This Ain't No Farmville

The recent profiles published in the Sierra Club's Compass blog of communities affected by toxic coal-ash waste sites can make grim reading. Some excerpts:

Chester, WV: "With no family history of thyroid problems, her endocrinologist has assessed that environmental exposure as the cause and told her, 'You need to move or you will never survive this stuff.'" 

Bokoshe, OK: "Dozens of people in Bokoshe have died of cancer or are battling it right now, and children with asthma wake up in the middle of the night, struggling to breathe, afraid that they're going to die."

Colstrip, MT: "After watching a deer refuse to drink water from a reservoir on a hot summer day last August, Colstrip, Montana area ranchers knew something was wrong. The water, found to contain toxic levels of sulfates, was traced back to a coal ash dump."

Riverside Gardens, KY: "Resident Terri Humphrey expressed a common sentiment when she told a community meeting, 'I believe the companies think that it's already so bad down there that it doesn't matter if they dump something else on us.'"

Coal ash is laced with dozens of toxic chemicals like mercury, selenium, lead, and arsenic. Last week, I toured a local community located next to a coal ash dump outside Asheville, NC -- you could see the ash from the dump site coating the siding and windowsills on houses up and down the street. When it rains, the poisons from the dump site can migrate into local drinking water supplies. Imagine if an international terrorist organization injected arsenic into our drinking water. It'd be an act of war. But for coal-burning utilities, it's just part of the business.

What's even more scary is that most of us live a lot closer to a toxic coal-ash waste site than we realize. There are more than 2,000 of these toxic sites, after all -- all over the country. More than 600 of them are "wet dump" sites like the one that failed catastrophically in Kingston, Tennessee, two years ago -- and forty-nine of those are considered so hazardous that the EPA believes an accident would result in the loss of human life.

So we should all be glad that the people in coal-ash communities are fighting back. The EPA has been holding public hearings around the country since August 30th on how coal-ash waste should be regulated. (Currently, household garbage is regulated more strictly than coal-ash waste.) Not surprisingly, people from communities already affected by toxic coal ash have packed these hearings. I attended the one in Dallas, and people came from Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, and all across Texas, in spite of torrential downpours and floods.

But the folks on the front lines need help from the rest of us. Coal-ash waste may be a local issue, but it's a nationwide local issue. We need to spread the outrage of the people who have been immediately affected to everyone who's at risk -- which includes a lot of people who don't even know yet what toxic coal ash is.

So, besides sending your own comment on coal-ash waste directly to the EPA, why not take a moment to let your friends on Facebook know that you've got their backs? The Sierra Club's Coal Ash Tool will show you which of your Facebook friends live near toxic coal-ash sites -- and make it easy for you both to alert them and tell them how to take action. Because, in this case, what your friends don't know could someday hurt them.

What's So Funny About a Little More Sanity?

Maybe you've heard: Comedy Central's Jon Stewart is holding a "Rally to Restore Sanity" next week. His fellow satirist, Stephen Colbert, will be there, too, leading his "March to Keep Fear Alive." This is all going down on the day before Halloween, right on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Jon Stewart's not a politician (yet), but I suspect he'll get more people -- especially young people -- thinking about how politics work (or don't work) in this country than any elected official could. Stewart says the goal of his rally is to "take it down a notch for America." Sounds reasonable. Of course, with Colbert around, you can be sure things won't get too reasonable. This is the guy, after all, who once serenaded my predecessor, Carl Pope, with a suicidal black bear hand puppet.

I won't be in D.C. that weekend (my kids care more about trick-or-treating than they do about some guys wearing suits on TV). But plenty of Sierra Club supporters will be there and to be sure they're properly attired, we're printing some t-shirts to mark the occasion.

We're taking suggestions for both "sanity" and "fear" messages to put on the shirts, and we'll use the best ones. Give us your smartest (or funniest) ideas by midnight Sunday, and you might win a solar-powered backpack. A few that have caught my eye so far :

• Mountaintop-Removal Mining: Keep the Earth Flat
• Sanity: 100% Renewable.
• I don't like polar bears anyway.
• Save the Earth! Because the thought of domesticating another planet is just exhausting.

Although I won't be there, I hope Jon Stewart achieves his goal. I'm a big fan of sanity. Polluting the air we breathe and the water we drink is just nuts. And when our economy is pulling itself out of a ditch, it’s also a bit batty to stifle investments in solar and wind that would put more people to work than any coal or nuclear plant out there. And I'm happy to argue about how we should deal with runaway greenhouse gas emissions, but shouldn't we all be able to agree it's a prudent goal? I mean, even if you did have doubts about the reality of climate disruption (because you somehow knew more than the best scientists in the world), why not hedge your bets?

So put me down for reason, sanity, and common sense (and just a little bit of fear for the possibility that one day it could be me sitting across from a guy in a suit with a hand puppet).

 

The EPA Steps Up for Appalachia

Today, Lisa Jackson and the EPA sent a clear message to those who would destroy Appalachia's mountains.

Back on September 27, the day of the Appalachia Rising events in Washington, D.C., I said this during a DailyKos livechat: "...it's up to Obama's EPA to put a halt to any further blasting in Appalachia. The biggest test of the Administration's commitment to coalfield residents, Appalachia's mountains -- and basic environmental sanity -- is whether the Administration will approve Arch Coal's Spruce mine MTR mining permit."

So kudos to the EPA, to Administrator Jackson, and to Regional Administrator Shawn Garvin for passing that test by recommending the withdrawal of the mining permit for the Spruce No. 1 Mine in Logan County, West Virginia.

This mother of all mountaintop-removal coal mines would destroy thousands of acres of land, bury seven miles of streams, and end a way of life for too many Appalachian families.

Let's also hear it for the local grassroots heroes who spent more than a decade fighting this largest mountaintop removal coal mine. While the coal industry has been cutting jobs and cutting corners in Appalachia, clean energy and efficiency investments there could generate almost 80,000 jobs by 2030 and save consumers more than $25 billion in energy costs.

Alarmists have tried to turn the EPA into this year's version of 'death panels' by attacking it for fulfilling its mission: protecting the public. Today's recommended veto of the Spruce Mine permit shows that the Obama administration is adhering to science and the rule of law and is listening to the people of Appalachia.

Now EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson needs to take final action to prohibit this mine once and for all. In addition, it's time for the Obama administration to fix the rules to put clear, permanent solutions in place to protect Appalachia from irresponsible mining and to accelerate America's transition from coal to clean energy.

Why Dick Cheney Sticks to Bottled Water

Americans should be able to drink what comes out of their taps without worrying that it will make them sick. So why would anyone insert a loophole into the Safe Drinking Water Act that subverts that basic right?

If you can't guess the answer, a quick history refresher should tip you off.

In 2005, Congress passed an Energy Act that included (thanks to meddling by former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney) an exemption for hydraulic fracturing (fracking) from the protections of the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act. It's called the "Halliburton loophole" and it's a whopper.

Fracking, which I wrote about in August, involves injecting a pressurized mix of water, sand, and highly toxic chemicals directly into gas-rich shale formations. If you combine fracking with horizontal drilling (something that Halliburton pioneered shortly before getting its loophole), you can get exponentially more gas from shale formations, which means exponentially more profit. The U.S. has some very, very big shale formations so, even by Halliburton standards, we're talking about a lot of money.

Back in 2005, the industry argued that fracking was so safe and so harmless, that regulation simply wasn't necessary. It's hard to imagine they really believed it. Chemicals used in fracking fluid are known to cause everything from cancer to depression of the central nervous system. Moreover, the chemicals underneath the earth's surface that may be released due to gas drilling are also known to be harmful to human health and the environment. But just for the sake of argument, let's take a leap of faith and assume that the industry is correct and that gas drilling and fracking really don't pose a significant threat to anyone's water supply. If that's the case, then why doesn't the industry want to operate under the same rules as everyone else? Why are most companies refusing to reveal what's in the fluid, let alone agree to safeguards?

The Halliburton Loophole perfectly represents the outsized arrogance of the big energy companies during a time when oil men were running the country. For the natural gas industry, a gold-rush mentality without common-sense safeguards to protect water quality and human health, has produced a litany of horror stories and safety violations -- not to mention a popular uprising of citizens whose water supplies have been poisoned. 

Times truly have changed, however, since the days when Dick Cheney held his secret meetings with energy execs and a compliant Congress opened the Halliburton Loophole. A bill widely known as "the FRAC Act" has been introduced in both the House and Senate, and if Congress passes it, the Halliburton Loophole will close.  The fossil-fuel lobby, so far at least, is vehemently opposed.

I just don't get that. Yes, we need to use natural gas as our country makes the transition from the dirtiest energy sources (coal and oil) to clean and renewable sources like wind and solar. And yes, if we want that gas, we will have to drill for it. But no, we can't compromise when it comes to protecting our drinking water. People shouldn't have to fear that their wells will be poisoned and communities will be destroyed. We need to close the Halliburton Loophole.

How to Say Never Again

When the BP oil disaster was raging this summer, much of the country was engaged in a conversation about how we could prevent something like this from ever happening again.

If there were an easy answer to that question, we would have found it already. Oil drilling is inherently dangerous and dirty. As long as we keep drilling for oil, there's simply no way to guarantee against another disaster. Sure, we can reduce the odds -- the new drilling regulations announced by the Interior Department last week  might make another accident less likely, but they don't address the fundamental challenge: getting off oil as quickly as possible.

President Obama dedicated his first Oval Office address to make public his commitment to reduce America's oil dependence. He reiterated that commitment in his recent Rolling Stone interview and in his latest weekly address. The President can take credit for making several down payments on this pledge: enacting the first increases in vehicle efficiency in more than twenty years, announcing a rule-making process to regulate emissions from medium- and heavy-duty trucks, and beginning a process to set standards for cars manufactured in 2017-2025. He's justifiably proud of the effect that these will have, but he was also right when he said this: "Is it enough? Absolutely not."

That's just it: There's nothing wrong with making oil rigs safer or cars slightly more fuel-efficient. It's just not enough. Really solving the problem requires a deeper level of thinking about transportation in America.

Currently, more than seventy percent of the oil we consume goes into a transportation system that's been neglected for decades. Much of that oil is used in cars, trucks, and SUVs. We won't ever meet the challenge of breaking America's oil addiction as long as we're tinkering around with modest increases in fuel economy. We need to electrify transportation and put the internal combustion engine in our rearview mirror.

Furthermore, according to a new report from a bipartisan panel of experts, our entire transportation infrastructure will require major investment in the coming decades. If we don't -- our whole economy's at risk.

But let's not just reinvest -- let's also redefine. High-speed rail and other alternatives to cars and trucks demand the kind of forward-looking commitment in this country that they're already getting in China and Europe. This shouldn't be a partisan issue (which is what too many candidates for office this election are trying to make it) -- it should be a patriotic imperative.

At the same time, we need to find ways to reduce the number of vehicle miles traveled and to prioritize transit-oriented development that doesn't promote single-driver long-distance commutes. Cities like Portland, Oregon, with its successful reintroduction of streetcars to revitalize its downtown and its first-in-the-nation bike-commuting stats, have already shown what can be done with the right planning and investment. Let's make it a national mandate.

Most of all, though, corporate and public policymakers need to "think different" about how we get from here to there. We have a choice. We can stick with the old ways and watch as the rest of the world waves goodbye from a bullet train. Or we can reinvent ourselves as a nation that won't be held hostage to gas spikes and gridlock.

If we want to avoid another oil disaster, it's an easy call.