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THE WITNESS
A coal ash impoundment at TVA Kingston Fossil Fuel Power Plant in Tennessee failed in 2008, spilling five times the volume of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. It was the worst in US history. The next year, the EPA, overseeing the clean-up operations, shipped 4 million tons of toxic coal ash by rail to an Alabama landfill in a region called the Black Belt. The Black Belt, birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement, has “the richest soil and the poorest people.” Continue reading
A Pennsylvania family shows their tap water from their contaminated well due to fracking
Even the heads of fossil fuel companies read the polls.They know the majority of Americans see global warming as an imminent threat and a clear sign that the way we use energy must change. But instead of offering the solar and wind choices America wants, fossil fuel companies like Shell, Exxon and Duke are offering what might be their most disastrous bait and switch yet: natural gas.
The bait? Burning natural gas is “clean” because it produces less carbon pollution than burning oil and coal. The switch? The catastrophic pollution caused when companies like Exxon fracture the earth — commonly called fracking — to get natural gas out of the ground. Continue reading
Greenpeace's 5kw solar roof top project at its warehouse in Beijing. The project will be grid connected.
At 10:48 am on 17 April in Beijing, Greenpeace made a bit of history: we joined the first batch of around 50 rooftop solar PV projects that connected to the grid in China.
And to our surprise, we learned that our modest five-kilowatt solar system is actually the biggest rooftop solar power project currently in Beijing.
Our “system” is 65 square meters of solar panels at the new GP China warehouse in Shunyi, on the outskirts of Beijing. At full capacity on a day with clear weather, these panels will generate around 25 kWh of electricity. To give you a sense of scale, an average urban Chinese family consumes less than 10 kWh per day. Continue reading
Crossposted from the Institute of Southern Studies
A bill that would have ended North Carolina’s renewable energy program was voted down this week by a state House committee in a bipartisan vote by a surprisingly wide margin. Continue reading
Today, those employed by North Carolina’s clean energy industries and anyone concerned about global climate change can celebrate the apparent downfall of an attack on renewable energy incentives.
NC Representative Mike Hager, a former engineer for coal-burning utility giant Duke Energy and a member of the fossil fuel-promoting American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) watched members of the NC House utilities committee vote down his bill to freeze incentives for clean energy 18-3. While the bill technically isn’t dead yet, it will be tough for Rep. Hager to recover this fumble.
The incentive targeted by Rep. Hager is North Carolina’s renewable portfolio standard, or RPS. The NC RPS requires utilities to generate increasing amounts of electricity from cleaner sources of energy like wind and solar (ideally–the law is far from perfect but has been an important policy in helping North Carolina’s rapid growth of wind and solar energy projects). Continue reading
Last Saturday, on April 20, more than 10,000 people came together all across the globe to take a stand for the Arctic. Organisers hosted human banners in the shape of a heart, spelling out ‘I Love Arctic’, in more than 280 cities in 38 countries from Chile to New Zealand and from Norway to South Africa. Looking at these beautiful photos, the results speak for themselves.
Zhong Yu, a marathon runner, is one of the volunteers who had her personal air pollution exposure tested. She was shocked to find out that her samples contained arsenic levels exceeding the national standard X-fold
You have seen air pollution before, but not in this way. Beijing’s hazardous air is changing the energy outlook of the country, and sending a warning to other countries on the human cost of heavy reliance on coal. Continue reading
Boats try unsuccessfully to clean oil from the ocean, near the site of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Tomorrow marks the third anniversary of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. And while I wish it was a distant memory, I’ve been thinking about it all too much lately.
The recent Exxon tar sands pipeline spill in Mayflower, Arkansas has evoked vivid memories of the BP spill. Exxon is following BP’s playbook very closely, and like BP, is successfully controlling the entire response effort. Continue reading
Thanks to some pressure from Google, the largest utility company in the U.S., Duke Energy, now plans to offer renewable energy to its major customers. This will allow Google, who also announced plans today to double the size of one if its largest data centers, an option to power its cloud with clean energy. Continue reading
A building collapsed into floodwater near the Route 528 (Herbert Street) Bridge one day after Hurricane Sandy hit the New Jersey and New York.
While those impacted by Hurricane Sandy are still struggling to get their lives back to normal, forecasters at Colorado State University anticipate a hurricane season with 11 more storms than average. There is now a 72 percent chance that a major hurricane will hit the U.S. coast in 2013 compared to a previous average of 52 percent. Continue reading