Cliffside Climate Action

I live 20 minutes away from a coal burning power plant owned by Duke Energy - the proposed site of a new 800-megawatt coal-fired facility to replace five older, coal boilers currently stationed there. While the new unit is an upgrade and will expand generation capacity, it will be powered by conventional coal technology, and will not capture any of the over 6 million tons of carbon dioxide it is expected to spew into the atmosphere, annually. Over the course of its 50 year predicted lifetime, it will emit enough carbon to equal the addition of 1 million cars to the road for each of those years.

So, on Monday, April 21st, I joined a group of over 300 protestors in Charlotte, NC, who converged in Marshall Park, marched through the streets of Charlotte, delivered a letter to Governor Bev Perdue, and ended at Duke Energy's headquarters to demand that CEO Jim Rogers hault construction of the massive, new unit. The protest was nearly 3 hours from start to finish, culminating in a non-violent, civil disobedience action ending in the arrest of about 30 protestors (myself not included).

While I feel that these actions are unlikely to stop the construction of this particular plant, I believe that they help build support for clean energy alternatives, and bring issues like Mountain Top Removal and the plight of Coal Field communities into the limelight. My hope, of course, is that the movement against the Cliffside plant will gain enough momentum that we really will hault it's construction (slated to be finished in 2012...sad to think we'll still be reliant on such a dirty fossil fuel by then - and then for the next 50 years thereafter! Ridiculous.) If not, perhaps we will have enough support by then to permanently topple King Coal from atop his ruinous smokestacks.

Please show your support! http://www.stopcliffside.org

Chck out this great article about the Cliffside plant, which discusses arguments by proponents and opponents, and includes alternative energy production options:
http://newsinitiative.org/story/2008/08/13/carolina_coal_plant_expansion_generates

Here is a clip from the protest. The crowd is chanting "Arrest Jim Rogers" who is the CEO of Duke Energy. A protester is arrested for non-violent, civil disobedience (crossing a dotted line onto Duke's property)

EPA Halts Mountain Top Removal Permits - Sort of

AP NEws - 3/24/09

The Environmental Protection Agency is putting on hold hundreds of mountaintop coal-mining permits until it can evaluate the projects' impacts on streams and wetlands.The decision was announced Tuesday by EPA administrator Lisa Jackson. It targets a controversial practice by coal mining companies that dump waste from mountaintop mining into streams and wetlands.

I thought this was great news, until I read a press statement that the EPA didn't actually put a moratorium on MTR, and that the exuberant announcments that have been circulating are in fact 'mischaracterizations' of the EPA's intentions (which are simply to review two questionable pending permits and take a closer look at hundreds of others...though, as the PR says, the EPA "fully anticipate[s] that the bulk of these pending permit applications will not raise environmental concerns", or, in other words, they will still go through as planned. Way to dampen an already rainy day.

As a resident of Western North Carolina I hear a lot about the devestating effects of Mountain Top Removal on the communities and wildlife that surround these sites. My recent trip to Washington, DC for Powershift 2009 gave me a first hand look at the horrors that residents in Coal Mining communities in the South East face on a daily basis. One of the speakers in a panel I attended entitled Achieving Environmental Justice through Economic Justice is a resident of a community in southern West Virginia and a member of CRMW (Coal River Mountain Watch). She is the lady in blue in the image on the right - next to her is the panel moderator and in the foreground is a representative from a group in NYC called Sustainable South Bronx. Both were excellent speakers and gave a lot of insight into the economic challenges that hinder the advancement of environmental causes, especially in low-income areas. To learn more about Mountain Top Removal, I suggest visiting some of the website below:

-http://www.ilovemountains.org/ - A MTR action and resource center
-http://www.mountainjusticesummer.org/ - Anti MTR activst group
-http://www.appvoices.org/ - News, information, and resource center
-Click here to see a Video