coalfight
The end of coal will haunt the Navajo.
The fossil fuel has been an environmental threat and economic necessity for Native American tribes in Arizona. What happens when it's gone?
Percy Deal, 67, lives in the same small, three-bedroom stone house he grew up in, situated in the remote Navajo village of Cactus Valley, Ariz. Like many homes in this part of the country, Deal’s lacks running water, so once a month, he drives his pickup truck 17 miles to a public pump, where he fills three 55-gallon drums to bring back home. On the living room wall, his father’s ceremonial feathers and sweat-stained cowboy hat hang over the couch next to a framed poem his father wrote, titled Endless. The second stanza reads: “Your heart and your roots tell a perpetual story of the love and harmony you and Mother Earth share.” His family has been on this land for 500 years.
Sixty miles north of Cactus Valley lies the Kayenta Mine, a 44,000-acre open pit whose sole customer is the Navajo Generating Station, 100 miles northwest in the town called Page. NGS is the country’s eighth-largest climate polluter, pumping out 16 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and hundreds of pounds of mercury and arsenic into the atmosphere each year. It’s also one of the area’s largest employers: Together with the mine, it’s responsible for 3,000 jobs, more than a third of them full-time.
In February, NGS’s controlling shareholder, a public utility called Salt River Project, announced that it would shut down the power plant beginning at the end of this year, another casualty of the surge in cheap natural gas. Without the power plant to buy its coal, the mine will be forced to shut down, as well. Navajo leaders railed and called on the Trump administration for help; Percy Deal and environmentalists celebrated. “Our leaders are not talking about the impact on the health of these people, respiratory diseases as a result of the industry,” Deal says.
In 2014, the independent Clean Air Task Force estimated that emissions from NGS contribute to 16 premature deaths, 25 heart attacks, 300 asthma attacks, and 15 asthma emergency room visits each year, and that shutting down the plant would save $127 million in annual health-care costs, according to the task force’s assessment. That same year, the Environmental Protection Agency reached an agreement with NGS to cut its emissions of nitrogen oxide—the main pollutant linked to lung ailments, not to mention thick haze in 11 nearby national parks, including the Grand Canyon—by 80 percent over the next 16 years before shutting down permanently in 2044. “Back then, the economics projected that it would still be viable,” SRP media relations manager Scott Harelson demurs. “The analysis of utilities and the price of natural gas moving forward show that the price will continue to remain low, and that’s what ultimately caused SRP to make their decision.”
For years, every economic indicator has pointed to the eventual death of coal as a power source—but with no public announcement before this year that SRP would consider shutting down the plant before its 2044 deadline, the tribe had little reason to think they needed contingency plans. “They dropped the whole thing on top of us,” says Navajo Nation chairman Russell Begaye. Each salary derived from NGS probably supports 20 to 30 people, he says—and at $141,500, on average, it is seven times greater than the median salary on the reservation. Already the poverty rate among the Navajo is three and a half times the national mean. “If we knew five years ago that they were going to be shutting down, we would have been ready.”
It’s unquestionable that closing NGS is the best possible outcome for the land the Navajo and their neighbors, the Hopi, have called home for more than 800 years. It’s also unquestionable that closing NGS presents an existential threat to both tribes. Once the work of winding down operations is said and done, “some will say, ‘I have no choice but to make a life off the reservation,’” says Hopi Chairman Herman Honanie. “That is very likely, and something that we, as parents and tribal leaders, especially for younger people, may have to really encourage.” After centuries of fighting against both men and laws, it’s market forces that have brought them to this breaking point. “I think we need to reach deep down inside ourselves and ask how we want to survive as a people,” he says.
“You don’t see a direct effect from pollution. And I live here,” says Marie Justice, a truck driver at the Kayenta mine and local union president, who lives down the street from Navajo Generating Station. “I’ve lived here a long time. My parents lived here their entire lives. They didn’t have any lung issues that you think would be from pollution. I just don’t think you can prove it.”
Justice grew up in nearby LeChee, a sparse village of 1,400, where her family raised sheep. They lived in a hogan, a traditional Navajo mud-and-wood structure, before building a single-story cinder-block ranch in the early 1960s. The home didn’t have running water and was first wired with electricity—through a program sponsored by NGS—in 2015. Thirty members of her extended family have been employed at either NGS or Kayenta, she says. She met her husband, Bill, a retired supervisor, at the mine, and her son now works at the power plant.
Talk with nearly anyone around the plant or the mine, and you’ll hear stories of families depending on them for far more than just their jobs. Kayenta operates the water pump Deal goes to for water, and in the winter, the mine also provides free coal at a public load-out station to all native residents. “It burns long and hot—much better than wood,” says Dwayne Blackrock, who lives on the reservation and whose father worked at the mine for 21 years. “Everyone out here relies on the mine. When they are gone, I am not sure what some people are going to do.” This dependence is due in no small part to actions taken by the federal government.
The Navajo and the Hopi may be allies in the fight to keep NGS operational, but they have a fraught history of land disputes dating back to the 19th century. In 1966, as a means of forcing the tribes to negotiate, the federal government enacted the Bennett Freeze, which prohibited development on 1.5 million acres of contested land. For the 35 years the Bennett Freeze was in effect, the tribes were prohibited from undertaking infrastructure improvements such as laying gas or water lines and paving roads—worse, residents were unable to perform necessary maintenance such as re-roofing a house. By 2001, when the freeze was finally lifted, more than 75 percent of homes in the disputed territory had become uninhabitable. Today an estimated 60 percent of homes in the area still don’t have electricity or phones, and one in three has incomplete indoor plumbing.
The federal government has been more than willing to step in and legislate in the past, but in this case, it has been unwilling to assist the tribes. In May, the Hopi and Navajo sent a joint letter to Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke asking the department to intervene on their behalf—a reasonable expectation, they thought, given the administration’s bellicose pro-coal rhetoric. “We have not received any commitment from them,” says Begaye, the Navajo chairman. “The government is not living up to its promises when it comes to supporting coal.” The Department of the Interior did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
On Oct. 9, however, EPA chief Scott Pruitt announced the Trump administration’s intention to roll back the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which curbs emissions from coal power plants such as NGS. “The war on coal is over,” Pruitt said. But it may be too little too late for the Navajo’s economic breadwinner.
While Salt River Project owns the largest share of NGS, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, a division of the Department of Interior, also has a stake that entitles it to extract power for the Central Arizona Project, which pumps water from the Colorado River to parts of central and southern Arizona. (Others, including Arizona Public Service Company, NV Energy, and Tucson Electric Power, are also minority shareholders.)
David Palumbo, deputy commissioner of operations at the Bureau of Reclamation, told Bloomberg News it can’t just take over. “We don’t believe we have the current congressional authority to assume complete ownership of the plant,” he says. “Our authority lies in bringing power to CAP.” Helping SRP subsidize the price of coal to rates competitive with natural gas—a cost of $100 million per year—is also not an option. “We do not currently have that as part of our budget,” says Palumbo. “The authority to subsidize does not exist.” The federal government’s Indian trust responsibility, which obliges the U.S. to assist Native American tribes with economic development, doesn’t apply to jobs lost at NGS and the mine, Palumbo says, although he adds that the department will be accelerating efforts related to infrastructure development, including bringing broadband, electricity, and water to rural communities, after the closures.
This is Percy Deal’s main priority. “There is only one thing more powerful than money. That’s water,” he says. “The mine closing down is going to be a blessing to us. It’s going to be the beginning of a new era for us towards recovery, simply because we are going to get access to the water. Water is life. Without water, everything is at a standstill out here.” The plant uses more than 30,000 acre-feet per year for its cooling system, while the mine draws an additional 1,200 acre-feet per year, mainly for dust control. There’s no evidence to suggest that either has prevented water from reaching Deal’s hom. However, the water level of the Little Colorado River Plateau, which provides water to the northern region of the Navajo reservation, has dropped by 11.2 feet in the past 20 years.
SRP plans to pay the Navajo Nation $110 million over a period of 35 years to monitor the plant’s long-term environmental impact—less than 3 percent of what it would have paid the tribe for use of the land if the plant had remained operational. The tribe will also retain ownership of water pumps in Lake Powell, the direct water source for the plant’s cooling systems, as well as the railroad used to ship coal from the mine to the plant. To take those items off SRP’s hands, it will pay the Navajo an additional $18 million.
The Navajo Nation recently allocated $21 million to serve water to 180 new homes, including Deal’s. But Begaye admits that reclaiming water rights won’t be easy. What the plant uses is owned by the state of Arizona—part of the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which divided water rights among seven states, not including any Native territories. “We still have to get permission from the state of Arizona to get us that water, which we know is something we will not get,” Begaye says. “We will negotiate as hard as we can with the state to bring that water back to our people.”
On the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana, the Absaloka coal mine accounts for 50 percent of the tribe’s nonfederal income. The mine opened in 1974 and employs 170 people, but revenue from the operation has dwindled in recent years because of coal’s decline, causing the tribal government to lay off 1,000 of its 1,300 employees. “This is the worst I’ve ever seen it—ever,” Crow Chief Executive Officer Paul Little Light told the New York Times in April, referring to poverty on the reservation.
“Many tribal economies are insufficiently diversified,” says Joe Kalt, co-director of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development at Harvard University. “With coal-reliant tribes like the Crow or the Navajo, you are obviously seeing consequences of not being diversified more directly. Part of the problem at NGS, too, is just the problem of coal in general. But this being part of the first generation of economic development, back in the ’60s, they put a lot of eggs in that single basket.”
SRP signed a 50-year lease with the Navajo in 1969; Peabody Energy Corp. signed agreements with both the Navajo and the Hopi in 1966 (the same year the Bennett Freeze was enacted). Together, the two companies pay the Navajo $35 million per year, which amounts to 30 percent of the tribe’s income. Peabody pays the Hopi $13 million annually—a full 85 percent of the tribe's yearly revenue. “The plant and mine hold up the economy of an entire region,” Begaye says, adding that he’s considering reducing hours and cutting retirement packages for Navajo government employees. “We are facing a crisis here.”
Begaye says the Navajo Nation will continue to operate the water station, and no-cost coal will still be available for heating, but residents will have to venture out to find it themselves. SRP offered to find jobs for NGS employees at its other facilities in Arizona, which include a coal power plant 260 miles from NGS and several gas plants and corporate buildings in the Phoenix metropolitan area, four hours away by car. Peabody, too, will offer priority consideration to Kayenta employees for jobs at other sites in the U.S. “Peabody believes NGS is an important engine for Arizona’s economy and growth and should continue operating well into the future,” the company told Bloomberg News. Peabody has exclusive rights to the 21 billion tons of coal in the area, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, worth upward of $100 billion. If NGS shuts down, that revenue remains in the ground.
SRP’s position is that the factors contributing to NGS’s closure were hardly unique or secret. “We have regular communications with the Navajo Nation. The subject of costs of other resources are part of those conversations,” says Harelson. “Natural gas prices dropping was not a mystery to anyone, including the Navajo Nation. But when was the tipping point for us? It’s difficult to say.”
The plant’s 50-year lease ends in 2019; the original agreement included an option to extend until 2044, which SRP chose not to exercise. A necessary two-year wind-down period explains its haste to close. In July, the Navajo and the Hopi successfully negotiated a two-year lease extension with SRP, which would allow the plant—and, by extension, the Kayenta mine—to remain operational through 2019. But because the federal government is technically a trustee of the land, it has to certify the agreement before the deal can go through. It has until Dec. 1 to do so. In the unlikely event it rejects the lease extension, the plant and mine will begin shutting down soon after Christmas. On Oct. 2, however, Peabody announced that potential investors have expressed interest in pursuing ownership of NGS, which may extend the life of the facilities.
Every morning for the past 40 years, Gerald Clitso, 59, has made the same drive from his home in the town of Kayenta to the mine, where he’s a machine operator. He has two grown children, both of whom he was able to put through college off the reservation. “I decided to work in the mine because of my family—to support them and give them a good life,” he says. “But now that opportunity is being taken away from others. There’s nothing else up here for jobs—nothing.”
Unlike some of his co-workers, Clitso doesn’t deny the environmental impact of the mine. “It’s a choice we’ve had to make,” Clitso says. “What am I supposed to do? Keep living in poverty and raise my kids in poverty? There will never be a day that I regret to say that I worked at the mine.”
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Secretary Zinke, it's time to call it quits.
Working to undermine the agency you were charged with leading is not just a betrayal of those who work there; it is a betrayal of the Americans the agency serves.
Story highlights
Joel Clement: Secretary Ryan Zinke has shown contempt for the Department of Interior's mission and its employees
His priorities lie with President Trump and special interests, not the American people he should be working for, writes Clement
Joel Clement is an independent science, policy and climate change expert and former civil servant. He was a climate change policy adviser at the US Department of the Interior until July 2017, when he became a federal whistleblower, accusing the Trump administration of retaliating against him for his climate change work. In September 2017, he received the Joe A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage. The views expressed in this commentary are his own.
(CNN)Secretary Ryan Zinke, last week I turned in my US Department of the Interior credentials and reluctantly walked away from public service. Today, I call on you to do the same and resign as secretary of the Interior.
Since you were sworn in on March 1, you have demonstrated contempt for the agency's mission and its devoted employees. As I described in my resignation letter, I quit my position because of your spectacularly poor leadership, reckless waste of taxpayer dollars and disregard for the dangers of climate change -- all of which are putting American well-being and the economy at risk.
You and your deputy secretary, David Bernhardt, a former oil and gas lobbyist, have no strategic vision of your own and are dedicated to President Donald Trump's special interests first, Americans last model. As Trump flunkies, you are eliminating anything the previous administration touched, you are marginalizing scientists and experts, and you are blithely disabling the agency so special interests can move in and snatch public lands out of the public's hands.
DOI has a unique set of responsibilities in the federal family, and your resume of failure impacts every single facet of the DOI mission. You have shown contempt for the conservation mission by conducting a sloppy review of our treasured national monuments to score political points. Your review was of an arbitrary list of monuments and your recommendations to the President, captured in an error-filled memorandum to the White House, were seemingly based on an unclear and inconsistent set of criteria. And you conducted this review while hypocritically recommending a new national monument for Montana, where you hope to advance your political career.
Astonishingly, you're also moving to undercut the Western sage grouse conservation plans that were so carefully developed by bipartisan federal, state and local partners across the West. Even Republican Gov. Matt Mead from Wyoming has expressed public concern over what you are trying to do. Unlike you, those partners understand that if that bird lands on the endangered list, Western economies will pay the price. For years, collaborators in the West have been working hard to prevent a conflict in which the sage grouse and its habitat require stringent protections that can impact local economies.
Trump is the swamp monster
You have also been reckless with DOI's resource leasing mission. You eliminated a rule that helped prevent oil, gas and coal companies from cheating American taxpayers on royalty payments. You canceled a moratorium on a failed coal leasing program that is also cheating taxpayers. And you had the audacity to cancel a study into the health risks of people living near mountaintop-removal coal mines after rescinding a rule that would have protected their health. If not for the intervention of a US District Court, you also would have suspended a methane rule that will save hundreds of millions of dollars, provide energy for American homes and restrict harmful methane emissions.
In addition to your conservation and resource extraction failures, you have left the imperiled Alaska Native villages of the Arctic to fend for themselves and you reneged on your day one promise to prioritize American Indian sovereignty by curtailing programs meant to serve American Indians and Alaska Natives.
Your failures will be amplified by climate change, and it's not only the Alaska Native villages that are on the front lines now. Worried families sit in the path of devastating hurricanes, businesses in coastal communities are already experiencing frequent and severe flooding, fishermen along our coasts are pulling up empty nets due to warming seas, farming communities are being hit by floods of biblical proportions and medical professionals are scrambling to understand new disease vectors. Climate change is real and has consequences for Americans, our natural and cultural heritage, and our economy.
If you and President Trump continue to muzzle experts in science, health and other fields while handing over the keys to special interests, these consequences will be far more harmful. Harvey, Irma and Maria were monster storms made worse by climate change, but their damage was amplified exponentially by a lack of urban resilience, deregulation on steroids and an ongoing disregard for environmental justice. These problems will only grow worse if special interests maintain their grip on the agencies that are supposed to be looking out for Americans
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Working to undermine the agency you were charged with leading is not just a betrayal of those who work there; it is a betrayal of the Americans the agency serves. Americans deserve a secretary who will protect America's natural resources rather than pander to corporate interests; they deserve a secretary who will rise to new challenges rather than rebuke civil servants; they deserve a secretary who will be frugal with the agency's limited resources rather than fly private jets on at least three occasions and then hold fundraisers and photo shoots (a story you have called "a little BS"); they deserve a secretary who will foster American well-being rather than flatter his own political ambitions.
Secretary Zinke, you should resign effective immediately.
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Blankenship opens wallet to clear his name, rattle Manchin.
How does Senator Don Blankenship sound to you?
How does Senator Don Blankenship sound to you?
In May, the former Massey Energy Co. CEO finished serving his one-year prison sentence for a misdemeanor charge of conspiring to violate mine safety laws in connection with the 2010 Upper Big Branch explosion, which killed 29 West Virginia miners.
Investigators and prosecutors blamed Blankenship for the mine disaster, saying he put profits ahead of safety. But he insists he is innocent.
"It doesn't matter how many times somebody tells a lie, nor how many different people tell that lie, or for how long they maintain that lie — if it is a lie, it is a lie," Blankenship said in a recent telephone interview. "And that's what all of you are missing."
Yesterday, the Supreme Court decided not to take up his appeal, but Blankenship — once coal's highest-paid CEO — said he has enough cash to tell West Virginians his side of the story, maybe during a run next year for Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin's seat.
"My focus has and will remain on exposing Obama's deadliest cover up. Twenty-nine Americans died because of the government," Blankenship wrote on his website after the decision, attacking Manchin as a "man who believes in declaring Americans guilty before their trial."
Blankenship has never shied away from spending big on politics. He opened his wallet over decades to help Republicans turn once-blue West Virginia into a red state, and now he plans another spending blitz.
"I probably won't disclose how much I am going to spend," he said, "but I'm going to spend whatever it takes."
In August, Blankenship started buying airtime on West Virginia television for ads that outline his Upper Big Branch theory and call on Manchin to "tell the truth" about the catastrophe, which happened when Manchin was West Virginia's governor.
The new campaign, "For the Sake of Coal Miners," recalls "And for the Sake of the Kids," the group Blankenship bankrolled in 2004 to unseat West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Warren McGraw. He spent more than $3 million to elect Republican attorney Brent Benjamin, who cast the deciding vote in 2005 to scrap a $50 million judgment against Blankenship's Massey Energy. The resulting furor helped inspire the plot of John Grisham's novel "The Appeal."
The campaign has stoked talk about Blankenship entering the Senate race. Manchin faces a Democratic primary challenge from activist Paula Jean Swearengin. On the Republican side, Rep. Evan Jenkins and state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey are the best-known candidates in a field of five.
Said Blankenship: "I haven't decided whether I'm going to run or not."
But he's conducted a poll to test the waters.
"When you poll, you never know for sure whether you're getting the truth, so I don't know whether I could do it or not," he said.
Blankenship believes he could carry southern West Virginia, where he was born and raised, but admits he would struggle in the northern half of the state, blaming biased media coverage.
Kentucky attorney and mine safety expert Tony Oppegard doesn't doubt Blankenship has support in places where his company's paychecks are now missed.
"He's got more money than God," Oppegard said, "so you're always going to have people sucking up to you."
Manchin shrugged off Blankenship's attacks, telling E&E; News the former coal executive should respect the rule of law and stop dredging up the still-raw emotions of the victim's families.
"I guess Don is having a hard time looking at himself, looking in the mirror," Manchin said.
Said Blankenship, "Anybody who's not telling the truth wishes the truth would go away."
No matter what, he said, all the candidates will have to deal with his ads.
"These guys are going to tell the truth at some point," he said.
'Far worse than Benghazi'
Blankenship maintains that the Upper Big Branch blast was caused by natural gas, not a methane ignition fueled by coal dust.
"That area of West Virginia continues to have natural gas inundations that endanger the coal miners, and at some point, the truth's got to be told if we're to have any chance of it not happening again," he said.
The mine's ventilation system could have helped, but Blankenship contends federal Mine Safety and Health Administration inspectors ordered the air flow in the mine to be cut in half the day before the explosion. He compares the mine disaster with Islamic militants' 2012 attack on the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya, which resulted in the deaths of U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and U.S. Foreign Service information management officer Sean Smith.
"It's far worse than Benghazi. At Benghazi, mistakes were made and Americans died," he said, echoing his most recent ad. "Here, the mistakes were made by the government itself, and the coal miners died, and they just lied about it and nobody cares."
But Davitt McAteer, a Clinton-era MSHA chief who led an independent investigative panel for then-Gov. Manchin, said science doesn't support Blankenship's claim.
The McAteer group's report identified not only a history of methane inundations at Upper Big Branch but 64 violations pertaining to the ventilation system just in 2009.
Still, the report said, the ignition could have been contained had Massey properly controlled rock dust and maintained water sprayers. Instead, a massive blast spread miles through the mine.
The United Mine Workers of America produced its own report condemning Blankenship for 54 total deaths during his time at Massey.
UMWA President Cecil Roberts said Blankenship's insistence on pushing his "whack-job theory" only reopens the wounds suffered by the families of the victims.
"Although Don Blankenship may not have received the proper punishment in this world, those families can rest assured that he will receive it in the next," Roberts said.
Blankenship dismissed the McAteer, UMWA and MSHA reports as "neither independent nor responsible."
"They are all supporters and fans of one another," he said. "They all supported President Obama for election, and all their reports supported Obama's declaration made prior to any UBB [Upper Big Branch] investigation that management was at fault."
Blankenship defended his safety record, including a number of technological innovations like the continuous miner proximity device and adopting now-standard reflective miners' clothing.
He said he is pressing for MSHA to focus more on technology to make mines safer.
"Our answer was always technology; their answer was always to blame the miner and explain how the miner could have done it better," Blankenship said.
McAteer conceded that Blankenship had done innovative things, but wrote in the report: "Upper Big Branch is a cautionary tale of hubris."
"To his discredit," McAteer said, Blankenship "has disregarded the very fundamental and very basic safety precautions that keep people alive."
'Meaningful adversary'
Blankenship blamed his conviction on a conspiracy of Democrats. The Obama administration, Manchin and McAteer didn't let "a good crisis go to waste," he said, quoting former the former Obama White House Chief of Staff and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
"I'm not hated by the union or the liberal side of the government or the press because I do things incorrectly," he said. "I'm hated because I've been a meaningful adversary of theirs."
Blankenship was backing Republicans long before the GOP finally retook the West Virginia Legislature in 2014 after eight decades.
He also took credit for taking on UMWA, which has seen its influence dwindle in the region as the mining workforce has contracted (Greenwire, April 11).
Blankenship pointed to the 1984-85 strike at Massey subsidiary Rawls Sales and Processing as a turning point in West Virginia politics. As the company's young leader, Blankenship broke the strike by hiring non-union workers. He spent the next decade buying up union coal mines, closing them and reopening them as non-union mines.
He was already pushing to make West Virginia a right-to-work state — prohibiting companies from requiring their employees to pay union dues as a condition of employment. In 2016, the Legislature passed right-to-work, and this month, the West Virginia Supreme Court overruled a lower judge who blocked implementation of the law.
"It took me a long time to get there, but we finally got there," Blankenship said.
His work paved the way for Donald Trump's landslide victory in West Virginia last year, but Blankenship said he didn't put much stock in Trump — who he derided as "an Archie Bunker with a billion dollars" — reviving the coal industry.
"It clearly shows he doesn't realize what's involved in getting coal to come back, but it was a great message to win West Virginia and Kentucky," he said.
While Blankenship maintains that his conviction was political, former MSHA chief McAteer said it only marked a shift from the politics that allowed the coal industry to rule West Virginia.
"Mine operators are no longer exempt from a look at the criminal side," McAteer said. "He's back in the 1950s where nobody was touchable."
While some see the pro-coal Trump White House giving Blankenship another chance to clear his name over the Upper Big Branch catastrophe, David Zatezalo, Trump's nominee to lead MSHA, said, "Absent any new evidence, I don't see any reason why it should be reopened."
Blankenship, meanwhile, said he has never had faith in governments or courts, not since gasoline taxes put his mother's gas station on the West Virginia-Kentucky line out business. His time in prison, he said, only reinforced his notion that the law bends to corporate and political interests.
"If I hadn't had millions of dollars," he said, "they would have put me in prison for life."
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Canada aligning with UK to fight global growth in coal-fired electricity.
Canada is joining forces with the United Kingdom to push for a global crackdown on unabated coal-fired electricity.
Canada is joining forces with the United Kingdom to push for a global crackdown on unabated coal-fired electricity.
Eliminating, or at least reducing, the world's reliance on coal is a critical step in the Paris climate change accord's efforts to prevent the planet from warming more than two degrees Celsius over with pre-industrial times.
Environment Minister Catherine McKenna is on a two-day trip to the U.K. and Ireland this week, pushing Canada as a global leader on climate change action.
On Thursday she was in Ireland to be a panellist at a climate risk conference in Dublin and tour Ireland's Marine Institute in Galway.
During Wednesday's stop in London she and Claire Perry, British minister of state for climate change and industry, announced plans to use their own national commitments to phase out coal power plants as a means to convince others to do the same.
In a statement, the two said Canada and the U.K. are both committed to phasing out unabated coal use at home — Canada by 2030 and the U.K. by 2025 — and they are inviting others to jump on board during the next United Nations climate talks in Bonn, Germany in November.
Unabated coal plants are those built without carbon capture or storage, which reduces their emissions significantly.
About 40 per cent of the world's power is generated from burning coal and in Canada one-tenth of electricity comes from coal plants.
"All the models show you one of the key things that has to happen if we're going to get anywhere close to our climate change commitments is that coal has to exit the energy mix as fast as possible and that means government intervention to cut it out," said Rob Bailey, research director of energy, environment and resources at Chatham House, a British independent policy think tank.
McKenna was the closing keynote speaker at Chatham House's climate change conference Wednesday but Bailey said he hadn't yet heard about Canada and Britain's plans.
"The devil is in the details of all these things, but that is exactly the kind of thing they should be doing," said Bailey. "I think that's very positive."
He said he'd also like to see Canada push for a coal phase-out commitment as part of the G7 talks, which Canada will host next spring in Charlevoix, Que.
Bailey said when U.S. President Donald Trump decided to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord, he left a big leadership gap, noting without joint leadership of China and the U.S. under President Barack Obama, the Paris agreement would never have been possible.
Bailey said the next big step for Paris is that in 2020 the signatories are expected to resubmit their national emissions reductions targets, which have to get more ambitious if the two degree goal has any hope. He said if China and the U.S. stepped up with more ambitious plans others would have followed them.
Now it's going to need a coalition of countries to take the U.S.'s place because no one nation on its own is as wealthy, powerful or influential as the U.S. The U.K. and Canada both have the kind of national climate change plans that give them authority on the matter internationally and Bailey said they now need to really use it.
"They need to build the tent," he said. "The more rich countries and developing countries they can bring in on coal or other aspects of the climate agenda the better."
He noted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's international position helps.
"You have a prime minister who is high-profile internationally, charismatic, dynamic," he said. "A lot of this does come down to personalities at the end of the day and that's somebody who could potentially catalyze things if they invest the political time in a diplomatic effort."
Urgewald, a German environmental organization, in June, released a list of 850 new coal-fired plants on tap to be built in 62 nations, including 33 which currently don't burn much, if any coal, to make electricity. If they are all built it will increase coal-fired power production 45 per cent.
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Fossil fuels win billions in public money after Paris climate deal, angry campaigners claim.
Coal, oil and gas finance from major development banks totalled $5bn in year after historic climate pact, according to estimates.
Billions of dollars of public money was sunk in new fossil fuel projects by the world’s major development banks in the year after the Paris climate change deal was agreed, according to campaigners who are calling for the banks to halt their financing of coal, oil and gas.
The new analysis also reveals that some of the taxpayers’ money given to coal and gas projects was counted as “climate” finance.
Funding for fossil fuel projects from the six main international development banks totalled at least $5bn in 2016, according to a report from researchers at Oil Change International (OCI).
In particular, OCI estimate the funding for exploration for new oil and gas more than doubled in 2016, to $2.1bn. Funding for clean energy also grew by more than a third, to $11.4bn.
A second report from analysts at E3G suggests that in recent years the World Bank and European Bank for Development and Reconstruction (EBRD) have given similar levels of funding to fossil fuels as to climate-friendly energy projects.
“Despite the Paris Agreement being reached, multilateral development banks that say all the right things on climate are still financing billions of dollars in oil, gas, and coal projects,” said Alex Doukas at Oil Change International. “They are using relatively scarce public resources that need to be used as strategically as possible if we have a hope of meeting the agreement’s aims. If they really want to help lift people out of poverty, taxpayer-funded banks can no longer finance climate destruction. They must stop funding fossil fuels.”
Helena Wright at E3G said: “Development banks must do more to green their investments. As a first step, the banks should commit to ending finance for fossil fuel exploration. Obviously exploration for new resources is not in line with the Paris goals – we have got enough fossil fuels already to go over 2C of warming.”
Scientists showed in 2015 that to keep under the internationally agreed 2C warming limit, then most existing fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground. In July, the G20 nations were accused of hypocrisy for talking tough on global warming but providing four times more public finance for fossil fuels than for renewables.
Wright also found that millions of dollars given by the EBRD for a coal port in Morocco were counted as climate finance on the grounds the port contributed to adaptation to climate change. In another example, millions of dollars given by the EBRD for an offshore gas exploration project in Azerbaijan were also counted as climate finance on the basis that it reduced emissions compared to baseline. “It seems a bit ridiculous,” she said.
However, a spokesman for the EBRD said it strongly disagreed with the analysis in the new reports and the way in which the projects were categorised. He said the EBRD spent 2.7 times more on energy-related climate projects than on fossil fuels and that the analyses had not included lending that went to projects via partner banks.
A World Bank spokesman also disputed the analyses and emphasised the bank’s clean investments: “Over the last five years, the World Bank Group has invested more than $11bn in renewable energy and $4.5bn in energy efficiency. We are now the largest multilateral provider of finance for renewable energy and energy efficiency projects in developing countries.”
Both of the new reports analysed the lending by the World Bank, EBRD, the African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, European Investment Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.
The OCI report estimated significant rises in fossil fuel funding in 2016 by the Asian Development Bank, where it leapt fivefold, and at the World Bank. The E3G report judged the Inter-American Development Bank as the greenest, giving over five times more to climate-friendly energy projects between 2013 and 2015 than to fossil fuel schemes.
Yongping Zhai, energy advisor at the Asian Development Bank, said: “ADB will continue to expand climate finance, while still providing access to energy in the most cost effective manner to support progress for developing countries. ADB’s financing to fossil fuel in 2016 was limited to natural gas, which is an important transition fuel, [with] lesser carbon.”
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The EPA rips up the Clean Power Plan.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the agency must regulate carbon dioxide. Now it may try to do the minimum the courts will allow.
By Editorial Board October 11 at 7:28 PM Follow postopinions
FROM A certain perspective, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s move to rip up the Clean Power Plan, President Barack Obama’s signature climate change policy, hardly seems radical. The EPA chief repealed a rule he claims was illegal. Indeed, it was something of a stretch for the EPA to regulate planet-warming carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act, a law originally written to handle more traditional pollutants. The Obama administration took an expansive approach, pushing the law as far as it could so that Mr. Obama’s climate negotiators could credibly promise that the United States would cut its carbon emissions if other nations would, too.
Yet the Obama EPA’s Clean Power Plan did not, in our view and that of many experts, break the law. The Supreme Court has already ruled that the EPA must regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act. There is a strong chance that the court would have upheld the Obama administration’s now-defunct strategy to do so, or at least much of it. But now the country may never know, because its chief environmental officer wants not to do as much as he can to protect the atmosphere, but to do as little as the law demands, threatening the painstaking progress the Obama administration made in coordinating an international response to climate change.
Mr. Pruitt has not yet proposed a replacement plan; he began a public comment process that may lead to a new set of regulations on carbon emissions. It is technically possible that his EPA will decide to instate new rules that are serious, if less aggressive than Mr. Obama’s. But everything about Mr. Pruitt’s history — relentlessly suing the Obama administration, denying climate science, shutting environmentalist voices out of the EPA — suggests he will aim to do the minimum the courts will allow.
As if to confirm that reading, Mr. Pruitt announced his Clean Power Plan rollback in coal country, declaring that “the war against coal is over.” Economist Paul Krugman has pointed out that 18 times more jobs have been lost at department stores than in the coal business since the turn of the century. Nevertheless, it is on behalf of a dirty, dying and relatively small industry that Mr. Pruitt will go down as one of the nation’s worst environmental stewards. He may believe that the Obama administration’s climate plan was radical. But his approach — anti-scientific, ideological, a betrayal of his office — is far more so.
There is another notable villain: Congress. For decades, lawmakers have dawdled while the greatest environmental challenge of our time has worsened, each wasted year making it harder to address. Once the science became clear — and it has been for years now — it became legislators’ responsibility to craft a law specifically designed to address the carbon issue. Instead, they punted to the executive branch, leading to the chaotic regulatory seesaw now on display. The right response to Mr. Pruitt’s radical action is a reassertion of congressional responsibility.
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Bloomberg's charity donates $64 million to 'war on coal.'
Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s charity gave another $64 million to a campaign that aims to slash the number of U.S. coal-fired plants by two thirds by 2020, he said on Wednesday.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s charity gave another $64 million to a campaign that aims to slash the number of U.S. coal-fired plants by two thirds by 2020, he said on Wednesday.
Bloomberg Philanthropies made the donation to the Beyond Coal campaign run by non-profit Sierra Club, and other organizations fighting the burning of coal. Including this latest donation, the charity has given $110 million to Beyond Coal since 2011.
The pledge was made a day after President Donald Trump’s environmental regulator announced a move to scrap former president Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan that would have reduced carbon emissions from coal plants.
The Trump administration labeled the Clean Power Plan part of a “war on coal” by Obama.
But Bloomberg said that since the plan has been tied up by the courts and never came into effect, the real threat to coal comes from competing power sources, such as cheap natural gas, solar, and wind power, as well as communities, local governments and companies concerned about public health.
“These are the groups that are fighting the war on coal and it’s happening all across America and they are winning,” Bloomberg said at an event at the Sierra Club in Washington.
Since 2011 nearly half of the country’s coal-fired power plants, or nearly 260 plants, have been closed.
Beyond Coal wants to push communities to fight coal plants which emit carbon and particulates blamed for lung and heart problems. It aims to increase closures to some two-thirds of the U.S. coal fleet by 2020.
While domestic coal use is under pressure, coal exports have risen this year amid high global demand. The Energy Information Administration, the independent statistics arm of the Department of Energy, said on Wednesday that U.S. coal exports were up 62 percent from January to July, compared to the same period in 2016.
But U.S. coal-fired power plant closures have continued apace since Trump came to office in January. Last week, Luminant, a subsidiary of Vistra Energy Corp, said it would shut its Monticello plant in Texas next year, joining about 10 other plants that have announced their closure since Trump came to office.
Reporting by Timothy Gardner, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien
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