Photo credit: CLF

For those of you following Maine Governor Paul LePage’s assault on the state’s environmental protections, check out this op-ed by CLF Maine Director Sean Mahoney, which appeared June 3 in the Bangor Daily News. Here, Mahoney rebuffs LePage’s claim that generating more energy from renewable sources in Maine, as required by the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, means higher energy prices for Maine consumers, and rejects his so-called “solution,” a bill entitled “Act to Reduce Energy Prices for Maine Consumers.” Want to hear four reasons why LePage’s Act and attitude are bad for Maine? Mahoney has them here. Read more >

With gas prices hovering around $4 a gallon, many New Englanders are rightfully asking why we’re paying so much at the pump. Many economists will point to price speculation and other factors such as political unrest and conflicts in oil producing nations. Oil industry reps have been claiming that high prices are due to all that clean air we use and all those required practices that help keep workers safe. They seem to think our leaders in congress should reduce environmental regulations put in place after the BP oil spill.

The fact of the matter is that domestic production has little to do with the price of oil, which is set on the world market.  In fact last year US oil production reached its highest levels since 2003.

David Koch — a billionaire oilman widely known for funding campaigns to discredit climate science and oppose the construction of clean, renewable wind energy projects—has launched a new campaign through his group “Americans for Prosperity” to convince us that environmental regulations are to blame for high gas prices. Furthermore, they are looking to target political leaders who support tougher safety and environmental reviews for the oil industry that could prevent another catastrophic spill, and the clean energy sources that could break our addiction to their oil.

While most serious economists will tell you that the conflict in Libya, and soaring demand for gas in emerging economies such as China are the key factors driving energy prices up, most serious economists don’t have billions of dollars to spend on massive PR campaigns and secret political donations. As mentioned in this story the Koch brothers are betting that their ad campaigns and political donations will be enough to convince our leaders in congress to ignore real solutions and instead weaken environmental regulations.

Unfortunately, we’re seeing signs that their campaign is working.  As I wrote last week, the US House of Representatives recently passed three bills that would have required massively expanded offshore drilling all around the country, including in New England.  Thankfully, the Senate voted down a similar measure, but oil industry supporters have vowed to keep up the fight. Unfortunately when faced with a decision between big oil and New Englanders who depend on a healthy ocean, Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown sided with big oil. Click here to hear the radio ads CLF is running across the state, and here to write Senator Brown to urge him to stand with us in opposition to expanded drilling and for real solutions to high gas prices.

CLF applauds the balance regulators struck in approving the Kingdom Community Wind Project in Lowell, VT. The order allows the controversial project to move forward while protecting wildlife habitat and ensuring restoration of disturbed areas.  The decision addresses all the concerns that were raised and provides some innovative means to manage the impacts.

All power supplies – including wind – have environmental impacts.   While the environmental harms associated with wind are less than most sources of generation, they need to be minimized and mitigated, not ignored. The Vermont order includes specific requirements from an agreement with Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources that permanently protects significant habitat and requires re-vegetation and restoration of disturbed areas both after construction and when the project is no longer used.  These measures go a long way to reduce the environmental footprint of the project.  The decision also calls for minimizing lighting while still conforming to FAA requirements.  Overall, the decision can be a model for how projects can move forward while responsibly addressing impacts. 

The project’s benefits are significant and weighed in favor of approval.  Powering 20,000 homes from this project will help Vermont meet it renewable energy goals, create jobs and tax revenue, avoid greenhouse gas emissions, and provide long-term, stably priced power. In an interview with VPR, GMP’s President Mary Powell described the project as, “incredibly cost effective for premium renewable electricity.”

The project, consisting of 20-21 400-foot turbines along 3 miles of Lowell Mountain ridgeline, is expected to break ground in August of this year. The turbines will power an estimated 20,000 households, making it the largest wind site in the state. The project is moving forward with the approval of the Lowell community, who voted in favor of the turbines during Town Meeting Day in 2010.  CLF is excited to support wind projects that bring the community to the table, are responsibly cited, and mitigate the impacts on the environment in exchange for clean, locally produced energy.

Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown has been striking a defensive pose in recent weeks as non-profit groups and the thousands of Massachusetts voters they count as members called him out about his votes on the environment. A new radio ad from CLF and NRDC, launching today in major markets across Massachusetts, asks Brown to explain his latest votes in support of big oil, approving the continuation of huge subsidies for oil companies and opening up New England’s oceans (among other areas) to new offshore drilling. Brown’s rhetoric setting up a false choice between protecting the environment and creating a thriving Massachusetts economy is ringing hollow. We wonder what his response will be this time.

Siding with Big Oil – Senator Scott Brown by conservationlawfoundation

TAKE ACTION NOW! Tell Senator Scott Brown to protect our coasts, not big oil.

Photo credit: Marilyn Humphries

For those of you looking for a good clean-energy read, check out this recent article by Climate Progress’s Stephen Lacey. Lacey focuses on the common myth that clean energy and climate reduction policies will mean higher energy costs for consumers, pointing out that two recently released reports show that the implementation of cleaner, more efficient energy systems will actually save them money in the long run. The same myth has been perpetuated regarding the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) here in the Northeast. To debunk that notion, Lacey quotes CLF’s VP for Climate Advocacy and Policy Seth Kaplan:

“The fact is, RGGI is a very, very, very small piece of the overall cost of electricity. There are so many costs that are much greater. Pulling out the cost of RGGI would be like factoring in the cost of mowing the lawn at the power plant or factoring in the property taxes. Some of the claims that groups are making about the cost of the program are patently absurd.”

To hear more from Seth on the subject, read the full article here.

Last Friday, I got a bad taste of life in a changed climate.

After barely sleeping through a night filled with constantly rumbling thunder, hail, whipping winds, and the most incredibly intense rain I have ever seen, my cell phone rang at 4:50 a.m.  The panicked voice on the other end was a friend who owns a downtown business with his wife.  Apologetically, he asked for help.  The Winooski River, which flows through downtown Montpelier, had broken its banks and was creeping toward their shop’s doorstep and they needed help getting merchandise up and out.  We spent a frantic hour packing inventory into cars as the water continued to advance and noisily poured into their basement.  Once they were as prepared as possible, I rushed to join my fellow citizens  helping other businesses as the air filled with the smell of sewage and fuel oil mixing into the river as buildings became inundated.  By 8:00 a.m., I finally got to CLF’s offices where the alarm was sounding to signal that flood waters in the basement were threatening the electricity.  Fortunately, forecasted rain did not fall and the river levels subsided throughout the course of a day that saw most businesses closed.

Though flood waters have receded in the neighborhoods and towns surrounding CLF’s office, reminders of last week’s terrifying deluge abound.  As you walk in the door to our building, a powerful smell of mold and mildew assaults you–a side-effect of our flooded basement.  Downtown dumpsters still overflow with discarded merchandise ruined when floodwaters rushed into low-lying businesses, some of which have yet to reopen.  Some city roads are still washed out and the City’s sewage treatment plant is assessing damage after it was completely underwater much of last Friday.  With the immediate crisis passed and the long recovery beginning, many are starting to ask whether this kind of flooding may be the new normal resulting from climate change.

Flooding at Montpelier's sewage treatment plan resulted in sewage discharges to the Winooski River. City residents await a final estimate of the cost to repair damage to the plant. (Photo credit: Louis Porter)

At this point, I am supposed to offer the obligatory caveat that we cannot measure climate change by any one single weather event.  Sadly, we don’t have to. Extreme weather is becoming the norm–just as so many climate scientists have for so long been predicting that it will.

The flash flooding that wreaked havoc across New England’s north country last week comes on top of earlier spring flooding throughout the Lake Champlain region.  In fact, Burlington, VT has recorded its wettest spring ever in 2011–as have several other parts of the country.  Before flooding came to our neck of the woods, we watched in horror as tornado after tornado flattened parts of the south and midwest.  And before that, all eyes were fixed on deluged areas along the Mississippi.  Just last spring, we were reporting on this blog about horrendous flooding caused by historic rain storms in Rhode Island and elsewhere in southern New England.  After all this, I refuse to believe the climate skeptics who argue that extreme weather has nothing to do with the rising global temperatures that made 2010 the second warmest year on record with the highest carbon output in history, pushing greenhouse gas levels to dangerous new heights.

In this last month, our region and our nation has seen climate change first hand and it sucks.  There’s just no other way to put it.

Politicians talk often about Americans as world leaders.  Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change , we are leaders in polluting the atmosphere with climate-changing greenhouse gases.  It does not have to be this way.

Americans have a choice.  It is up to us to demand that our elected officials like Senators Scott Brown and Kelly Ayotte stop doing the bidding of the mega-billionaire oil barons, coal companies, and their legions of bought-and-paid for climate change deniers while America continues to suffer devastation from climate change that they claim is not happening or is not a problem.  Climate change is happening!  It is harming Americans all across the country–from Barre, VT to Joplin, MO–and undermining the stability upon which our prosperity is based.  The time for action in Washington is long passed.

We can make the changes needed to stave off catastrophic climate change and–like Chicago–adapt to the climate change already happening.  Here in soggy Vermont, there are lots of hurting businesspeople, homeowners, and municipal officials realizing we have no time to waste…

I finally got around to posting a blog entry about the latest report by the International Energy Agency about the terrible trajectory that our species is putting the planet’s climate but then I saw that Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby had weighed in with good news: he has found one physicist who disagrees with the rest of the scientific establishment and therefore we can stop worrying about this fundamental threat to our environment, society, health and economy.

If Jacoby was only a lone crank offering his opinions and “facts” on his own website that would be one thing – but he is the primary “conservative” columnist (although how ignoring science and real threats to the environment and the economy is conservative is  a bit of a mystery) at one of the leading news sources in New England.

Mr. Jacoby is the local voice of well-financed effort to generate doubt about climate science and he is seeking to undermine support for the affirmative steps taken in Massachusetts, and New England, to attack this most fundamental of problems.

The people stepping up to take action to protect our climate, our public health and to build a new clean energy economy come from our religious communities, our businesses, our neighborhoods as well as the public policy and political worlds.

This broad and deep support for action is grounded firmly in the science, the need to protect and conserve our environment and economy – as well as a recognition that getting out of the curve on global warming and energy independence will help build a more prosperous Commonwealth, region and nation.

The International Energy Agency has issued an analysis of current emissions of the greenhouse gases causing global warming and the trends and implications that can be seen in the data – and their conclusions are terrifying.

Using language that is unusual for a sober technical adviser the IEA states that “the prospect of limiting the global increase in temperature to 2 degrees Celsius is getting bleaker.”  A broad range of scientists have long agreed that moving beyond that level of global climate change would be disastrous, and that is why it is the target agreed to by the world’s governments.  The IEA noted that this target is getting harder and harder to reach because “80% of projected emissions from the power sector in 2020 are already locked in, as they will come from power plants that are currently in place or under construction today.”

In an article in the Guardian newspaper, Professor Lord Stern of the London School of Economics (who, the Guardian notes, was the author of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change  in 2006) issued this dire warning about the new IEA analysis: “These figures indicate that [emissions] are now close to being back on a ‘business as usual’ path. According to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] projections, such a path … would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100,” he said.

“Such warming would disrupt the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people across the planet, leading to widespread mass migration and conflict. That is a risk any sane person would seek to drastically reduce.”

How are we going to change this disastrous course?  We have  all the tools in our hands to do it – moving rapidly away from coal fired power plants, unleashing the full energy efficiency potential all around us, building the renewable energy resources that will convert the wind and sun into energy we can use.

As the battle over Vermont Yankee’s future is waged, Conservation Law Foundation and VPIRG seek to join as a friend of the court, or amicus for this first stage.  CLF will use the expertise gained in opposing Yankee’s continued operation before the PSB to bolster the argument that Yankee’s a long track record of failures preclude the Court from allowing continued operation.  Entergy would love to characterize their re-licensing as a guarantee to operate past 2012. However, CLF points out that their federal court challenge to the license over Entergy’s failure to obtain a necessary Clean Water Act certification makes the license itself uncertain.

CLF urges the Court not to allow Entergy to usurp Vermont law and walk away from their legal obligations.  The false testimony, leaks and bad economics of continued operation are ample justification for Vermont to refuse to grant a new certificate to operate for another twenty years.  In 2009 Entergy officials gave false testimony about the existence of underground pipes that were later found to be leaking radioactive tritium.  As CLF’s brief states:  “If land surveyors, architects, plumbers and physicians assistants can lose or be denied a license for making a material misrepresentation, less cannot be expected or required of nuclear facility operators.  The false testimony that Entergy officials provided under oath calls into question the ability of the plant operator to meet its legal obligations.”

The state of Vermont swung back in its reply brief last week with a laundry list of reasons the court should dismiss Entergy’s request to continue operating during the trial, or a “preliminary injunction”.  Because Entergy agreed to seek Public Service Board (PSB) approval, and not challenge PSB authority in court, the state argues Entergy is bound by their agreement. Also, the state suggests it is inappropriate for Entergy to object to PSB oversight at such a late hour, long after they received the benefit of doing business in Vermont under this agreement since 2002.

The state railed against Entergy’s argument that federal law supersedes state regulation over the aging plant. Vermont argues that, with the exception of radiation safety, states have authority over nuclear in many areas such as, “economics, land use, policy questions regarding a state’s energy future, and whether a corporation running a nuclear power plant has established itself as a trustworthy business partner.” Thus, the state argues that regulation over nuclear was never meant to preempt state law altogether.

Both Entergy and the state of Vermont will have a chance to argue on the preliminary injunction motion before United States District Court Judge J. Garvan Murtha on June 22-24.