Massive Climate Change Action in DC Scores Early Victory

In addressing our nation this week, President Barack Obama called on us to "confront boldly the challenges we face, and take responsibility for our future once more.” 

Thousands of American citizens are taking the President at his word.  Preparing to descend on Washington, DC., on Monday, March 2nd, to boldly confront our nation's dirty coal policy at a planned protest at the Capitol Power Plant, the broad alliance of citizens groups (capitolclimateaction.org) scored an extraordinary advanced victory yesterday:  Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have just released a letter calling on the Acting Architect of the Capitol to end the use of coal at the Capitol Power Plant.

This unprecedented act by our Congressional leadership marks a symbolic step toward a new era of clean energy.

We still have a long way to go, of course.

While the Capitol buildings are heated by the Capitol Power Plant, a 100-year-old coal-fired dinosaur, the Capitol's electricity is actually generated from the Potomac River Plant, which operates on coal hauled from mountaintop removal strip mines that have left parts of Appalachia in ruin, and emits tons of carbon dioxide.

And President Obama himself, while mapping out a plan to  double this nation's supply of renewable energy in the next three years, is still beholden to the chimera of "clean coal," its devastating extraction counterparts and dirty coal's underlining role in the silent tsunami of climate destabilization.

Beside the Capitol Power Plant switch over, here's the good news: The Obama administration is providing over $100 billion in loan guarantees and tax incentives for green energy initiatives in his stimulus package, and an annual investment of $15 billion in renewable energy technologies, and has called on Congress to send legislation for a "market-based cap on carbon pollution" to deal with climate change.

Here's the bad news: The Obama administration is shelling out billions of stimulus and budget dollars to the coal industry, at a time when extraction companies like Peabody Energy announced an eightfold increase in quarterly profits.  This is not only pointless, but a frightening reminder that any positive steps by the Obama administration to curb carbon emissions could be derailed by the "clean coal" scams of the coal lobby, and seriously delay any efforts to pass effective climate legislation before the world climate change conference in Copenhagen in December.

By ending coal at the Capitol Power Plant, our nation is coming to grips with the reality that coal is not clean, and that coal is not cheap, if we consider the social and environmental costs.  Here in Illinois, ever since a young Democratic Party activist by the name of Francis Peabody sunk his first coal mine in southern Illinois in 1895, we have witnessed the tragic journey of coal from its costly extraction, processing, transportation, burning and storage of ash with an element of truth and detail that somehow alludes those who live outside the coalfields. Our coal miners have paid the ultimate price of black lung and workplace accidents; our farms and forests have been strip-mined, wiping our family's heritage, and destroying our watersheds. Our relatives in the coalfields of Appalachia have borne the burden of coal for over 150 years; in the last couple of decades, over 470 mountains, 1,200 miles of streams and hundreds of historic mountain communities have literally been destroyed by the detonation of three million pounds of explosives a day, as part of the assault of mountaintop removal mining. 

Coal mining has not created prosperity in the coalfields; it has kept out any diversified economy and led to the nation's highest poverty rates.