Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
Sierra Club grades green schools
Academics? They barely count in this survey of top schools by the Sierra Club. Its grades of U.S. college and university green credentials focus on how the institutions directly affect the environment. Building efficiency, where food is from, waste management; it’s arguably a list of which schools are walking the green walk.
The University of Colorado, Boulder came out on top, despite a miserable 3 out of 10 for energy. It topped the chart in waste management and transportation. Three University of California schools — Santa Cruz, Berkeley and UCLA – were in the top 10. The Ivy League didn’t crack the top 10; Harvard made #11 thanks to a good energy efficiency score.
(Picture: A visitor to the University of Colorado at Boulder’s entry at the Solar Decathlon looks over their team’s solar-powered house entry in Washington, October, 15, 2007. The competition was among 20 college teams from around the world to design, build and operate the most liveable, energy-efficient, completely solar powered house. REUTERS/Jim Young)
A tax by any other name…
Can semantics help save the planet?
A showdown between leaders of Chevron Corp and the Sierra Club on Wednesday night revealed a number of shared beliefs between the two California institutions, particularly about the need for a transparent way of pricing carbon.
The debate at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club on Wednesday night pitted Chevron CEO David O’Reilly against Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, and both agreed that limiting carbon emissions should involve some sort of levy imposed by the government – if only there was a word for such a thing.
“It would be much cleaner if there was a transparent cost on carbon that one could see,” O’Reilly said.
The moderator suggested that was a ‘tax’. “Nobody wants to talk about it,” O’Reilly replied.
“Call it a fee,” Pope then suggested.
Coal-promoting ringtones draw Sierra Club’s ire
West Virginians who want to show off their pride in the state’s coal industry can now do so via some catchy, coal-promoting ringtones put together by the West Virginia Coal Association.
Beware, however, that the ringtones have already drawn the ire of environmentalists.
The ringtones are jingles the West Virginia coal group has used for some time to promote the state’s vast coal resources (and presumably to offset the bad rap coal gets for producing about 30 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gases).
Below are some of the lyrics:
Coal is WestVirginia/ Coal is me and you/ Coal is West Virginia / We’ve got a job to do/ Coal is energy (coal is energy)/ We need energy (we need energy)/ Coal is West Virginia
And:
When we go down deep through the dark today/ We come up wth a light for America
Coal mine operators have a history of using private armies and murderous security forces to block union organizing efforts and environmental responsibility. These practices go back over a hundred years. Like so many other industries in this country, mine operators will stop at nothing to preserve their business and wealth. The have the help of legislators who receive campaign contributions from these mining aristocrats.
A bad week for U.S. coal projects
It was a bad week to be planning a coal-fired power plant in the United States.
The industry suffered its second blow of the week on Friday with the cancellation of a plant in Michigan. The move by power plant developer LS Power marks the ninth such plant to be dropped in the United States so far this year, according to a count by environmental group the Sierra Club.
The company blamed regulatory uncertainty and the weak economy for the cancellation, which environmentalists cheered because coal-fired power plants are responsible for more than 30 percent of the United States’ global warming emissions.
The Michigan plant cancellation wasn’t the first blow to coal this week, either. On Tuesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency withdrew a permit for a massive coal-fired plant in New Mexico that would have been built on an Indian reservation.
The announcements came within two weeks after the Obama administration opened the way to regulating greenhouse gas emissions by declaring them a danger to human health.
Mandated limits on greenhouse gases, which the U.S. could adopt as early as this year, are certain to deal a further blow to new coal-fired plants. The U.S. Department of Energy’s statistical arm, however, expects coal to provide the largest share of U.S. electric generation for years to come, making up 47 percent of the nation’s power generation in 2030.
What do you think is the future of coal-fired power in the United States?
Emissions reduction mandates are expected to come into effect very soon—not just for heavy emitters, but medium and small emitters too. While mandatory reporting is a useful tool for managing carbon change, what is lacking in a lot of these programs is the ability to provide contextual detail, or to showcase emissions reduction achievements. Canadian Standards Association (CSA, World Secretariat for the development of ISO 14064, an international carbon accounting standard) just launched the GHG CleanStart™ Registry based on ISO 14064. It’s a voluntary program, but it covers the same bases as the regulated programs, while also allowing organizations to highlight their successes. Check it out at http://www.csa.ca/carbonperformance
