Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘coal ash spill’

Finally a positive ruling for those adversely affected by coal power plants.  Today a federal judge ruled that the Tennessee Valley Authority is liable for a huge spill of toxin-laden sludge in 2008 in Tennessee when containment dike at TVA’s Kingston Fossil Plant burst. About 5 million cubic yards of ash spilled out of a storage pond, into a river and spoiled hundreds of acres in a riverside community 35 miles west of Knoxville.

U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Varlan found TVA was negligent in its conduct and will be liable for damages to be determined later. Ratepayers have had to pay for the spill in the form of higher power costs as the $1.2 billion cleanup of the spill, the Environmental Protection Agency described as one of the worst environmental disasters of its kind, continues.  After damages are awarded it is likely that TVA will pass those costs along to their customers.

And rest assured, the nearly $11 million TVA paid for outside legal help plus the work done by in-house lawyers, for which TVA is saying they can’t provide a total, will also be passed along to ratepayers.

Lesson learned here, if your energy generator messes up, you get to pay for it.

Read Full Post »

Rule #1 for being an organization even pretending to be a grassroots movement: Actually have some grassroots supporters.  Even manufactured outrage groups ginned up by Freedomworks or the Tea Bag people or United Health Care actually have people who believe and will regurgitate their corporate PR spin.  But, presumably because the coal industry couldn’t find and photograph any actual human beings who supported their agenda, they have had to resort to buying and using internet stock photos.

As DeSmogBlog had previously reported,

“The Federation for American Coal, Energy and Security (FACES of Coal).” the latest “grassroots” organization to join the public conversation on behalf of the coal industry, appears to be a project of the K-Street public relations firm, the Adfero Group, one of industry’s most accommodating voices in Washington, D.C.

The FACES website, which includes no contact information, is registered to Adfero.

And now the Front Porch Blog from Appalachian Voices has reported that

We’ve touched on the fact that the new coal industry front group “FACES” has yet to come forward with a list of their members.  Well, thanks to a few new media> gumshoes, including our own Jamie Goodman and our friends at DeSmogBlog, we’ve learned that not only is FACES hosted by a K-Street firm called Adfero, but all of the “FACES” of coal are actually just istockphotos. They couldn’t even get real photos of their supporters.

You can see the actual photos and screencaps by going to the Front Porch Blog.

If Big Coal wanted to hire models to be the faces of coal, we could’ve saved them the trouble and recommended these photos:

ZoolanderCoalMine

I think Im getting thwe black lung, pop!

"I think I'm getting the black lung, pop!"

And let’s remember that it is not that far of a drive to get out to coal country even from Washington DC, where both West Virginia and Pennsylvania coal-centric communities are less than a 3 hour drive.  It just must really be that hard for fat cat K Street lobbyists to take time out of their busy schedules wining and dining at $2300 / plate fundraisers and take a camera out to coal country to see the actual faces of coal.

Here’s an example of what they might actually find if they did:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPixjCneseE]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ats3dClc0No]

Real voices from coal country know that coal is killing us.  It kills their local economies and destroys precious landscapes and water supplies and kills workers because greedy mine owners care more about profits than human lives, such as in the case of the Crandall Canyon disaster in Utah last year.  It pollutes our air and contaminates our water when we burn it, so much so that a USGS study this week found that every fish they tested in the US had mercury contamination.  And even after it’s burned, the coal ash waste is a problem.  From when they dig it up out of the ground to when they try to store the ash, coal is dirty, cradle to grave.  And grave here is meant in the literal sense.

Don’t be fooled by expensive-cocktail-drinking, $1000-shoe-wearing lobbyists in Washington and their stock photos.  The real faces of coal are against it, and we should be moving away from it as quickly as possible.

Read Full Post »

For any of you global warming denier trolls lurking out there, here you finally have it: ANOTHER final study that undeniably shows a link between manmade greenhouse gas emissions and the warming that has occurred.

Yes, yes, and the sky is blue as well.  AND the Earth revolves around the sun.  I know most of us don’t need more scientific evidence that putting pollution in the atmosphere fundamentally disrupts the climate, but what is most interesting about this study is it calculates a precise amount of warming per ton of CO2 or equivalent:

Until now, it has been difficult to estimate how much climate will warm in response to a given carbon dioxide emissions scenario because of the complex interactions between human emissions, carbon sinks, atmospheric concentrations and temperature change. Matthews and colleagues show that despite these uncertainties, each emission of carbon dioxide results in the same global temperature increase, regardless of when or over what period of time the emission occurs.

These findings mean that we can now say: if you emit that tonne of carbon dioxide, it will lead to 0.0000000000015 degrees of global temperature change.

If we want to restrict global warming to no more than 2 degrees, we must restrict total carbon emissions — from now until forever — to little more than half a trillion tonnes of carbon, or about as much again as we have emitted since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

The full article will eb published in the June 11 edition of Nature.

And if that wasn’t enough, this from the HuffPo about coal ash:

Aerial photo of the Kingston fly ash spill

Aerial photo of the Kingston fly ash spill

Just how bad has the coal ash situation gotten in the United States? So bad that the Department of Homeland Security has told Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) that her committee can’t publicly disclose the location of coal ash dumps across the country.

The pollution is so toxic, so dangerous, that an enemy of the United States — or a storm or some other disrupting event — could easily cause them to spill out and lay waste to any area nearby.

There are 44 sites deemed by the Environmental Protection Agency to be high hazard, but Boxer said she isn’t allowed to talk about them other than to senators in the states affected. “There is a huge muzzle on me and my staff,” she said.

“Homeland Security and the Army Corps [of Engineers] have decided in the interests of national security they can’t make these sites known,” she said.

There are several hundred coal ash piles across the nation, she said, all of them unregulated.

“If these coal ash piles were to fail they’d pose a threat to the people nearby,” she said. While keeping it from the public, DHS is alerting first responders as to the location of the piles.

“I believe it is essential to let people know,” said Boxer, arguing that if people knew what was in their backyard they’d press public officials to clean it up and protect the area. “I think secrecy might lead to inaction…I am pressing on this.”

Especially in the wake of Kingston fly ash disaster, which was the worst environmental disaster ever in the US– worse even than the Exxon Valdez- this seems pretty simple to me: climate change is caused by greenhouse gases, coal is the major contributor to CO2 emissions, coal ash is so dangerous we can’t even know where the dumps are because of national security… so, let’s stop burning coal? That’s a solution so easy, it’s not surprising anyone in Washington (or for that matter, Austin) hasn’t proposed it.  Oh wait, we have.  It’s called a coal moratorium, and we should be doing it.  For more info, visit www.coalblock.org

Read Full Post »

A ruptured pipeline has just spilled 4,000 gallons of toxic coal ash into the north Potomac River, reports Pete Altman at NRDC’s Switchboard blog:

The Maryland Department of the Environment just reported that a ruptured pipeline carrying wet coal ash has spilled 4,000 gallons of the toxic-laden stuff into the North Branch of the Potomac River, in Luke, MD.

I don’t know how long it’ll take for the spill to reach DC proper, but its a hell of a way to send a message about how much we need to regulate the handling of this stuff. All the more reason to thank the Obama Administration for announcing plans to propose federal regulations for coal waste.

potomac

Google Earth image of the North Branch of the Potomac and site of the spill

I hate to see this happen, but hopefully it will provide the kick in the pants Congress needs to regulate coal combustion waste.  Please take this timely opportunity to visit 1Sky’s Skywriter blog and tell Congress to prevent the next coal waste disaster by passing a moratorium on new coal plants.

Read Full Post »