Red, Green, and Blue

Exelon became the latest utility to leave the US Chamber of Commerce over the business group’s opposition to House climate change legislation. California’s Pacific Gas and Electric announced its decision to leave the Chamber in the climate change/cap-and-trade flap last week, quickly followed by New Mexico’s PNM Resources.

The House Waxman-Markey bill has drawn criticism for being too friendly to utility companies, who would be handed a large percentage of the carbon credit allowances created. That criticism has come not only from environmental advocates who are concerned that free allowances will undermine the value of a cap, but also from other business interests who see the credits creating a potential windfall for utilities – especially those who already generate much of their power from cleaner fuels.

The Chamber’s opposition to Waxman-Markey is understandable when you consider that they represent a broad cross-section of business sectors, including many that did not fare as well in the negotiations as Waxman-Markey took shape. For their part, the Chamber has responded to the recent defections by noting that it only opposes the House bill itself, and is not opposed to the idea of climate-change legislation. According to their COO David Chavern, “Congress should do everything it can to promote and incentivize technology development and other policies that allow us to control carbon in ways that don’t trash the economy.” The fact that the Chamber’s site was unavailable on the morning of Exelon’s announcement indicates that the public may not be ready for so nuanced a position.

Might the departures be a harbinger of movement away from the Chamber across the entire utility sector? Or, should they be viewed as evidence of a fracture within the industry? Utilities that rely more heavily on coal and other dirty fuels share the Chamber’s concerns about cap-and-trade’s impact on the cost of their power. By contrast, PG&E, PNM, Exelon and others that are already invested heavily in cleaner fuels can afford to appear green. It may even be profitable.

The Chamber is in the news right now, but the place to watch as the Senate picks up debate of its own bill will be the utility trade group, Edison Electric Institute, which represents the investor-owned companies on both signs of the fuel type divide. EEI has already been engaging Senate leaders in a way that tries to split the difference for its membership: they are not running from Waxman-Markey, but they have some suggestions for improvement on the Senate side.

This dust-up may be all the more costly for utilities, their trade group and the Chamber if long-term discord is fomented for naught. The Senate will need 60 votes to get a bill. It will be tough to get there as Democrats hailing from industrial and agricultural states have the 1993 BTU Tax debacle in their memories and a 2010 election year in their sights. And, with political fallout that could be even more dramatic than the squabbles that are now unfolding in the business community, there may not be a Senate climate bill in 2009. Either way, the utility industry will be left to mend fences. The questions now are whose fences, and how many?

In the midst of a week when climate change finally stole back some of the spotlight that had been hogged by health care reform for months, the Senate fought off a potentially devastating attempt to emasculate the EPA and its recently won power to regulate greenhouse gases. Read the rest of this entry »

Protests from the tiny and good-tempered to the large and tragic this week, starting with the small and apparently ineffectual.

Ineffective Canadian protest

On Wednesday Royal Dutch Shell claimed that the oilsands mine that it operates at Muskeg River in northern Vancouver, Canada, was still running at full speed, despite the second day of environmental protest by Greenpeace activists who had arrived at the mine on Tuesday and prevented the operation of a super-sized dumper truck and a hydraulic mining shovel.  The protest is intended to show that the utilisation of Canada’s oilsands desposits is a contributor to worsening climate change.

Fatal Peruvian protest

In Peru, the government has acted on the financially troubled and environmentally challenged Doe Run Peru smelter. Their response to the closure of the site has been to give the operators a 30-month extension on their previous environmental clean-up deadline.  Production was halted in June, when banks cut off finance to the operating company: U.S.-based Renco Group. Now Renco says that it expects to obtain new loans and restart production now that 30 months have been added to the October deadline. If the plant reopens, around 20,000 jobs could be saved, but La Oroya will remain one of the most polluted towns on the planet for some time to come as spokesman has said Renco requires three years to undertake the clean-up. In unrest at the plant this week, one policeman died and at least three others were injured as protesters demanded the government reopen the smelter.

Polite Scottish Highlands protest

In the Scottish Highlands, a village of 270 persons has managed to obtain a 283 signature petition against proposed quarrying at Muir of Ord. Ord is famous for its distillery which produces whisky and several local businesses have lodged protests on environmental grounds. The entire 140-member Conon Fishings Syndicate has demanded safeguards for salmon fishing, and the Glen Orrin fish farm fears it could be at risk from flooding and reduced water quality. A local fruit farm has said the quarrying will have a detrimental effect on its business and adversely impact local wildlife. These protestors say this adverse effect on local business would counteract potential economic gains from the quarry which will extract sand and gravel from a 22-acre site over a 15 year licence period. Local wildlife like otters, ospreys and red kites may also be affected as their habitats are damaged, especially round local rivers.

Highlands photograph author’s own

Mean Joe Green #74: Old King Coal’s New Nursery Rhyme.
Will we be able to move away from dirty fossil fuels to new clean energy sources in the near future? Not if Old King Coal has his way…

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The UK is undergoing a small crisis of parenting at present. The reason is that there has been an outbreak of E.coli, in one of its most virulent forms: 0157, which causes kidney damage in a small proportion of people contracting it, and the outbreaks have been linked to two city farms visited by children with their parents or as part of school groups.

City Zoos linked to disease outbreak

Forty-nine cases of E.coli have been linked to Godstone Farm in Surrey which has been closed, and its fellow site Horton Park Children’s Farm in Epsom, Surrey has closed voluntarily.  Other sites have closed in Nottingham and Devon. In Exmouth, Devon, a petting farm has closed after three children became ill, although there hasn’t been a direct link from their illness to a visit to the site.

However, in responding to the concerns, there appears to be a division of opinion in the governmental ranks. Professor Hugh Pennington who was chair of the Pennington Group enquiry into the Scottish Escherichia coli outbreak of 1996 and Chairman of the Public Inquiry into the 2005 Outbreak of E.coli O157 in South Wales, says parents should not allow under-fives to touch animals on farms. But the Department of Health (DoH) is maintaining that its current advice still stands: contact with animals is okay if good hand hygiene is undertaken.

Youngsters most at risk of harm

The concern is partly that very young children haven’t learned good hand hygiene and so are not good at washing their hands, and also that they are more prone to complications from E.coli than adults.  But there is a counter-argument being made by some health professionals that a child’s immune system is only built if it is given enough exposure to the wider world and depriving children of this kind of contact actually harms their ability to battle a range of viruses and infections.

One solution could be to provide better systems of hygiene, such as nail brushes that would allow people to ensure that they removed every lurking trace of the bacterium from their hands.  It is impossible to remove E.coli risk entirely from animals or their environment, even though most strains of the disease are very short lived outside the gut which is their natural habitat. So parents must decide whether to give their children the chance to get to meet animals, to improve their knowledge and development and to boost their immune systems through contact with the wider environment, or to reduce the risk of exposure to E.coli by avoiding such experiences as city zoos and agricultural or wild animals, altogether.

City Farm photograph author’s own

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled on Monday that five of the largest power utilities can be called upon to defend themselves in court against allegations that their greenhouse gas emissions create a public nuisance by contributing to global warming.

Siding with a coalition of eight states, three land trusts, and the city of New York, the court made its long awaited ruling, reinstating the lawsuit State of Connecticut v. American Electric Power Co (pdf) brought under federal common law. The suit was rejected by a lower court judge in 2004.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thursday this week seems to have been a key day for environmental protest.

Chinese pollution protest

In Fujian Province, eastern China, villagers blockaded a road to protest against high levels of lead in the blood of their children. Local residents are convinced that the children’s excessive lead levels are the result of pollution from the  Huaqiang Battery Factory. Authorities have ordered China’s environmental protection bureau to increase oversight of the plant. The protest comes in the wake of several similar protests against industrial plants that have succeeded in getting polluting factories closed down.

Manure message

And in the UK, journalist and television presenter Jeremy Clarkson found his own bit of global warming, on his doorstep! Seven members of group Climate Rush visited his home and left steaming piles of horse manure on his drive, along with a message reading ‘This is what you’re landing us in’. The protestors, all women, chose Clarkson because he has a sceptical attitude to climate change. Clarkson is the presenter of Top Gear, a car programme, and has recently driven to the Arctic. In the past he has made inflammatory remarks about the effects of climate change, describing walkers who demand access to land as ‘urban communists’ and cyclists as ‘Lycra Nazis’.

New Zealand animal foods protest

And finally on the same day, 17 September, a New Zealand protest against palm kernel imports ended inconclusively.  The company, Fonterra, is a dairy supplies specialist and also a cooperative with over 11,000 dairy farming members in New Zealand.  Greenpeace claims there is both local and international concern about the nature of the palm oil industry globally and protestors chained themselves to the cranes of the ship delivering the imports.  Feed imports for livestock are an increasing contentious issue – Greenpeace says that corn and grain farmers in New Zealand have supported their action because their own products have been outpriced by cheap imported livestock foods and that endangered species are being further threatened by land clearance fuelled by the palm oil export industry. 14 protesters, charged with unlawful boarding of a ship, will be appearing in court next week.
New Zealand sheep courtesy of PhillipC at Flickr under a creative commons licence

The Sunday talk shows were full of talk about the health care reform fight: are there 60 votes in the Senate? is the public option off the table? are illegal immigrants covered? And, while consensus on any health care answers has been fleeting, everyone agrees on what is the most important question: how is President Obama going to PAY for health care reform?

The White House still lists climate change legislation as one of its priorities, but with Senate action on a bill getting pushed deeper into September – and closer to oblivion for 2009 – greens cannot help but worry that their cause will not only be eclipsed by health care, but also by the economy generally, unemployment specifically, and even foreign policy issues like the escalation in Afghanistan. Read the rest of this entry »

The leader of one of Australia’s most influential unions has said that green jobs is a ‘dopey term’. Tony Maher went on to suggest that many of the environmental campaigns run in his country are ‘judgemental nonsense’ and that industries like coal and steel will have more impact on both prosperity and the creation of a low carbon future than people realised. As an example, he claimed that carbon capture and storage schemes would require vast amounts of steel and that this steel should be produced in Australia by Australian workers.

Union fights for blue-collar jobs, not green-tinged ones

Maher is President of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, a constellation of workers that might look odd in many other parts of the world where ‘green’ industries like Forestry have separated themselves from extractive industries by putting logging in with extraction and keeping woodland husbandry and tree surgery in with farming.  For over ten years, Tony Maher has spoken on behalf of the union, which states in its publicity material that it is the principal union for both brown and black coal mining. Brown coal is relatively recent in origin and falls between peat, which is still largely vegetable in structure, and bituminous coal. It is often known as lignite.

Many people feel that brown coal should not be extracted because it should be kept as a reserve for the distance future when it may have developed further and become more like bituminous coal or black coal, which is more consolidated, deep black in colour and burns more readily with greater fuel efficiency.

Union leader says more coal, not less, will be burned in 2050

It’s not surprising that a union leader representing coal minders should object to ‘green jobs’ but Maher went much further than simply protesting against the removal of blue-collar industries, he added that he thought that by mid 2050 the planet would be using twice as much coal as at present and that the recent protest at Hazelwood power station was ‘just silly’.

Hazelwood Protestors Get Direct

‘Switch Off Hazelwood’ the campaigning group that organised the protests claims a successful weekend’s protesting, with more than 300 people turning up over 12 and 13 September, to use such direct action tactics as the Bikezilla (a number of bicycles welded together to form a giant bike, which was impounded by police), the Ministry of Energy, Resources and Silly Walks, the wombat warriors and forming a giant windmill with their bodies.  The police say 18 people were arrested, the action group says it was 22 individuals who were arrested and then released on bail.

While protestors said that removing Hazelwood could be the first step to creating an employment-rich, renewable energy manufacturing region, Maher’s comments suggest that the opposition to renewable energy is entrenched in the old blue-collar industrial regions as a threat to well paid jobs, as well as being perceived as a threat to lifestyle. Maher added that Australia produced some of the best-quality coking coal in the world, which was used to make premium quality steel and that it was ‘silly’ to raise objections to industries that created a large amount of Australia’s exports.

Switch off Hazelwood: Starring the Wombat Warriors courtesy of Sean Bedlam at youtube

Even in the midst of the health care fight, the Sunday talk shows devoted some time to the political fallout from the resignation of Van Jones, and with his resignation over the weekend, the former White House green jobs czar has become a national object lesson in partisan politicking. But, outside of the American political media vacuum, Jones’ green-jobs-for -the-urban-poor programming will be his lasting legacy.

For example, take this morning’s BBC feature on Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, a part of the British news radio network’s recent series of features on the US economic downturn and its ground-level impacts in California. The BBC focused on some of the funding problems that Homeboy faces in these times of both declining philanthropy and state budgets.

Still, the organization – devoted to reintegrating former LA-area gangbangers by providing everything from job training to tattoo removal – is finding a productive niche in the green-collar economy. Operating under the slogan “nothing stops a bullet like a job,” Homeboy recently began training former gang members as solar panel installers.

Class members in the solar program attend a two-month course – with the $131 tuition and an $8 hourly stipend paid by Homeboys – and graduate with skills that are helping them land jobs that pay from $15 to upwards of $30 an hour. If programs like Homeboy’s can catch on the way that Jones has envisioned, the average political observer some years hence may remember Jones more for the green-collar economic policies that the BBC highlighted rather than as the political cautionary tale that defined his 15 minutes of fame over one Labor Day weekend.

Illustration of Van Jones “greening the ghetto” by RADillustrates at Flickr.