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Environmental opponents begin hunger strike in protest of coal-fired plants
Associated Press via ABC
DENTON, TX) – Eleven environmental opponents of 16 coal-fired power plants proposed in Texas began a hunger strike Wednesday scheduled to last until Election Day on Nov. 7.
The fasting began nearly a year after Gov. Rick Perry signed an executive order Oct. 27, 2005, to speed up the permitting process for the plants.
The hunger strike aims to make state leaders consider cleaner technologies like wind power and other renewable energies, said Karen Hadden, 49, who organized the protest.
(26 Oct 2006)
Thanks for the Cheap Gas, Mr. Hitler!
Daniel Gross, Slate
When it comes to racial policies, it may be somewhat hyperbolic to say that the apartheid regime that came into power in South Africa in 1948 picked up where the Nazis left off. It’s not at all hyperbolic to observe that the apartheid regime picked up where the Nazis left off when it came to producing gasoline from coal. Nazism, apartheid, and international sanctions created a fuel source that might never have existed in a better world.
The circuitous travels of the Fischer-Tropsch process, a chemical technique to convert natural gas and coal into liquid fuels, provide an object lesson in historical irony. Used by the Nazis to make oil from coal during World War II, it was commercialized by the century’s second-most-odious racial supremacist regime in the 1950s through South Africa’s state energy company. Now, that privatized company, Sasol, may help liberate Western democracies (and non-Western ones, like India) from the grip of crude oil produced largely by loathsome authoritarian regimes.
(23 Oct 2006)
More Coal Equals More CO2
Chris Vernon, The Oil Drum / UK
As the indigenous extraction rate of natural gas has declined, tipping the UK from net exporter to net importer, prices have unsurprisingly risen. This gas price rise, coupled with the lower than expected cost of carbon emission under the EU carbon trading scheme, caused a dramatic shift away from gas and towards coal for electricity generation last winter.
The office of John Hemming MP has recently considered the impact this increased coal burn has had on UK carbon dioxide emissions.
“It is not surprising”, said John Hemming “that more carbon was emitted by burning pure carbon rather than a mixture of carbon and hydrogen. The government’s failures in the gas market do not only hit people’s gas bills, but they also hit the environment.”
(22 Oct 2006)
US Coal Plant Boom Poses Major Ecological, Economic Questions
Steve Quinn, Associated Press
A building boom that would add scores of new coal-fired power plants to the nation’s power grid is creating a new dilemma for politicians, environmentalists and utility companies across the United States.
Should power companies be permitted to build new plants that pollute more but are reliable and less expensive? Or should regulators push utilities toward cleaner burning coal plants, even if it means they will cost more and are based on newer, yet still unproven, technology?
How those questions are answered will have huge implications over the next few decades. It could determine how Americans light, heat and cool their homes and business, the rate of return on utility investments and the potential environmental impact of the new plants.
Nowhere do these competing interests play out with such force as in Texas, where 16 new coal-fired plants are proposed – 11 of them by Dallas-based TXU Corp., the state’s biggest power company.
The scope of TXU’s 5-year, $10 billion plan is considered bellwether and being closely watched by industry analysts, lawmakers, competitors and environmentalists across the U.S.
(16 Oct 2006)
