Scotland has approved 11 wind turbines in Aberdeen, which will supply have the town’s electricity. They are being touted as job-creators and engines of economic growth, and are locally popular. (Green energy has already created 11,000 jobs in Scotland and the country is rapidly increasing the amount of electricity it generates from renewables).
But Donald Trump, has plans for a golf course near Aberdeen and is threatening a law suit now that the project has been approved.
This was his address to the Scottish parliament on the subject last year:
The Donald’s complaint that wind turbines are a blight on the beauty of the land is silly. There is lots of land. And, the beauty of the land won’t remain anyway if it is turned to desert or ends up under the ocean. Scotland is doing its bit to avert the catastrophe of climate change caused by dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Trump exemplifies the selfishness and childishness of the current American business class, too many members of which are unimaginative and scientifically illiterate. If they knew what was good for them they’d be lobbying for green energy.
Dreaming of playing golf where wind energy can be generated is the contemporary equivalent of Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
Documentary on what the 600 coal plants in the US are doing to our health and well-being. The government should announce a crash program to close them all by 2023 and replace them with green energy. If it won’t municipalities (your city) should go into the business of solar and wind electricity generation itself. The “cost” would be minor to the cost to our health and our planet (via global warming — it isn’t a distant threat–) that we will incur if we don’t.
Although the Gulf makes its way in life by selling petroleum, countries like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates don’t engage in that sordid game of the American rich, of climate-change denial. The emirs are in no doubt about its dangers to their region and the need to use their current wealth to move to renewables. Since green energy requires massive investment capital, and since these countries are very wealthy, they are, ironically, in a position to take the lead on green energy. And they have the will. Unlike big American energy corporations who pay weasels to deny the dangers of our rapidly altering climate.
the United Arab Emirates has launched the Middle East’s biggest concentrated solar power plant, with the help of Spain’s Abengoa and the French energy firm Total S.A. When fully operational, Shams-1 will generate 100 megawatts of electricity.
The project was inaugurated by UAE President, Shaikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan. It is a project of Masdar, a green energy concern backed by the UAE government and headed by Sultan al-Jaber, whom I met in February when I was given a wonderful tour of Masdar City near Abu Dhabi by the very kind genius, Hector Hernandez. (See this press release).
With appropriate irony, Japan is putting the world’s largest offshore wind farm off the coast of Fukushima, hoping to generate a gigawatt of electricity with it. Japan’s current conservative government may not be as helpful as its predecessor, but surely renewables are in Japan’s future. The country has the scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs to become a leader in the field, if only it will commit to it. Indeed, a big turn toward green energy, on the scale being attempted by Germany, could help pull the country out of its long economic doldrums.
In a victory for advocates of clean air and water, energy giant American Electric Power will now be shutting down three coal-fired power plants and significantly reducing air pollution at 13 others across the Midwest and Southern United States.
American Electric Power’s generating station in Rockport, Indiana (Reuters) The agreement was made in a settlement between AEP and a coalition of 13 citizen groups, eight states, and the EPA—bringing an over decade old lawsuit to a close.
In the agreement AEP will also agree to replace a portion of the coal plants with new wind and solar investments in Indiana and Michigan.
“We’re glad AEP is going to retire these aging dinosaurs, and urge the company to ensure an equitable transition for the workers and communities most directly impacted by these retirements,” said Earthjustice attorney Shannon Fisk, who worked on the case.
Coal plants currently supply 32 percent of the nation’s electricity, and are the largest U.S. source of both sulfur dioxide and mercury as well as carbon dioxide linked to global warming.
The cuts will not happen immediately, however. AEP and its subsidiaries will reduce their total SO2 emissions by roughly 90 percent by 2029 from its baseline emissions; however, this agreement means that by 2015 AEP will have to stop burning coal at three power plants in Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky.
“Today’s agreement will protect public health, reduce the threat of climate disruption, and create a cleaner environment for families in Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky,” said Jodi Perras, Indiana Campaign Representative for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign. “Across the country, the coal industry faces unprecedented setbacks as its share of electricity generation plummets and the cost of coal continues to skyrocket. This agreement is only the latest sign of progress as our country continues to transition away from dirty, dangerous, and expensive coal-fired power plants.”
“According to estimates from the Clean Air Task Force, 203 deaths, 310 heart attacks, 3,160 asthma attacks, and 188 emergency room visits per year will be averted once the Muskingum River, Tanners Creek and Big Sandy power plants stop burning coal,” Earthjustice reports Monday.
In addition to benefiting public health, the settlement is also a victory for the climate in its vast reduction of greenhouse gases. Environment News Service reports that a total of 12 million tons of carbon dioxide and nearly 84,000 tons of sulfur dioxide pollution will be cut each year.
“Across the Midwest and the Great Plains, in states like Iowa and South Dakota that already get 20 percent of their energy from wind sources, clean energy is powering homes, putting people back to work, and protecting families from dangerous and expensive coal-fired power plants,” said Kerwin Olson, Executive Director of Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana. “Indiana has one of the fastest growing wind industries in the nation and is creating thousands of local jobs. This settlement builds on that success and will only accelerate Indiana’s and our nation’s responsible transition to an economy powered by clean, renewable, affordable sources of energy.”
The settlement also involves a $6 million payout from AEP to eight states involved in the settlement: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont. Those funds will cover programs to “mitigate the effects of air pollution carried east from AEP’s Midwest plants,” according to Environmental News Service.
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Mirrored from Common Dreams, where Jacob Chamberlain is a staff writer.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
The ‘Forward on Climate’ protest drew some 40,000 demonstrators to Washington, DC, on Sunday. Although the press tended to cast it as mainly a rally against the Keystone XL pipeline project, which would allow export of Canadian oil produced from tar sands via the Gulf of Mexico, the rally was against policies that accelerate climate change in general.
The mover behind the rally is Bill McKibben, creator of 350.org, the campaign to get the atmosphere back to 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide, since it is the most that is probably sustainable. We are now over 390 and going to 450, which will create an unbearably hot world, extreme sea level rises, and environmental instability. (The last time you got a 9 degrees F. / 5 degrees C. increase, millions of years ago, it produced 1200-year-long storms alternating with epochal droughts.)
The rally was intended to pressure President Obama to live up to his oral commitments in the State of the Union Address to making public policy that slows and reverses climate change.
Equally important, I believe, is for Obama to use the presidency as a bully pulpit to explain the dangers of climate change to people. He did some of that during Hurricane Sandy. But some appearances at places already devastated by the changes caused by our high-carbon civilization would be all to the good. His EPA is quietly closing coal plants over mercury pollution, but why not publicly campaign against mercury, and do an appearance with Richard Gelfond, the CEO of IMAX, who was crippled by eating fish. Likewise, pushing back against the idea that projects like Keystone would lower the price of gasoline or create jobs requires more than just denial. Showing the way the drought on the Mississippi River has actually put people out of work is equally important (severe weather is a climate-change effect).
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