Who's the Coolest?

The new "Cool Schools" issue of Sierra magazine has some great stories about what's happening on campuses across the country, and it's inspiring stuff. If you're like me, you'll turn first to see whether your own college made the list of the top 100 greenest schools. The rankings are based on responses to a detailed survey the Club sent out earlier this year to more than 900 colleges and universities, and each school's score is based on factors ranging from the kind of food in the cafeteria to the curriculum and faculty. We did make one big change this year, though: we increased how much of the score is based on how a school gets its energy.

We increased the emphasis on clean versus dirty energy because we know from working with student activists around the country that it's just about the most important environmental investment a school can make. That's why the Sierra Student Coalition started a "Campuses Beyond Coal" campaign last year that targeted schools that still rely on coal power. The goal: to phase out coal and move every single college and university in the U.S. to 100% clean energy as quickly as possible.

Of course, some schools are already there -- and you'll find a bunch of them on the "Cool Schools" list. But what if your own school isn't on this list? Don't panic. That doesn't necessarily mean there's a coal-burning power plant out behind the softball field. Not every school we sent the survey to responded. If you don't see your school on the list, go to their website and check out what they have to say about their sustainability efforts. If you don't see some answers there, ask them why.

As it happens, my own alma mater, West Chester University, isn't on the "Cool Schools" list (they didn't return our survey) and does have a coal-powered steam plant. The good news is that they've already embarked on an ambitious plan to completely replace it with geothermal.  How long before they're ranked in the top 100 greenest schools? I'm crossing my fingers it happens before the next class reunion.

Not So Fast

It's been almost a month since oil last gushed into the Gulf from BP's Macondo well. That's a good thing. We still can't say for sure whether BP has plugged the well for good. The "top kill" seems to be holding, but the last bit of drilling on the relief well for a "bottom kill" was delayed by bad weather.  For now, though, it's looking like the end to this chapter might finally be in sight.

But it would be a big mistake for anyone to start hanging "Mission Accomplished" banners.

Thousands are still out of work in the Gulf as a result of this disaster. Miles of coastal wetlands have been covered with oil, and we don't yet know what long-term damage fisheries and marine life will suffer as a result of the oil and chemical dispersants.

There's a real temptation to paint a rosier picture, though. Last week, the White House reported that three-quarters of the oil that was dumped in the Gulf was now accounted for. "The vast majority of the oil is gone," said Carol Browner on the Today show.  

First of all, there's skepticism among experts about that figure.   A quarter of the "gone" oil is marked as "dispersed," for instance. Dispersing oil is not the same as making it disappear. It's still in the ecosystem, along with the chemicals used to disperse it.

Even if you accept the government's numbers, that still leaves 100 million gallons of oil still in the Gulf, either on the surface, dispersed, or unaccounted for.

That's a lot of oil. It's nearly ten times more oil than was released during the Exxon Valdez spill, which -- twenty years later -- is still doing damage along hundreds of miles of Alaska's shoreline.

Stopping the oil and cleaning it up have always been the immediate priorities. But there's much much more that needs to happen:

BP still needs to address the damage done to the Gulf's economy, communities, shorelines, and marine life as a result of its carelessness.

Our leaders need to make sure that BP stays accountable. The Senate can start by picking up the ball it dropped before its recess and passing a strong oil-spill response bill.

Congress must address the root cause of this disaster by delivering transportation and clean-energy measures that can end our dependence on oil.

And, perhaps most of all, America needs a comprehensive 21st-century energy plan that will create jobs, boost the economy, and avoid any more disasters.

Frack Attack

Fracking. It's a word you probably hadn't heard a year or two ago. This week the Environmental Protection Agency had to postpone a public hearing on the subject in Syracuse, New York, because of concerns that the venue might not be able to accommodate the 8,000 or more citizens expected to show up and voice their passions on the subject.

I've been in New York and Pennsylvania in recent days, and I know how important this issue is to people in these states and others that sit on what's known as the Marcellus Shale -- a geological formation that stretches north from West Virginia. In total, this shale contains what may be the biggest natural-gas deposit in the world. To extract the gas, companies first drill deep wells and then use a technique called hydraulic fracturing -- "fracking" for short.  It's a process that injects, under high pressure, huge amounts of water laced with sand and more than a hundred chemicals into rock formations deep under the ground.

Chemicals and water -- there's your first clue to why people are alarmed. A report released by the Pennsylvania Land Trust this month showed that there have been 1,435 violations of the state oil and gas laws in the past 2.5 years -- at least 952 of which affect the environment. That's more than one a day.

The tiny town of Dimock, Pennsylvania, has more than 60 wells in a nine-square-mile area. Fourteen families have had their drinking water contaminated with methane gas after drilling on or near their property. They'll probably never be able to drink the water from their wells again.

Methane in your tap water is both creepy and dangerous. YouTube clips of people lighting the water from their faucets on fire are bad enough. But a couple of weeks ago, a man in Pennsylvania was severely burned after his well exploded while he was setting up a waterslide in his yard for his kids.

There's a drilling boom sweeping across the Marcellus Shale region, and the gas companies are out of control. If we can't protect our communities and treasured landscapes, then we should not drill for natural gas.

I am cautiously hopeful, however, that strong regulation and government oversight will make drilling safe, because we sure could use the help of natural gas as we push quickly and aggressively toward a truly clean energy future powered by wind, solar, and other renewable resources.

In 2005, the Sierra Club's staff and volunteer leaders agreed climate change should be our highest priority. And stopping climate change requires that we transition from the dirtiest energy sources (coal and oil) to the cleanest. Natural gas, while decidedly imperfect, burns more cleanly than other fossil fuels and, thanks in part to the Marcellus Shale, it's abundant. 

But when I said that the gas companies are "out of control," I meant it literally. If there's one lesson we all learned from what happened in the Gulf of Mexico this year, it's that energy companies have to be regulated. There's just too much money at stake for them to be trusted to do the right thing on their own.

Thanks to the Bush/Cheney Energy Task Force,  however, fracking is specifically exempt from federal regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act -- what's known as "the Halliburton Loophole."  Oh, and by the way, Halliburton, is one of three biggest suppliers of hydraulic-fracturing technology.

Some moves in the right direction are already being made. The New York State Senate just passed a moratorium on natural-gas drilling until next May to give its Department of Environmental Conservation time to finish new permitting guidelines.  And the EPA has begun a two-year, $1.9 million safety review of hydraulic fracturing that could ultimately result in a reversal of the federal government's abdication of oversight over one of our most important energy resources.

But it's not enough. The gas companies are operating with the arrogance of the pre-Gulf BP. They won't disclose the names and concentrations of the chemicals they're injecting into the water table. And they flat out refuse to admit that fracking is dangerous or that drilling should be regulated.

The Sierra Club won't stand for reckless drilling anywhere, whether it's the Marcellus Shale or the Gulf of Mexico. Already, the Hydrofracking Team is one of the most active on the Club's Activist Network. I encourage you to check out the work they're doing, along with the Pennsylvania Chapter and the Atlantic Chapter.

We need to reach a clean-energy future, but let's do it without destroying communities and ecosystems along the way.

Reality TV or Horror Movie?

This summer's most gripping reality TV show took place 5,000 feet below sea level in the Gulf of Mexico and starred plumes of crude oil gushing 24/7. It looked like the broadcast might get canceled at one point, but popular demand (and Congressman Ed Markey) kept it on the air. But now, 107 days later, it looks like the Macondo well might finally get capped for good in the next few days.

I'll be glad when it's finally over, but I won't be ready to celebrate.

Back in April, when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and the oil started flowing, everyone seemed stunned when BP said that, based on the "worst-case scenario," it might take up to three months to permanently stop the Macondo leak by drilling relief wells. Three months?!? What business did anyone have risking a disaster that takes three months to fix?  

But BP was right: This has been a worst-case scenario all along. When the well is plugged, we'll be closing Chapter One of the worst oil spill in U.S. history. But not the last.

The biggest mistake anyone can make is to assume that a disaster like Macondo/Deepwater spill couldn't happen where they live. In reality, oil spills happen all the time and all over the place. Just last month, we saw horrific photos of oil-soaked workers after a shore-to-tanker pipeline exploded in Darian, China. It looked pretty bad, but the Chinese (as you might expect) were quick to play down the severity of the leak. Perhaps a little too quick, as the New York Times reported today:

"…an investigation by the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace and accounts by two experts with authoritative knowledge of what happened make a compelling case for an alternative account. The Greenpeace report, issued last week, said that as the fire from the explosion spread, large quantities of oil were deliberately released from onshore tanks to avert devastating damage to a tank at the storage facility that was filled with dimethylbenzene, a flammable and poisonous gas used to make aviation fuel and solvents. Had the oil fire reached that tank, the report said, the resulting explosion could have released a toxic cloud endangering the entire area.

This week, two experts with detailed knowledge of the accident confirmed that account, with one saying that the cloud could have killed thousands of people."

Thousands dead? Could an accident like that happen at one of the Gulf Coast's ports? Would you trust BP if it said "no way"?

Last week saw another oil disaster -- this time closer to home -- when an Enbridge Energy pipeline burst and dumped nearly one million gallons of crude oil into Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River, which runs directly into Lake Michigan. The oil didn't make to that Great Lake, but it did foul 30 miles of the Kalamazoo and force some residential evacuations because of concerns about air quality.

The pipe that burst, though, is actually part of one of the largest networks of pipeline in the world. Its purpose: to carry dirty tar-sands oil from Canada to distribution points throughout the Midwest. Ultimately, the oil companies want to pipe it all the way to refineries on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

Tar-sands oil belongs in a horror movie, not a TV show. First, you clear-cut ancient boreal forest. Then you expend jaw-dropping quantities of energy and water to grind up the earth and extract tiny bits of crude. The whole process leaves behind toxic lakes so big they can be seen from space. In Alberta, unlucky flocks of ducks that have landed on these lakes have died almost instantly.   

The goal is pipe this nasty crude across Illinois, Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri. Along the way, it would traverse the giant Ogallala aquifer, which produces about 30 percent of the ground water we use for irrigation and provides drinking water to 82 percent of the people who live within its boundaries.

Personally, I don't want to live in a reality TV show, and I don't want my family exposed to the kinds of risks that Big Oil and its supporters in Washington, D.C., seem to think are no big deal. Especially since it's pointless -- we already know how to reduce our dependence on oil enough to make these risks moot. Let's celebrate when we've plugged that hole.

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