Who Needs Congress?

Is Congress "sclerotic"? That's the word Al Gore described them last week while speaking at the announcement that Los Angeles will be coal-free by 2025. "You know," he said, "we can't pass this and we can't pass that." The vice-president was talking about climate legislation, but Congress has been, shall we say, clogged up in many ways. It's now been four years since it passed a single bill to protect wilderness -- even though many such bills have been introduced during that time by members of both parties.

Fortunately, we don't have to rely on Congress for good news -- whether it's about cleaning up our air or protecting our public lands. So here's some of both kinds.

Start with the welcome announcement that President Obama has designated five new national monuments. They're all worthwhile, but two of them are also significant and long overdue additions to our wilderness heritage. The new Rio Grande del Norte National Monument includes 240,000 acres of northern New Mexico wilderness and represents hundreds of years of Native American and Hispanic culture. It also provides critical habitat for wildlife such as elk, deer, bighorn sheep, and many migratory birds. And the creation of San Juan Islands National Monument in Washington State protects 955 acres of what Obama's proclamation accurately describes as "a dramatic and unusual diversity of habitats with forests, woodlands, bluffs, inter-tidal areas, and sandy beaches." Not to mention orcas.

Both Rio Grande del Norte and the San Juans had strong local support for protection, both will provide major boosts to local economies, and both had previously been proposed as national conservation areas in Congress. The bills went nowhere. What was that word again? Sclerotic.

Here's some more good news that happened in spite of the current Congress, which has been more interested in weakening the Clean Air Act than enforcing it. During the past two decades, the air in our national parks has dramatically improved. But thanks to the Clean Air Act -- and our nation's move away from coal-fired power plants -- mountains are reappearing from the haze and smog. That's good news both for the millions of people who enjoy these parks and for the plants and wildlife that live in them. You can see a slideshow of "before and after" images from researchers at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University.

In honor of Los Angeles, which has cleaned up its air dramatically during the past decade, and which is setting an example for cities across the world with its commitment to renewable energy, here's an example from that city's backyard -- The San Gorgonio Wilderness:

Wow. If we can clean up the air in our parks this dramatically in 20 years, maybe there's hope for getting Congress moving again, too. Send your representative a message supporting action on the dozens of wilderness protection bills that are still stuck in the system. 

A Big One for L.A.

We are going to get the United States off dirty fuels and onto clean energy. Of course, it won't happen overnight nor everywhere at once. Our success will come from winning hundreds, if not thousands, of victories -- big and small.

This is about one of the big ones.

Tomorrow, I'll be in Los Angeles to watch as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa officially announces that, within 12 years, the City of Angels will be entirely coal-free. Currently, L.A. gets almost 40 percent of its power from two old and notoriously dirty out-of-state coal plants -- the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona and the Intermountain Power Project in Utah.

It's impossible to overstate the significance of this announcement from the second-largest city in the U.S. But getting rid of coal is only part of the story. Los Angeles is also leading on clean energy.

Two years ago, L.A. was the first city in California to hit 20 percent clean energy. The city's new CLEAN LA Solar program (which allows local businesses, residents, and organizations to install renewable energy projects and sell the power they generate back to the utility) is the largest program of its kind in the nation. It's also expected to create 4,500 jobs and nearly $500 million in economic development for the city.

More jobs will be created as the city ramps up its already impressive energy-efficiency efforts. When the EPA released its annual ranking of cities with the most Energy Star certified buildings last week, Los Angeles topped the list -- as it has for the past five years.

Certainly, much of the credit goes to Mayor Villaraigosa. When he took office eight years ago, Los Angeles was getting almost half of its power from coal and only three percent from clean energy. When you fly  into LAX and see hundreds of square miles of rooftops soaking up the Southern California sun, it seems obvious that rooftop solar is a huge opportunity for L.A. But it took a mayor with vision and determination to make it happen.

I'm proud to stand by Mayor Villaraigosa as he announces a coal-free Los Angeles on Friday. You can join us -- the event will be live-streamed. In the meantime, let the sun shine!

Sally Jewell: From REI to DOI?

Watching the members of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources question Sally Jewell, who is President Obama's nominee for Secretary of the Interior, brought to mind John McPhee's classic Encounters with the Archdruid. To write that book, McPhee spent a year with David Brower (the "archdruid" of the title), who was the Sierra Club's first executive director. Brower's "encounters" were with, respectively, a mineral engineer, a real estate developer, and a dam builder. In the book, Brower stood for what in 1969 was still a somewhat radical idea: That wild places have value beyond whatever natural resources we can extract from them.

One thing that makes Sally Jewell such an interesting choice for Secretary of the Interior is that, if McPhee were writing his book today, she could have played both roles. On the one hand, she's a former petroleum engineer who worked on the Trans-Alaska pipeline and has actually fracked an oil well. Yet at the same time, she's a lifelong outdoor enthusiast, is the CEO of outdoor recreation retail giant REI (where she's pushed sustainability initiatives while boosting profits), and serves on the board of the National Parks Conservation Association. I suspect that, if confirmed, she will be the first Interior Secretary whose resume includes summiting the highest peak (16,077 feet) in Antarctica. David Brower, an expert mountaineer, would have appreciated that!

Jewell's mountaineering experience in Antarctica was probably good preparation for the reception she received from some Republican members of the Senate committee, who greeted her with everything from wariness to hostility, as if she must surely be a tree hugger disguised behind a petroleum engineer's pocket protector. Would she, they asked repeatedly, have the audacity to stand in the way of drilling and mining public lands? Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia (a Democrat) even tried (unsuccessfully) to trick her into supporting mountaintop-removal coal mining. Through it all, Jewell stuck to the Obama administration's ill-conceived "all of the above" party line on energy, albeit with nods toward "responsible" development of energy resources on our public lands and the importance of clean energy.

Clearly, the struggle between those who want unfettered exploitation of natural resources and those who believe we should protect irreplaceable wild places is as relevant now as it was in Brower's day. But the values articulated by Brower are no longer quite so radical. In fact, they're shared by a strong majority of Americans, especially in the West, where so many of our public lands are found. This year's "Conservation in the West Poll," which is sponsored annually by the Colorado College State of the Rockies Project, found more than three-quarters of Western voters believe environmentally sensitive public lands should have at least some permanent protection from drilling. They also strongly support prioritizing renewable energy on public lands over mining and drilling dirty fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas. Nearly two-thirds labeled themselves as "conservationists," and that includes not just Democrats and independents, but a majority of Republicans.

Incidentally, 83 percent of Western voters agreed that "children not spending enough time in the outdoors" is a "serious problem" -- a belief that Jewell also strongly expressed in her statement to the Senate committee last week. I couldn't agree more.

From everything I've seen, Sally Jewell has the potential to be a great Secretary of the Interior. Based on the Obama's administration's track record of protecting public lands thus far, though, I have to hope this expert kayaker doesn't find herself paddling into the wind.

Unfortunately, this administration has been too slow to act on making sure that frackers, drillers, and miners don't ruin our public lands.  Some of the areas facing threats -- from the greater Grand Canyon to the San Juan Islands to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- could easily be protected by President Obama as national monuments. As the "Conservation in the West" polling data shows, people in the West understand the value of protecting these special places. A national monument generates economic and recreational value for nearby communities, and it keeps doing so in perpetuity. You can't say that for oil fields or uranium mines. In fact, the opposite is true.

"All of the above" energy malarky notwithstanding, I suspect that Sally Jewell understands the true value of public lands better than most folks who've held the job for which she's been nominated. If she does become Secretary of the Interior, let's hope she carries that infectious enthusiasm for the great outdoors into her new role, and spreads it to her boss.

In the meantime, you can ask President Obama to create more national monuments. 

What's That Smell?

You know what natural gas smells like. Or do you? Natural gas is actually odorless. That rotten-egg smell is added for safety reasons. Otherwise, you might not notice a potentially deadly gas leak.

If only we could add a similar smell to the natural gas industry. Too many people -- especially politicians -- aren't paying attention to the dangers of the current "boom" in natural gas development. Here are three big reasons why we should stop new gas drilling before it starts and replace fossil fuels at every opportunity with clean, renewable energy.

It starts with how we get gas out of the ground. Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," is problem #1. Frackers inject a toxic chemical cocktail underground under high pressure to fracture the rock and release the gas. A lot of that fluid comes back up the well as waste and, when it does, it's even more toxic than it started out.

People who live in areas where fracking is happening are outraged. They should be. What guarantee do they have that their drinking water won't be affected by fracking? None. How do they know that toxic wastewater from fracking will be disposed of in a way that ensures it won't contaminate aquifers ten, twenty, or thirty years from now? They don't.

In fact, a ProPublica investigation has identified more than 1,000 cases of water contamination near drilling sites. The risks don't end when the drilling does, either. The question isn't whether abandoned wells and fracking-waste storage sites can leak, but how many will fail, and how soon it will happen. Yet, incredibly, fracking enjoys exemptions from parts of at least seven major national environmental statutes, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act. The rush to frack for natural gas has occurred with maximum greed and minimum oversight.

The next time someone tries to tell you that fracking is safe, ask them why, then, the industry spends so much money getting exemptions to our nation's environmental laws. Ask why the gas industry won't fully disclose exactly what's in the billions of gallons of water they are pumping into wells across the country. Ask why the gas industry fights so hard to enforce gag rules on local hospitals so that doctors can't talk about what chemicals are poisoning gas-drilling communities.

The Sierra Club believes no community should be forced to accept the risks of fracking. That's why we're working with local activists to support moratoriums on fracking in New York, Illinois, and eight other states, as well as the right of local communities, like Longmont and Fort Collins in Colorado, to declare fracking off-limits within their borders.

That work's paying off, too: The New York State Assembly just last week passed legislation that would extend the moratorium on high-volume hydraulic fracturing in the state until May 2015. That victory is a credit to the passionate advocacy of citizens throughout the state who refuse to accept the premise that New York's countryside must be sacrificed for the sake of dirty-fuel profits. Together, we've also won the first round of a legal challenge to Pennsylvania's ACT 13 legislation, which similarly gives communities control over their own fate.

Moratoriums are important because, as currently practiced, fracking simply can't be considered safe. Take what's happening in Illinois. The Sierra Club and many other grassroots groups are fighting hard to get a moratorium in place because the frackers have not proven the safety of their process. But because of massive gas-industry lobbying, we do not yet have sufficient political support. With no regulations in place, and the frackers lining up, our local chapter joined an effort to develop rules that would prevent the worst abuses of the gas industry. And at one level they were successful -- the proposed Illinois rules tighten some of the loopholes found in other states. But here's the thing: Even these improvements do not fully protect the health and safety of the good people of Illinois. In fact, no proposed legislation in any state currently does.

Although problem #1 is how we get gas out of the ground, problem #2 happens far above ground -- in our atmosphere. Natural gas boosters like to claim that it is a climate-friendly energy source, supposedly because it's not as dirty as other fossil fuels. That's like saying it's safer to be attacked with a knife than a gun. If you end up dead, it's a moot point.

It's true that gas doesn't directly create as much carbon pollution as coal when it's burned, but that reality hides a larger story. Natural gas is mostly methane, and methane is an extremely powerful climate-disrupting gas all on its own (more than twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide).

We know that during the drilling and transportation of natural gas, methane leaks, but nobody knows exactly how much, because no comprehensive studies have yet been conducted. The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that leakage rates are around 2.4 percent. However, a range of studies in recent years have called that figure into question. One of the most recent, from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research group, measured methane leakage from a Utah gas field (not even shale gas!) up to an astonishing 9 percent, and that didn't even include leakage from distribution and transmission. Any leakage rate much greater than the EPA’s 2.4 percent would be enough to make gas worse than coal as a climate disruptor.

But even if drillers could magically eliminate all methane leakage, natural gas would still threaten our climate simply because there's so much of it. If we allow the industry to extract and burn all (or even most) of it, then we're looking at irreversible climate disruption. The International Energy Agency estimates that to have a shot at keeping global warming under 3.6°F (which is a risky target considering the damage we've already incurred with a little more than 1°F of warming), we need to keep two-thirds of our known oil, gas, and coal reserves in the ground. That's all the reason we need to go "all-in" on clean energy.

And that points to one of the biggest secrets the gas industry is trying to keep -- we don’t actually need all this fracked gas. Despite the industry's well-funded misinformation campaigns, the fact is that clean energy is already cheaper than dirty fuels in many places. At the retail level, installing solar on your home is cheaper than traditional utility power for many homes in 14 states. At the wholesale level, solar panel prices have dropped 80 percent in the past five years, and new solar projects are beating out new gas and coal in places like California and New Mexico. We installed more solar and wind energy last year in the U.S. than new gas, coal, and nukes combined. Although clean energy is not yet cheaper than dirty fuels in every part of the country, solar and wind have a nice little side benefit: They don't destabilize our climate. Plus, the cost of clean power continues to drop, while the cost of fossil fuels goes up. We need to build on this progress, not undermine it.

That's going to be even tougher if we don't address problem #3 -- the burning desire of the industry to export U.S. natural gas to foreign markets in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG). That would actually make both of the other two problems worse. Opening up more foreign markets to U.S. natural gas would lock us into long-term contracts that will require us to keep on fracking, regardless of how quickly we move to clean energy at home. And owing to the cooling and pressurizing that are required to make LNG, it would also compound the carbon pollution from natural gas.

Although LNG exports would boost the profits of natural gas producers, they would also mean higher energy prices for American consumers and industries and serious problems for our climate. That's why the Sierra Club Beyond Gas campaign is aggressively challenging permits for new LNG export facilities. Like coal-export terminals, these projects are long-term carbon-pollution disasters waiting to happen.

Fracking, climate, and LNG exports are three reasons why we want to keep natural gas in the ground as much as possible, but it's important to note that the Sierra Club is as committed to developing long-term clean-energy solutions as it is to opposing dirty-fuel problems. Instead of replacing one dirty fossil fuel with another, we can move to clean, renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and geothermal. Together with upgrading our energy efficiency, that's what can free us from fossil fuels. We've already seen tremendous progress in the past four years, thanks to renewable energy standards, falling prices for solar and wind, innovative financing, and (early in its first term) critical clean energy support from the Obama administration.

We need to maintain this clean-energy momentum. It's the only way we'll ever achieve "escape velocity" from the fossil fuel planet we've been stuck on for two hundred years. But the "get richer quicker" mentality behind the natural gas boom is trying to slow us down and drag us back to a world that runs almost entirely on dirty fuels.

What's that smell? It's not natural gas -- it's greed.

Keystone XL: Cynicism on the Potomac

You know the news is going to be bad when they bury it at 4pm on a Friday. We dealt with this for eight years during the Bush administration. I never thought we'd be doing it again under John Kerry's State Department.

The State Department's analysis of the Keystone XL pipeline proposal acknowledges that tar sands crude is 17 percent more greenhouse gas intensive than conventional oil. But State says that the overall environmental impacts of the pipeline are limited because, according to their analysis, the oil would be mined and drilled anyway. That's not accurate. Currently, 1.8 million barrels of oil per day are being produced in the tar sands. Permits have already been issued that would allow that extraction to expand to 5 million barrels of oil per day, and the oil industry would like to go even higher. But the oil industry is the first to admit that it needs new pipeline capacity before it can expand:

"When I talk to producers in Alberta, as long as Keystone XL goes ahead, they view that there's pretty sufficient takeaway capacity to get us to late in the next decade."  --Alex Pourbaix, president of energy and oil pipelines, Transcanada

"All of the crude oil export pipelines are pretty much full, running at maximum capacity... And we're not likely to see any meaningful capacity added to these networks until the end of the year."  --Vern Yu, VP of business development and market development, Enbridge, Inc.

So the State Department's analysis is not only inaccurate but also incredibly cynical. By this same logic, why would anyone in North America stop new coal plants from being built, if the coal would just be burned in China and India anyway? Why would we try to replace fracked gas or mountaintop-removal coal with solar and wind, if we're powerless as a country to lead the world to a clean energy economy? This is shockingly defeatist thinking from a bureaucracy that is now led by someone who has been a proven and courageous champion of the climate throughout his career.  

I spent this morning on a press conference with Mayor Michael Bloomberg discussing how we've succeeded in securing the retirement of 142 coal plants over the past couple of years. Although we've begun to see a clean energy turnaround outside the Beltway, we're still looking for a real sign of strong leadership inside Washington, D.C. Instead, we keep hearing about the inevitability of fossil fuels: All the oil will be burned, no matter how extreme; coal and natural gas should be mined, drilled and fracked, then exported if necessary. Too often, we even hear these tired arguments from climate champions who should know better.

President Obama needs to reconcile his soaring oratory on climate with strong action to turn away from dirty fuels like tar sands oil. Today, the State Department made the president's job much more difficult. But it's still not too late to stop this pipeline. We have until mid-April to speak out and show the president that there is a national movement demanding he keep his climate promises. Send your message to the administration today.