Since the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACESA) is 932 pages, it is unlikely that it has been read and digested in its entirety by many, save environmental groups. The US desperately needs an energy policy that addresses climate change and energy security, but Dirty Energy lobbyists outnumber and outspend the interests of the environment and our personal interests. Generous campaign contributions from extremely profitable Dirty Energy have work to gut the bill and insert goodies that fail to serve the public interest, the environment or energy security.
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Energy policy is complex and additional will be posted as time permits. It is imperative that if you care about this issue and the future of sustainable policies, you express your dismay with the ACESA in its current form.
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Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) offered A Common Person's Guide to the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, also offered by ISS .
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Coal Wins: Coal companies are big winners under this legislation. They receive 35% of emissions permits for free via Local Distribution Companies and merchant coal. They also receive 5% of the funds raised by the overall legislation by 2018, following a 2% allocation from 2014-2017, which will cover the costs of installing and operating carbon capture and sequestration (ccs) technologies. CCS is a technology that 1) barely exists, 2) is roughly a decade from perhaps being commercially viable on a large scale, 3) surrounded by serious safety questions as far as leakage into underground drinking water, earthquake-caused massive releases, etc. It involves the pumping of billions of tons of liquefied carbon dioxide into the earth, or under the sea. New coal plants built from 2009-2020 would be required to capture 50% of their carbon emissions but not until 2025. Plants built after 2020 must capture 65%. It is certain that, a dozen or so years from now, if these provisions are not changed, the coal industry will be expending tens of millions of dollar in advertisements, campaign contributions and lobbying to extend those deadlines if it turns out that extensive carbon capture and sequestration is not possible
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Coal Ash and Mountaintop Removal clearly explain how Dirty Coal remains extremely profitable because of its ability to escape environmental costs.
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Papers Detail Industry's Role in Cheney's Energy Report provides an overview of the secret meetings held by Vice President Dick Cheney that contained this curious statement from Daniel Yergin:
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Cheney and Lundquist also met with Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and author of "The Prize," a history of the oil industry. Yergin recalls discussing energy efficiency and natural gas data, which were then showing that increased drilling had for the first time not raised U.S. production.
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Good News, There's a Climate Bill -- Bad News, It Stinks raises a number of serious issues that have been added to a bill that is now grossly flawed. Those flaws need to be corrected before passage is sensible.
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On the heels of a major Wall Street Journal report that we are reaching "peak coal," and revelations that the Bush administration buried a 2002 report on the cancer risks associated with coal ash, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu made a $1.073 billion down payment today on the construction of FutureGen, "the first commercial scale, fully integrated, carbon capture and sequestration project in the country in Mattoon, Illinois."
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IMPACT Act
We estimate that Sen. Brown’s IMPACT legislation, once enacted, will create at least 680,000 direct manufacturing jobs nationally and 1,972,000 indirect jobs over the next five years. “The domestic manufacturing industry helped build our nation’s middle class and is critical to national security,” said Sen. Brown. “It accounts for 12 percent - $1.6 trillion - of the U.S. gross domestic product and almost three-fourths of the nation’s research and development. Despite this, the U.S. manufacturing industry has contracted for 16 consecutive months.”
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