MICHAEL KLARE, mklare at hampshire.edu
Author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, Klare just wrote the piece “The Gravitational Pull of Planet Carbon: Three Signs of Retreat in the Global War on Climate Change,” which states “As oil and gas have proven unexpectedly abundant and affordable, major energy consumers are planning to rely on them more — and on renewable sources of energy less — to meet their future requirements. As a result, the promises we once heard of a substantial decline in fossil fuel use (along with a corresponding boom in renewables) are fading. According to the most recent projections from the U.S. Department of Energy, global fossil fuel consumption is expected to grow by an astonishing 40 percent by 2035.”
EVAN WEBER, evan at usclimateplan.org, @usclimateplan
Weber is co-author of the report: “The Plan: How the U.S. Can Help Stabilize the Climate and Create a Clean Energy Future,” available at: usclimateplan.org. He said today: “The East Coast of the United States is reeling from sever winter weather as a snow storm continues to move up the coast. Meanwhile the West Coast continues to suffer from prolonged drought — the worst in recent memory. In both cases, extreme weather is causing trouble for our nation’s aging infrastructure. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports today that the severe winter weather is threatening the East Coast’s electricity supply — from oil and gas wells to electricity lines — as ‘450,000 customers were without power from Florida to Pennsylvania.’ Meanwhile in California, water shortages are impacting conventional power generation as well as water-intensive hydraulic fracturing. As climate change makes these types of extreme weather events more severe, energy security will also worsen — unless we change course.
“Severe weather highlights our need to move towards distributed renewable energy, as well as increase the strength of our nation’s transmission infrastructure. Clean renewable energy not only uses half the water as dirty 20th Century oil, gas, and coal, but it also doesn’t contribute to the climate change that fuels these types of debilitating weather events.”
Charleston Gazeete reports: “More than 100,000 gallons of coal slurry poured into an eastern Kanawha County stream Tuesday in what officials were calling a ‘significant spill’ from a Patriot Coal processing facility.
“Emergency officials and environmental inspectors said roughly six miles of Fields Creek had been blackened and that a smaller amount of the slurry made it into the Kanawha River near Chesapeake. … This is at least the third incident…since 2010 at the Kanawha Eagle cite.” CNN notes: “Word of the slurry spill comes as West Virginia is trying to recover from the January spill that leaked 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, known as MCHM, into the water.”
RUSSELL MOKHIBER, russellmokhiber at gmail.com, @CorpCrimeReport
Mokhiber is the editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter as well as morgancountyusa.org in West Virginia. He just wrote the piece “Tomblin Huffman and the Patriot Coal Spill” and said today: “Governor Earl Ray Tomblin and the West Virginia Democratic Party are beholden to the coal, chemical and fracking industries. They have created a culture of deregulation in the state, flashing the green light to polluters and other reckless corporate operators. The results are predictable — chemical spills, coal slurry spills, natural gas fires, worker deaths, mountaintop removal. Patriot Coal delivers more than $20,000 to Tomblin’s 2012 campaign for Governor and then spills 100,000 gallons of coal slurry, blackening six miles of Fields Creek in Kanawha County. Guess who is charged by the public with enforcing the law against Patriot Coal?”