Tag Archives: obama

Weak Carbon Target Jives with Science, Says Obama Team

Posted on by

By: Kyle Ash

Many people have given up hope that President Obama will take the lead on climate. This is a massive disappointment, given the hope we all had after the departure of Bush and his denial of climate change, and Obama’s 2008 campaign promise to take action. Apparently, Obama was just trying to woo us.

Here at the Durban climate talks, President Obama’s team has begun actively denying the urgency of global climate change. This is just another form of climate denialism.  

Here’s an excerpt from an article in today’s ECO, the conference daily paper published by Climate Action International, the alliance of over 700 organizations including Greenpeace: “…science says climate change is happening due to human activity, and it’s urgent. The US received a Fossil of the Day award for statements about the science of climate change by Jonathan Pershing, the US Deputy Special Envoy, in his first press briefing here in Durban. Pershing is a scientist himself, and was involved with the IPCC, but he implausibly said current collective mitigation targets are sufficient to avoid going over 2 degrees. His overall message was that the US stands on its position that avoiding runaway global warming is not urgent enough to expend much political capital on commitments in the UNFCCC.

…By saying the US is only really concerned with post-2020 commitments, the Obama Administration’s negotiators are saying their boss doesn’t need to deal with this issue, since Obama won’t be in office after 2016 (assuming he wins another 4 year term). In his 2008 campaign, however, President Obama promised to be a leader on global climate disruption.  But expectations have now fallen so low that all we can ask is for the US to agree some very reasonable steps forward in the negotiations – for example, on a mandate to package commitments into a legally binding agreement by 2015.  That would give the world four more years, in addition to the Bali Action Plan, agreed by the Bush administration, which gave the world two. The climate may not wait. The world certainly cannot be dragged down by another US administration in denial.”

When the Obama administration says the President is making climate change a priority, it is a claim with no foundation. The perfect example is the US pollution target, which is less than half target agreed by the US in Kyoto. By acting in 2009 as if the US had never signed onto anything, Obama followed the lead of President Bush who was probably the first leader in modern history to un-sign a treaty. 

More importantly, the US climate pollution target is so weak that it may already have been accomplished without any new national policies aimed at reducing climate pollution. Adding up reduced CO2 from new car efficiency rules, plus closing defunct coal-fired power plants may be enough as even analysts from Shell Oil argue can happen with a recovery from the recession. Although it’s worth mentioning that the recession resulted in a reduction of emissions almost equal to half of the Obama administration goal.

Mitt Romney many believe to be Obama’s likeliest contender in next year’s bid for the presidency. People are recalling that Romney has a record of crafting, signing into law, and implementing climate policy. And one of the best Obama appointees, who is in fact in charge of developing EPA greenhouse gas policy, previously worked in Romney’s government. Despite the crazy rhetoric by Republican candidates on climate, Obama will have a very hard time arguing he has a better record than Romney.

Original Post via QuitCoal.org

[BP]resident Obama – Where does BP begin and Obama end?

Posted on by

The sticky, hot oil was so deep that my boots sank three inches and nearly came off when I took my next step.

Where the beach looked clean, I let my eyes follow baby crabs a foot more on shore where I saw the wall of debris and grass saturated four inches deep with thick, reddish-brown oil.

Last Thursday marked one month since the Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing 11 people and setting in motion an unfolding, unprecedented disaster in the U.S.

Greenpeace image: The cost of offshore drilling

[BP]resident Obama?

What was so unsettling in the Gulf was that when I was down there I couldn’t tell where President Obama began and BP ended. Greenpeace boats full of reporters were physically blocked by the coastguard and forbidden to take pictures of the oil on the beach. When asked why, the coast guard staff replied: “It’s not our policy. It’s BP’s policy.” The President’s response to the spill, until yesterday when Lisa Jackson demanded that the toxic dispersants be replaced (kudos to her for this), has seemed like a page out of BP’s playbook of focusing on image damage control as much as oil spill damage control. He has not batted an eye in defending further off-shore oil drilling and has withheld from the publicthe scale of the problem.

I was heartened to hear that the President called for truck mile per gallon standards be upgraded and that fuel economy standards should be strengthened in the long-run for regular cars. The big question is if the President will virtually phase out the use of oil in cars by 2030 or continue down Ken Salazar’s misguided drill baby drill policy.

Greenpeace image: The cost of offshore drilling

The Coast Guard’s “Nightmare Scenario”

As leviathans of underwater oil move their way up the East Coast, President Obama is opening the door to what the Coast Guard called its “nightmare scenario” – drilling in the Arctic.

Shell Oil plans to begin exploratory drilling in Alaska’s Arctic Ocean this July. According to the Coast Guard, the pristine Chukchi and Beaufort Seas are extremely remote, freezing cold, covered in darkness for much of the year, and the water is incredibly choppy, making a spill a “nightmare.” The rig being shipped right now to the Arctic is older than the BP Deepwater rig that exploded. Regardless, President Obama and Secretary of Interior Salazar continue to push the interests of big oil companies.

This moment will require that the President do more than say that he is frustrated with BP and (rightly) pointing the finger. President Obama should ban all offshore oil drilling and call for an end to the use of oil in our cars by 2030.

Stopping Shell’s drilling plan would be a good, first indicator that the President is moving away from the Salazar-BP oil policy. Getting America’s cars and trucks off of oil by 2030 would prove that the President is finally actually leading.

Today Greenpeace activists took a stand on the ship the Harvey Explorer to send a message to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. The activists used oil from the spill to paint the message “Arctic Next?” on the bridge of the ship, which is scheduled to depart for Alaska to support drilling operations in July.

Obama’s atomic blunder

Posted on by

As Vermont seethes with radioactive contamination and the Democratic Party crumbles, Barack Obama has plunged into the atomic abyss.

In the face of fierce green opposition and withering scorn from both liberal and conservative budget hawks, Obama has done what George W. Bush could not: pledge billions of taxpayer dollars for a relapse of the 20th Century’s most expensive technological failure.

Obama has announced some $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for two new reactors planned for Georgia. Their Westinghouse AP-1000 designs have been rejected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as being unable to withstand natural cataclysms like hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes.

The Vogtle site was to originally host four reactors at a total cost of $600 million; it wound up with two at $9 billion.

The Southern Company, which wants to build these two new reactors, has cut at least one deal with Japanese financiers set to cash in on American taxpayer largess. The interest rate on the federal guarantees remains bitterly contested. The funding is being debated between at least five government agencies, and may well be tested in the courts. It’s not clear whether union labor will be required and what impact that might have on construction costs.

The Congressional Budget Office and other analysts warn the likely failure rate for government-back reactor construction loans could be in excess of 50%. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu has admitted he was unaware of the CBO’s report when he signed on to the Georgia guarantees.

Over the past several years the estimated price tag for proposed new reactors has jumped from $2-3 billion each in some cases to more than $12 billion today. The Chair of the NRC currently estimates it at $10 billion, well before a single construction license has been issued, which will take at least a year.

Energy experts at the Rocky Mountain Institute and elsewhere estimate that a dollar invested in increased efficiency could save as much as seven times as much energy than one invested in nuclear plants can produce, while producing ten times as many permanent jobs.

Georgia has been targeted largely because its regulators have demanded ratepayers put up the cash for the reactors as they’re being built. Florida and Georgia are among a small handful of states taxing electric consumers for projects that cannot come on line for many years, and that may never deliver a single electron of electricity.

Two Florida Public Service Commissioners, recently appointed by Republican Governor Charlie Crist (now a candidate for the US Senate), helped reject over a billion dollars in rate hikes demanded by Florida Power & Light and Progress Energy, both of which want to build double-reactors at ratepayer expense. The utilities now say they’ll postpone the projects proposed for Turkey Point and Levy County.

In 2005 the Bush Administration set aside some $18.5 billion for reactor loan guarantees, but the Department of Energy has been unable to administer them. Obama wants an additional $36 billion to bring the fund up to $54.5 billion. Proposed projects in South Carolina, Maryland and Texas appear to be next in line.

But the NRC has raised serious questions about Toshiba-owned Westinghouse’s AP-1000 slated for Georgia’s Vogtle site, as well as for South Carolina and Turkey Point. The French-made EPR design proposed for Maryland has been challenged by regulators in Finland, France and Great Britain. In Texas, a $4 billion price jump has sparked a political upheaval in San Antonio and elsewhere, throwing the future of that project in doubt.

Taxpayers are also on the hook for potential future accidents from these new reactors. In 1957, the industry promised Congress and the country that nuclear technology would quickly advance to the point that private insurers would take on the liability for any future disaster, which could by all serious estimates run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Only $11 billion has been set aside to cover the cost of such a catastrophe. But now the industry says it will not build even this next generation of plants without taxpayers underwriting liability for future accidents. Thus the “temporary” program could ultimately stretch out to a full century or more.

In the interim, Obama has all but killed Nevada’s proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump. He has appointed a commission of nuclear advocates to “investigate” the future of high-level reactor waste. But after 53 years, the industry is further from a solution than ever.

Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has reported that at least 27 of America’s 104 licensed reactors are now leaking radioactive tritium. The worst case may be Entergy’s Vermont Yankee, near the state’s southeastern border with New Hampshire and Massachusetts. High levels of contamination have been found in test wells around the reactor, and experts believe the Connecticut River is at serious risk.

A furious statewide grassroots campaign aims to shut the plant, whose license expires in 2012. A binding agreement between Entergy and the state gives the legislature the power to deny an extension. US Senator Bernie Saunders (D-VY) has demanded the plant close. The legislature may vote on it in a matter of days.

Obama has now driven a deep wedge between himself and the core of the environmental movement, which remains fiercely anti-nuclear. While reactor advocates paint the technology green, the opposition has been joined by fiscal conservatives like the National Taxpayer Institute, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

Reactor backers hailing a “renaissance” in atomic energy studiously ignore France’s catastrophic Olkiluoto project, now $3 billion over budget and 3 years behind schedule. Parallel problems have crippled another project at Flamanville, France, and are virtually certain to surface in the US.

The reactor industry has spent untold millions lobbying for this first round of loan guarantees. There’s no doubt it will seek far more in the coming months. Having failed to secure private American financing, the question will be: In a tight economy, how much public money will Congress throw at this obsolete technology?

The potential flow of taxpayer guarantees to Georgia means nuclear opponents now have a tangible target. Also guaranteed is ferocious grassroots opposition to financing, licensing and construction of this and all other new reactor proposals, as well as to continued operation of leaky rustbucket reactors like Vermont Yankee.

The “atomic renaissance” is still a very long way from going tangibly critical.

–
Harvey Wasserman is Senior Advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service. His SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH is at www.solartopia.org.

“Clean” Nuclear Power? The President Knows Better

Posted on by

In last night’s State of the Union address, President Obama said that “(t)o create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.” Despite his statement, the President knows better.

Nuclear power is neither safe nor clean. There is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation and just because nuclear pollution is invisible doesn’t mean it’s “clean.” For years nuclear plants have been leaking radioactive waste from underground pipes and radioactive waste pools into the ground water at sites across the nation. Mr. Obama was prompted to address the issue when radioactive contamination was found in drinking wells and off the nuclear plant site at Exelon’s Braidwood nuclear plant.

In 2006, when the President was serving as a senator from Illinois, he introduced the Nuclear Release Notice Act to address the radioactive contamination of groundwater at several nuclear reactors in his state. Unfortunately, the bill never became law.

Rather than hold nuclear power plant owners accountable for the uncontrolled and unmonitored leaks, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) handed the problem over to the nuclear industry’s lobbyists. Despite the fact that tritium releases to groundwater violate the terms of the nuclear plant’s license, the NRC has failed to exercise its regulatory authority. Instead, NRC has allowed the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) to create a voluntary industry program to deal with the tritium contamination.

Since then, the trickle of operators of nuclear plants acknowledging that they’ve contaminated the ground water at their sites has grown into a deluge. The nuclear plants that have admitted leaking radioactive hydrogen or tritium into the groundwater include: Braidwood, Byron & Dresden in Ilinois; Indian Point & Fitzpatrick in New York; Yankee Rowe & Pilgrim in Massachusetts; Three Mile Island & Peach Bottom in Pennsylvania; Callaway in Missouri; Oyster Creek in New Jersey; Hatch in Georgia; Palo Verde In Arizona; Perry in Ohio; Point Beach in Wisconsin; Salem in Delaware; Seabrook in New Hampshire; Watts Bar in Tennessee; Wolf Creek in Kansas; Connecticut Yankee and most recently Vermont Yankee. This NY Times article explains it all.

This list is likely incomplete and still growing. It remains difficult for the public to track which nuclear plants are leaking radioactive contamination because the NRC has failed to update its website since October of 2007 when it abdicated its authority to the industry’s voluntary initiative.

The President was then less than pleased with the industry’s voluntary regulation of radioactive leaks. Then Senator Obama responded that “(w)hile it’s encouraging that the nuclear industry recognizes it has a special responsibility to keep communities informed of tritium leaks, the voluntary guidelines recommended by the Nuclear Energy Institute would still allow tritium leaks to occur without the public ever finding out about it. The nuclear industry already has a voluntary policy, and it hasn’t worked.”

Obama’s comments now seem prophetic. Recently, just one week after the government regulators extended the operating license for the 40-year-old Oyster Creek reactor in New Jersey, the plant owner admitted leaking radioactive contamination into the plants ground water. This most recent revelation has prompted several members of Congress to ask the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate the leaks and how regulators at the NRC have mishandled the issue.

According to Congressman Ed Markey, who over sees the NRC, “(u)nder current regulations, miles and miles of buried pipes within nuclear reactors have never been inspected and will likely never be inspected.” Markey concluded that “(t)his is simply unacceptable. As it stands, the NRC requires-at most-a single, spot inspection of the buried piping systems no more than once every 10 years. This cannot possibly be sufficient to ensure the safety of both the public and the plant.”

If President Obama truly wants a clean energy economy and the jobs that come with it, he should abandon the failed policies of the past. Nuclear power is a dirty and dangerous distraction from the clean energy future the President has promised America.

This post originally appeared on Huffington Post.

Student activists fighting to save the climate!

Posted on by

This fall, the Greenpeace Student Network is fighting for our planet’s future and demanding climate action now. All across the country, student activists are holding their first meetings of the semester, having kickoff events, and turning up the pressure on decision makers to implement science based solutions to global warming.

Here are some highlights of what’s been happening across the country:

At Iowa State, student activists began their semester by gathering hundreds of petitions and rallying against a dirty coal plant on campus. They even made headlines!

In Atlanta, Georgia State student activists are planning a huge rally for the October 24th International Day of Action on Climate. They are expecting hundreds of people with prominent guest speakers, media, and a unified message that world leaders must act now on climate.

In Virginia, student activists at James Madison University are mobilizing their campus to take on climate this semester. They are doing a large recruitment drive and getting new volunteers each day! A movement, like none before, is growing on campus.

While Congress and President Obama have failed to be leaders on climate, our current generation is stepping up to the plate to deliver results! I am so inspired by the amazing work already underway this semester. Working with student activists has taught me one thing: they are a driving force for positive change.

Are you inspired like me? Are you ready for climate action? Then don’t miss a second of the action! Stay in the know about important updates with the Student Network. Join us on Facebook and on Twitter.

To get involved with the Student Network, email us!

Get ready for a movement like you’ve never seen before!

David

Watch Greenpeace activist Mary Sweeters talk about the Mt. Rushmore action on Billy Moyers Journal

Posted on by

Check out Greenpeace activist and organizer Mary Sweeters talking with Bill Moyers about last week’s Mt. Rushmore action and the lack of leadership on global warming from President Obama. After promising to “restore science to its rightful place” in his inaugural address, President Obama is all but ignoring the science and listening to the fossil fuels industries instead. We need him to be a leader. Also appearing with Mary is Erich Pica, Director of Domestic Programs for Friends of the Earth.

Greenpeace activist Mary Sweeters on Bill Moyers Journal

The True Test

Posted on by
Just this week scientists report that Joshua Tree National Park may no longer have Joshua Trees. Glacier National Park may be ice-free by 2030. All of this because of global warming.
America the Beautiful may not be so beautiful if we don’t stop global warming. The problem is that we have a few dinosaurs in office who are aligned with the companies that burn fossil fuels (coal, oil) who, together, stand in the way of global warming solutions.
The good news is that Washington is being swept with a new generation of leadership. The integrity, forward thinking, and stewardship of the public interest over special interests demonstrated by President Obama is truly inspiring. However, his ability to stay true to what science and future generations demand will be tested.
But the true test will be of us. The true test will be if we, together, can stand up to the dinosaurs in this new era of hope and hold President Obama and our elected officials to the highest moral standard.
The planet depends on it.

No climate leadership in Bonn

Posted on by

The climate talks in Bonn, Germany have come to an end, and by all reports we sure could have used some of that leadership on global warming policy that Obama keeps promising us. According to my Greenpeace colleagues who were there, the presence of the Obama Administration and the reengagement of the United States was generally a good thing that created a much more positive atmosphere, but virtually no progress was made on key issues and critical decisions that need to be made.

Greenpeace USA deputy campaigns director Carroll Muffett had this to say:

The diplomats and negotiators in Bonn have been treading water for two weeks, while back in the real world ice caps have continued to melt at alarming rates and flash floods have devastated parts of Australia. As it stands, this exact same meeting will be repeated in June. Heads of State must now inject leadership and direction into the talks in order to avert catastrophic climate change.

Read our full response: “As Bonn Negotiations Conclude, U.S. Climate Leadership Still Missing”.

President Obama and Nuclear Power’s Spin Campaign

Posted on by

Within hours of President-elect Obama’s victory, the nuclear industry was at it again: spinning nuclear power and attempting to put the best light on the industry’s prospects after the loss of their favorite candidate, Sen. John McCain. The President of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), Skip Bowman, congratulated President-elect Obama and Vice President-elect Biden on their victory and then he proceeded to mischaracterize their position on nuclear power.

I wrote all about it over on Huffington Post — check it out!