

WASHINGTON — America’s headlong rush to tap its enormous coal reserves for electricity has slowed abruptly, with more than 50 proposed coal-fired power plants in 20 states canceled or delayed in 2007 because of concerns about climate change, construction costs and transportation problems.

Coal, touted as cheap and plentiful, has been a cornerstone of President Bush’s plans to meet America’s energy needs with dozens of new power plants. Burned in about 600 facilities, coal produces more than half of the nation’s electricity.

But urgent questions are emerging about a fuel once thought to be the most reliable of all. Utilities are confronting rising costs and a lack of transportation routes from coal fields to generators, opposition from state regulators and environmental groups, and uncertainty over climate-change policies in Washington.

“Coal projects need more regulatory certainty before any new ones are going to get built in the near future,” said David Eskelsen, a spokesman for PacifiCorp, which serves more than 1.6 million customers in six Western states. “The current situation does make utility planning very challenging.”

Just a few weeks ago, PacifiCorp dropped plans for two coal-fired power plants in Utah, citing the many unknowns in assessing the costs and objections on global warming grounds from a major customer: the city of Los Angeles. PacifiCorp said in filings with the state of Utah that it hadn’t found a substitute for production that it will need to bring online in 2012 and 2014.

The setbacks have energy regulators jittery about the prospects for meeting America’s ever-increasing hunger for electricity. They say that any delays in building new capacity — coal-fired or otherwise — add pressure to an already strained electricity infrastructure, raising the prospect of shortages or sharply higher prices.

Energy planners say coal needs to be in the mix because the other mainstay fuels for generating electricity also have serious drawbacks. Natural gas has proved volatile in both price and supply. Nuclear power plants are costly and take much longer to build — and the problem of radioactive-waste disposal remains unsolved.

“We’re very close to the edge,” said Rick Sergel, who keeps a close eye on the grid as chief executive of the quasi-governmental North American Electric Reliability Corp. “We operate under tight conditions more often than ever. We need action in the next year or two to start on the path to having enough electricity 10 years from now.”

This fall, regulators in Kansas and Washington state denied applications for coal plant permits because of concerns about carbon dioxide emissions.

After Republican Florida Gov. Charlie Crist said in October that he wasn’t a “fan” of coal, utilities postponed plans to build coal plants in Tampa and Orlando.

Xcel Energy has told Colorado officials that it plans to close two coal plants and add 1,000 megawatts of wind and solar power, in addition to a new natural-gas plant. The company wants to cut its carbon dioxide emissions 10% by 2015.

In Nevada, Sierra Pacific Resources delayed construction of a coal plant and moved up the schedule for a natural-gas-powered plant instead.

The Tennessee Valley Authority decided in August to add a $2.5-billion unit to a nuclear power plant rather than construct a new coal facility — the other main option — because of the uncertain economics.

Altogether, 53 coal-fired plants were canceled or delayed in 2007, according to Global Energy Decisions, a private consulting firm that tracks power plants for the Department of Energy.

In the near term, coal clearly will remain a part of the American energy picture. Even as the postponements and terminations pile up, plans for new coal-fired power plants continue to advance in New Mexico, Mississippi and Indiana.

Although TXU Energy canceled eight coal-fired power plants it had proposed in Texas, the utility is going ahead with three others.

Last month, an energy industry consortium announced plans to build a government-subsidized power plant in southern Illinois to demonstrate low-emissions coal technology. But the ballooning cost of the FutureGen plant — now projected to be about $1.8 billion, nearly double its original estimated price tag — has drawn criticism from the Department of Energy, which could delay or kill the project by withholding funds.

The growing push in Washington to do something about global warming is a major factor that affects the cost of burning chunks of solid carbon, by far the dirtiest way to manufacture power.

A recent study by the industry-funded Electric Power Research Institute projects that coal power will cost more than nuclear power or natural gas by 2030 if coal’s carbon dioxide problem is solved the way most experts envision. Still unproven, that method involves separating carbon dioxide from the gas stream before it heads out of the stacks, collecting the vapors and then storing them underground. That would also require a new network of pipelines to move carbon dioxide from the power plant to a geologically sound site.

Green Energy the Next Frontier

Great piece by Declan Butler in Nature on the new venture capitalism in Silicon Valley. Green energy, folks. California gold. Butler reports how the venture-capital industry in the US spent $2.6 billion on clean-energy technologies in the first three-quarters of this year. Up from $1.8 billion in 2006, and $533 million in 2005. Google joined the game last week, committing millions more to solar, wind and geothermal, seeking a technology patch to make renewables cheaper than coal. A few weeks earlier, Al Gore’s London-based Generation Investment Management partnered with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in Menlo Park—the green-energy investors that nurtured Amazon, Google and Genentech—to fund global climate solutions.

For the fast-moving entrepreneurs of the [Silicon] [V]alley… the next frontier is the roughly US$6-trillion energy market, where the dinosaurs of power-generation utilities have traditionally invested a pittance in research and development. “Venture capital is exactly what we need to try new things outside the bounds of what the traditional energy companies think is worth doing,” says Vinod Khosla, a veteran entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Microsystems and now heads Khosla Ventures in Menlo Park, one of the most prominent clean-energy venture-capital firms. “There is almost no technology risk-taking in any of the energy companies.” Khosla predicts that within five years there will be a green form of electricity that is cheaper than coal, and cleaner fuels that are cheaper than oil.

Butler also notes that although the US lags far behind Europe’s leaders, Denmark and Germany, in renewables, its venture-capital investments in clean tech now more than double those in Europe.

California scooped $726.2 million of this year’s US clean-tech venture funding, followed by Massachusetts ($292.6 million) and Texas ($149.4 million). Almost $1 billion of US investment went abroad, including a $200-million investment in Brazil’s Brazilian Renewable Energy, which produces ethanol, and a $118-million investment in China’s Yingli Green Energy Holding Company, which makes photovoltaic solar systems.

This is the reason I refuse to surrender hope.

Julia Whitty is Mother Jones’ environmental correspondent. You can read from her new book, The Fragile Edge, and other writings, here.

Greens need to learn how to celebrate their friends and their movement

Posted by David Roberts 02 Dec 2007

I’ve run into a lot of sentiment along the lines of this comment thread — harumphing about how weak and insufficient the impending energy bill is — and it seems crazy and wrongheaded to me.

I urge you to check out this post by Josh Dorner on the post-2000 history of energy bill negotiations. Remember what it’s been like.

Since I started at Grist, I’ve been writing about a Republican president and Congress trying over and over again to pass energy legislation focused on drilling, mining, and doling out subsidies. Their greed and overreach were such that they bungled it again and again, until the 2005 Energy Act, which was a slightly scaled down version of the same old thing.

That act was part and parcel of what energy policy has been in this country more or less since Ronald Reagan walked in the White House: a monomaniacal focus on extraction and supply coupled with generous corporate welfare.

In just over a year, Democrats, with a small majority in the House and a knife-edge margin in the Senate, have pulled together an energy bill that contains:

1. The first CAFE boost since 1975. Even if you don’t think CAFE is crucial energy policy (I don’t), it ain’t nothing, and it is of extraordinary symbolic significance. It’s going to be the headline.
2. A 15% Renewable Energy Standard — a clear statement of support for a new energy direction, echoing and amplifying state-level efforts.
3. Billions in subsidies for clean energy.
4. Boosted energy efficiency and green building standards.
5. Yes, yes, a massive, horrendous boost in biofuels, but even on that front there are environmental safeguards attached that were absent in early negotiations.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

Photo: speaker.gov.

The distance between this bill and where were were a year ago is remarkable. And it is a credit to the leadership.

If you’re determined to think that all politicians are craven simps, go ahead, but it’s hard for me to see what would count of evidence of boldness and commitment on Nancy Pelosi’s part if this doesn’t.

Don’t think she’s been tiptoeing around. Sen. Pete Domenici, the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy Committee, is so pissed off at her he’s pulling out of the energy bill process. He’d gotten the impression that the RES (aka RPS) was off the table, but Pelosi’s pushed it back on. Says the irritated and possibly soon to be steamrolled Domenici:

RPS may not be the only deviation from the negotiated bill text, as the Speaker appears willing to take advantage of the lack of a formal conference committee process and institute other changes in the bill as she sees fit.

You’ll recall that when they were in control, Republican leadership regularly pulled procedural shenanigans that made this look like patty cakes. But still, Pelosi isn’t playing by Queensbury Rules. She’s throwing elbows.

It wasn’t just leading Republicans Pelosi had to outmaneuver. As this NYT story makes clear, she’s also gone head to head with Rep. John Dingell, one of the most powerful committee chairs in recent history, and pulled him in line:

Mr. Dingell said that all sides had compromised to get a good deal on the energy bill, and he took credit for safeguarding the interests of the auto industry. In a telephone interview, he praised Ms. Pelosi and said his disagreements with her had been useful.

…

Outside observers, however, said Mr. Dingell had capitulated after realizing he could not win, especially given high oil prices. “The speaker basically took him on and won,” said Dan Becker, an environmental consultant.

Pelosi’s been fighting hard and smart, and she’s done so out of what everyone who knows her describes as a genuine passion for renewable energy.

Please explain to me why the first reaction to this should be grumbling about how it’s not enough. What kind of political message does that send? What incentive does that give anyone to follow Pelosi out onto this limb?

You know what nobody likes? Nobody likes people who do nothing but judge and condemn and enforce in-group purity and piss on everyone’s shoes, including their friends’ shoes. Nobody wants to make any effort to please those people. Nobody even wants to get stuck in an elevator with them.

Of course this bill is not enough. Nothing will ever be enough, I guarantee you. But it’s a victory, and you know what people do like? People like winning. They like being on the winning team. They like winners. They want to hang around the winners, and act like them, and date them, and name drop them.

So please, take a moment for some strutting. Take strength from this victory, and give strength. Hand out some props for a job well done. Make politicians feel like there’s social and political capital to be gained by going green — if you do that, they’ll be back for more.

The arc of history is bending in our direction. Celebrate it. Tell everyone you know about it. Tell them about this:

Don’t Let Congress Give Away Our Future!

November 9, 2007The future of clean power is in the balance

Congress is about to pass an energy bill that will kill renewable energy development in this country!

Solar Nation hears that the vital 2007 Congressional Energy Bill is about to be compromised almost to death, with no provision for tax credits to help ordinary Americans take advantage of the benefits of solar energy.

We urgently need you, as a Solar Citizen, to contact your representative and senators as soon as possible, and ask them to put your concerns to Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid before Congress gives away YOUR future.

Please click here now to learn more and TAKE ACTION!

This really hit home with me and I thought I would share it with the Ecos out there . Citizenre will be a big part of the shift that needs to happen in this country and every one of you will play a part in making the change. I know this has been a slow process but we are about to round the corner. Hang in there just a little longer and everything will soon come together .

Tim Padden
512-788-5281
Executive Sales Director
www.solardays.com
tim@solardays.com

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world;
indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead

You have to LOVE this .

Educate yourself on what is going on with Nuclear energy. Here is a good video.

by Jessica Kelmon
Oct 10, 2007

WASHINGTON– It’s a hot, sunny afternoon when Pat Green’s song “I love Texas” erupts on the National Mall, signaling success for a bunch of University of Texas at Austin students wearing Stetson-shaped hardhats who are building a full-sized, competition-ready house.  The team is celebrating power – their solar energy is up and running.

Their project – “The Bloom House” – is intended as a solution for people who want to be environmentally friendly but not at the expense of living the good life.

David Bowers, 26, of UT said his team’s goal is to make a party house that happens to be powered by the sun, which explains why there’s an ultra-mod hot tub with attached wok grill on the deck.  A flat-screen TV still sits on the porch because none of the interior décor was done when the power came on.  But it will be.  And if there’s time, they plan to put a see-saw out back.

The team is on deadline – buildings one of 20 solar-powered houses between the Capitol and the Washington Monument for public exhibition Oct. 12 – 20 in what’s being billed as the Solar Decathlon. Despite the competition, the UT team isn’t stressed. <More…>

COMMENTARY: BRUCE HIGHT

Bruce Hight, AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Friday, October 05, 2007Over the past year or so the biggest public fight for Texas’ environmental groups has been to stop construction of 11 new coal-fired power plants in Texas. For now, they’ve mostly won; eight have been canceled.

Now environmentalists face a new threat: NRG Energy Inc. wants to build two more nuclear reactors at an existing nuclear power plant, the South Texas Project, at Bay City.
Opposition is mobilizing for what is likely to be a nationally significant battle, because this is the first application to build a nuclear plant in the United States in 29 years.
But wait: If coal is too dirty and nuclear too dangerous, and if the natural gas supply remains tight and expensive, what fuel’s left to make enough electricity?
Everyone agrees wind and solar are good for the environment. (More…)