May 2008 - Sustainability - list.sfgreens.org

[Sustain] EPA easing rules on power plants near national parks
by Eric Brooks 16 May '08

16 May '08

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/16/MNLA10NFLS.DTL&… EPA easing rules on power plants near national parks Rank-and-file staff, managers who oppose Bush administration plan spread the word Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post Friday, May 16, 2008 *(05-16) 04:00 PDT Washington -* -- The Bush administration is on the verge of implementing new air quality rules that will make it easier to build power plants near national parks and wilderness areas, according to rank-and-file agency scientists and park managers who oppose the plan. The new regulations, which are likely to be finalized this summer, rewrite a provision of the Clean Air Act that applies to "Class 1 areas," federal lands that currently have the highest level of protection under the law. Opponents predict the changes will worsen visibility at many of the United States' most prized tourist destinations. Nearly a year ago, with little fanfare, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed changing the way the government measures air pollution near Class 1 areas on the grounds that the nation needed a more uniform way of regulating emissions near protected areas. The agency closed the comment period in April and has indicated it is not making significant changes to the draft rule, despite objections by EPA staff members. Jeffrey Holmstead, who now heads the environmental strategies group at the law firm of Bracewell & Giuliani, helped initiate the rule change while heading EPA's air and radiation office. He said agency officials became concerned that EPA's scientific staff was taking the most conservative approach in predicting how much pollution new power plants would produce. The move is the latest in a series of administration efforts going back to 2003 to weaken air quality protections at national parks, including failed moves to prohibit federal land managers from commenting on permits for new pollution sources more than 31 miles away from their areas and to only protect air resources for parks that are big and diverse enough to represent complete ecosystems. For 30 years, regulators have measured pollution levels in the parks, over both three-hour and 24-hour increments, to capture the spikes in emissions that occur during periods of peak energy demand. The new rule would average the levels over a year so that spikes in pollution levels would not violate the law. Many National Park Service and EPA officials have challenged the rule change, arguing that it will worsen visibility in already-impaired areas, according to internal documents obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In one set of comments, EPA's regional computer modeling staff wrote that the proposal would allow for significant degradation of the parks' air quality. An e-mail from National Park Service staff called aspects of the plan bad public policy that would make it much easier to build power plants near Class 1 areas, which include some Fish and Wildlife Service-protected land. When committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, asked the EPA whether the rule would lead to construction of more power plants near protected areas, Robert Meyers, principal deputy assistant administrator for EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, replied in an April 24 letter that this was not the intention of the rule, but he could not rule it out. "We developed this proposal based on the need to clarify how increment consumption must be addressed, and not whether or not it would be easier to build power plants," Meyers wrote. "In the absence of any data or evidence provided by the National Parks Service, we are unable to conclusively confirm or deny their suggestion." On Thursday, the National Parks Conservation Association, a lobbying group, issued a report estimating that the rule would ease the way for the construction of 28 new coal-fired power plants within 186 miles of 10 national parks. In each of the next 50 years, the report concludes, the new plants would emit 122 million tons of carbon dioxide, 79,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, 52,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, and 4,000 pounds of toxic mercury into the air over and around the Great Smoky Mountains, Zion and eight other national parks. "It's like if you're pulled over by a cop for going 75 miles per hour in a 55 miles-per-hour zone, and you say, 'If you look at how I've driven all year, I've averaged fifty-five miles per hour,' " said Mark Wenzler, director of the National Parks Conservation Association's clean air programs. "It allows you to vastly underestimate the impact of these emissions." Don Shepherd, an environmental engineer at the National Park Service's air resources division in Denver, said of the new rule: "I don't know of anyone at our level, who deals with this day to day, that likes it or thinks it's going to make sense. "We really want to have clean air at national parks all the time, and not just at average times," Shepherd said. "All of our national parks have impaired visibility. ... It would really be a setback in trying to make progress." http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/16/MNLA10NFLS.DTL This article appeared on page *A - 3* of the San Francisco Chronicle -- "I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves." -- Che Guevara

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[Sustain] 'Peaker' Plant Vote Delayed - Mayor Preparing Alternative
by Eric Brooks 13 May '08

13 May '08

Hi all, Our collective hard work is beginning to pay off. Mayor Newsom has asked for a delay in the 'Peaker' vote so that he can prepare an alternative energy plan to avoid building the Combustion Turbine plant. Now is where we will need to be vigilant. Part of Newsom's proposal will be to reduce pollution at Mirant. So we will soon need to push for a firm closure date on the Mirant plant in the very near future (even if it is polluting less), and then hold the City to it. Below is the SF Examiner article that announces Newsom's switch. Also see the attached letter from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the Board and Mayor opposing the plant - sent Monday. (Note that Kennedy and his group NRDC are actually a major problem to real environmentalism - but most mainstream liberals don't know that, and to them, a letter from Kennedy is a -big- deal.) We're almost at the finish line all. But we'll need a last wise push to get there. ;) peace, Eric http://www.examiner.com/printa-1388244~Decision_on_Potrero_power_plant_dela… Decision on Potrero power plant delayed John Upton, The Examiner 2008-05-13 10:00:00.0 Current rank: # 19 of 9,416 SAN FRANCISCO - Mayor Gavin Newsom asked city legislators to delay a vote on a controversial plan to build a new power plant in Potrero Hill that will replace an older, more polluting plant, saying he needs another week to work on an alternative strategy. The Board of Supervisors was scheduled to vote today on a proposal to borrow $273 million to build natural-gas-burning power plants in The City's southeast and at the airport, but Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, the legislation's sponsor, said Monday that she had agreed to the mayor's request for a postponement. The state agency charged with ensuring that Californians have reliable electricity supplies, the California Independent Systems Operator confirmed in a May 1 letter to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission that The City's plan for the new power plant was "the best mechanism" for retiring the old Potrero power plant. The plan to build the cleaner power plants and take other steps to replace the Mirant plant was approved by the agency in November 2004. Opposition, to the plan, has grown in recent months, however, with groups including the Sierra Club, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research public policy nonprofit and the Bay Area Ella Baker Center for Human Rights expressing a desire for a more renewable, less polluting option than a fossil-fuel plant. Newsom, who agreed in November to fast-track development proposals on Mirant's land and waive millions of dollars in city fees if the company closed the plant, told The Examiner on Monday that while he wants to close Mirant, he is "desperate" to avoid building new fossil-fuel-burning plants. "I don't want to live to regret this decision," Newsom said. "We may look like fools five years from now." Newsom said he will try to come up with an "aggressive" alternative plan to install new technology at the Mirant-owned plant to reduce pollution, increase electricity imports from a plan in the works to bring power into The City through a Transbay Cable, create more electricity from renewable sources and reduce in-city electricity demand. San Francisco Public Utilities Commission General Manager Ed Harrington told supervisors last week that SFPUC staff hadn't filed proposals with the California ISO to take different steps to replace the Mirant plant because discussions indicated they would have "no chance of success." jupton(a)sfexaminer.com

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[Sustain] good article on idiocy of converting food to auto fuel
by Don Eichelberger 13 May '08

13 May '08

http://www.physorg.com/news129531564.html A biofuels backlash has erupted in major ethanol producer the United States, as lawmakers and experts debate the merits of converting food to fuel to support America's age-old love affair with the automobile. Don Eichelberger DJ Fix Independent Productions My Blog www.greenuprising.blogspot.com My You Tube <http://www.youtube.com/DonnyFix>http://www.youtube.com/DonnyFix My Space http://www.myspace.com/donnyfix Donny Fix del.icio.us book marks http://del.icio.us/donnyfix The Hegelian/Marxist goal is emancipation. Marx said it best in 1843: "Human emancipation wll only be complete when the real, individual man (sic) is absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his every day life, in his work and in his relationships, he has become a species-being (politically accountabe to the whole); and when he recognizes and realizes his own power as social powers, so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political power."

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[Sustain] Sustainability Working Group 4/24/08 Notes
by Don Eichelberger 12 May '08

12 May '08

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Re: [Sustain] SF May 17 Health Care meeting featuring Ameica's leading single payer activist - Please RSVP
by Don Eichelberger 12 May '08

12 May '08

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[Sustain] Action Alert: Stop 1st Genetically Engineered Sugar
by Eric Brooks 10 May '08

10 May '08

ronnie(a)organicconsumers.org wrote: FRANKENFOODS ALERT OF THE WEEK: GENETICALLY ENGINEERED CANDY FOR MOTHERS DAY? This Mothers Day may be the last time you can buy mainstream non-organic candy for Mom on Mothers Day that isn't made from genetically engineered (GE) sugar. Sugar in most conventional foods will soon come from newly approved biotech sugar beets unless we act now to stop it. In just a few weeks, US farmers are poised to plant their first GE sugar beet crops, Monsanto's Roundup Ready sugar beets. Over half the sugar in processed foods comes from sugar beets (the rest is supplied by sugarcane), and since ingredients from GE crops are not labeled in the U.S., once food producers start using GE beet sugar in their candies, cereals, breads, baby foods and other products, there will be no way for us to know if we are eating GE sugar unless we buy organic foods, since GE ingredients are banned in organic products. Take action now: http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_7031.cfm -- "I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves." – Che Guevara

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[Sustain] A Really Inconvenient Truth
by Eric Brooks 10 May '08

10 May '08

Ann Garrison <anniegarrison(a)mac.com> wrote: This will be on KPFA this morning (Saturday) at 10:00 A.M.; sounds like it might be worth listening to, either live or in the archives. A Really Inconvenient Truth Saturday, May 10th, 10:00am On the film "A Really Inconvenient Truth," Joel Kovel argues that we need to go far beyond Al Gore's reading of the climate change crisis.

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[Sustain] Call Mayor Newsom To Stop Fossil Fuel Plant In SF
by Eric Brooks 09 May '08

09 May '08

Hi all, This is a critical moment in the fight to stop global warming. Call Mayor Newsom Today To Stop A Fossil Fuel Power Plant From Being Built In San Francisco This Tuesday, May 13, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors will vote on a deeply misguided plan to build a polluting natural gas power plant in the City of San Francisco and allow it to spew pollution and CO2 for the next 18-30 years! But the Board is wavering and might not vote down this terrible proposal. WHAT YOU CAN DO: Mayor Newsom is in New York City this week, attending an environmental 'Green Cities' conference, and will return Saturday to San Francisco. The Board of Supervisors is so closely divided on the power plant vote that Mayor Newsom could tip the scales and stop the plant by taking a strong public stand against it on Tuesday morning. Call Mayor Newsom's Office of Neighborhood Services today at: 415-554-7111 (if you get voice mail, simply leave your recorded remarks - if you have trouble reaching the number above, just call the San Francisco 311 line and ask to leave a public comment for the Mayor) Leave him the following message: "Mayor Newsom, please be a global environmental champion and declare to the world that San Francisco will no longer burn fossil fuel for electricity, that you oppose the combustion turbine peaker project, and that you will establish a plan to close the existing Mirant power plant by relying only on renewable energy, efficiency, and the Transbay Cable." Let's flood the Mayor's office and voice mail box with -thousands- of comments so that he knows exactly what to do on Tuesday to make San Francisco a Green City! AND: Email the Board of Supervisors Once you have called the Mayor, take one more moment to send the following email message to the Board of Supervisors at: board.of.supervisors(a)sfgov.org Dear Supervisor, Please be a global environmental champion and vote 'NO' on the ICC combustion turbine peaker project. Then call for a 2008 Energy Action Plan to close the existing Mirant power plant by relying only on renewable energy, efficiency, and the Transbay Cable. Thank You! [your name and address here] - end of sample message - Further Background: The recently passed Community Choice renewable energy project (which will bring San Francisco 50% solar and wind power within the next decade), and a new power transmission cable from the Northeast with enough capacity to meet half of San Francisco's daily electricity needs, make this polluting plant completely unnecessary. The SFPUC plans to site the plant in the already heavily polluted and economically marginalized Bayview Hunters Point district, which is 40% African American, and has high concentrations of other people of color and low income residents. (For more information see http://our-city.org/campaigns/index.html ) Thanks for your action and support! Eric Brooks Campaign Coordinator Our City ////This alert sent by://// //Our City 1028-A Howard St. San Francisco, CA 94103 415-756-8844 For more information about Our City campaigns go to: http://www.our-city.org info(a)our-city.org <mailto:info@our-city.org> //

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[Sustain] Peaker Project Now Has Deep Economic/Environmental Flaw
by Eric Brooks 08 May '08

08 May '08

Hi all, With the May 5 hearing testimony on the new peaker proposal by the San Francisco Utilities Commission (SFPUC) staff, it has become clear that the new plan has a deep flaw in it, and if allowed to proceed, the SFPUC is going to get the City mired in a disastrous economic and environmental boondoggle. The plan totally fails to account for the fact that over the next ten years, the California energy landscape will so profoundly change due to new global warming regulations and spiking natural gas prices that the entire project will become financially impossible to maintain as written, and the inevitable result will be that the proposed plant will be allowed to run at maximum, leaving severe economic and environmental damage in its wake. Here's the problem: The SFPUC revealed that peakers must run at least 18 years in order to pay themselves off and will be contractually allowed as much as 30 years of operation if necessary to pay off those costs. The critical flaw in this model is that in 2016, after the Department of Water Resources is no longer required to purchase electricity capacity from the peakers, the City and County of San Francisco will be fully on the hook for the remaining $110 million cost of the project with no guarantees of power purchasers. PG&E, the biggest such potential customer, has already said no, largely due to a new state mandate for it to cut its production of new fossil fuel projects. Other potential customers will face the same environmental restrictions over the next two decades and will likely be unable to purchase our peaker capacity. This building environmental restriction on fossil fuel energy purchases will then combine like gasoline to a spark with the reality that natural gas production is about to peak (within the next decade) just as oil is peaking and skyrocketing in price now. This means that our ability to sell natural gas power capacity at a reasonable price will likely collapse, (driving potential gas energy customers even further away) and we will be forced to run the peakers full tilt, in what might well be a vain attempt, to sell enough hard power to meet even the 30 year contract deadline, and we will likely -still- not regain costs and will have to -amend- the contract to run the peakers well -past- 2040 and/or at higher than the 4000 hour per year limit to regain those costs. This -guarantees- that the peakers will pollute -far- more than the existing Mirant plant, which will certainly close within the next decade. This is because Mirant is no longer locked into -any- operation to regain costs and just 4 years from now we will have built hundreds of megawatts of renewables, efficiency and capacity both under the Community Choice renewable energy project and under new State and San Francisco climate change requirements; and because the then completed Transbay Cable project will bring us -another- 400 megawatts of capacity (enough to meet almost half of San Francisco's daily electricity needs). The alarming boondoggle scenario described above makes the peaker plants a -probable- economic and environmental disaster. It would be insanity to put ourselves in this massively risky future scenario just to avoid a few years of air and water pollution from Mirant; pollution that can be much more effectively avoided by canceling the peaker project and then devoting our full time and energy on closing down Mirant as soon as possible by replacing it with a carefully designed mix of renewables, efficiency and Transbay Cable capacity; and by redirecting the activist energies currently being wasted on the necessity of blocking the peaker project, into a full on high powered environmental and social justice campaign to demand the immediate closure of Mirant. peace, Eric

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[Sustain] Groundwater protection bill goes to governor
by Mato Ska 08 May '08

08 May '08

Groundwater protection bill goes to governor May 2008 U.S. Water News Online MONTPELIER, Vt. -- It's up to Gov. Jim Douglas now whether to sign into law a bill that would designate Vermont's groundwater aquifers a public trust like its lakes and rivers and require a state permit for large withdrawals of groundwater. The Vermont House has passed legislation that would require a permit for withdrawals of more than 40 gallons per minute, or 57,400 gallons per day. Backers of the legislation said the average Vermont family uses about 400 gallons a day. The public trust provision basically says groundwater is not owned by one person but by and for all Vermonters, and that the state must manage it as a public resource.

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