Coal in the West
If the story of coal in the west was a movie plot, the start of 2010 would definitely be considered the third act - the climax - the moment which marks a change for better or for worse. The Copenhagen climate conference ended 2009 leaving us basically helpless in our hope that international talks would address phasing out coal plants in favor of alternative energy options, thus leaving it up to individual countries and states to figure it out. All the while, places like the west, specifically Washington, Oregon, and California, started 2010 where they left off the last few years, in debt and looking for creative ways to not only get out of the red, but capitalize on the green the federal government is dangling in front of them. That's green as in stimulus money for alternative energy projects, and green as in "going green" and finding better ways to provide energy resources to the region that doesn't involve choking the skies with carbon emissions.
We can attrirbute this climax to not only the economy forcing creative thinking, but to a combination of geographical accidents, citizen activism, and political leadership. The geographical accidents are best understood by the west, specifically California, being more and more ravaged by wildfires, especially out of the typical fire season. And for political leadership, the Sierra Club points to three particular leaders in a recent article titled, "The West Without Coal": Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa vowed two years ago that sometime in 2010 the city's proportion of renewable power will grow to 20 percent [from 8 percent]. And Villaraigosa has committed to boosting that number to 40 percent by 2020 and to 60 percent by 2030. Seattle gets less than 1 percent of its power from coal and recently sold its ownership interest in a coal plant; its new mayor, Mike McGinn, is the former chair of the Sierra Club's Cascade Chapter and an activist in the Club's Cool Cities program. Portland, Oregon, has a draft "climate action plan" that calls for reducing carbon emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050. To that end, Mayor Sam Adams has called on Portland General Electric (PGE), one of two utilities serving the city, to phase out coal. The other major Oregon utility, Pacific Power, has had a moratorium on power from new coal-fired plants for the last two years. Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which serves 15 million people in the San Francisco Bay Area and throughout northern and central California, is snatching up power-purchase agreements from solar farms before they're even built. San Diego Gas and Electric Company, which serves 3.4 million people, gets half as much coal power today as it did five years ago and says it doesn't plan to renew its last coal contract, which expires in 2013.
So while those examples are admirable aspirations, the third leg from what we mentioned above, citizen activism, is one that is more complicated than it sounds. It can really be broken into two areas - consumer practices and political pressure, and both of them have hurdles, very big hurdles. Getting of coal is going to require relentless, informed organizing by grassroots activists and constant legal pressure all while lobbyists put in equal effort in D.C. to stop these very actions. According to a recent story in Rolling Stone titled, "As the World Burns," By last year, according to the Center for Public
Integrity, the number of lobbyists devoted to climate change had
soared by more than fivefold since 2003, to a total of 2,810
— or five lobbyists for every lawmaker in Washington. Only 138 of the lobbyists were pushing for alternative
energy — the rest were heavily weighted toward the old
fossil-fuel mafia, most of whom oppose tough carbon caps."
Many of you will argue that no matter what happens, we're chanined to what we have by the failure of congress to produce any sort of meaninful legislation to address coal and to move us beyond its dirty past. To that we say that this coal climax that we're at is the only time we'll be here. It's either act now, or react later. So while the damage may be done, we're convinced that if any place can make a go at being coal free it's the west. And we're ready to make an example for the rest of the U.S. and the world.
