Sierra Club took $26 million from natural gas lobby to battle coal industry
... the Sierra Club, America’s oldest and most august environmental organization, accepted millions of dollars in donations from one of the nation’s biggest natural gas-drilling companies for a program lambasting coal-fired power plants as environmental evildoers.
The total take for John Muir’s conservation group? A whopping $26 million over four years from Chesapeake Energy and its subsidiaries, mostly through Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon....
.... The Daily Caller asked Chesapeake Energy spokesman Jim Gipson whether his company’s donations were made with the expectation that the Sierra Club would attack the coal industry, and whether the company has subsidized other green groups that oppose generating electricity by burning coal. Gipson did not respond to the email.
The Sierra Club launched its “Beyond Coal” campaign in 2001 on a shoestring budget, aiming to shut down as many coal-fired power plants as it could. McClendon’s money appears to have helped that campaign during a critical time when it was firing on all cylinders, lobbying against new power plant construction and working to close existing facilities, all the while hammering clean-coal advocates and blaming “big coal” for mercury pollution, asthma and assorted unforgivable ecological sins.
In 2007, the natural gas industry was also engaged in trying to persuade the federal government that its product was a more environmentally benign alternative to coal. Having the Sierra Club as a compatriot didn’t hurt.
Sierra Club, Gas Industry "Succeed" --
FIRST ENERGY TO CLOSE 3 WVC POWER PLANTS
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- FirstEnergy Corp. announced Wednesday it will shut down three aging coal-fired power plants in West Virginia later this year.
The company's Monongahela Power subsidiary will retire the Albright, Willow Island and Rivesville power stations by Sept. 1, affecting a total of 105 workers.
Akron, Ohio-based FirstEnergy attributed the shutdowns to new federal environmental regulations that are designed to reduce emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants from coal- and oil-fired plants.
FirstEnergy said the three plants' total generating capacity is about 3 percent of the electricity produced by the company. Over the past three years, they generated less than 1 percent of the company's electricity and served mostly as peaking facilities.
Six coal-fired power plants in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland also will be retired.
Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin called the closures another example of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency hurting Appalachia with "short-sighted" rulings and urged the agency to "review the entire impact of their decisions-from environmental to economical."
"When the EPA adopts regulations, they continue to fail to take into account the real-life effects these rules have on hard working Americans" like those at the FirstEnergy plants, he said.
But the Sierra Club praised the announcement and said that pollution from coal-fired power plants contributes to respiratory illnesses, asthma attacks, heart disease and cancer. It estimates closure of the West Virginia plants will prevent approximately 40 premature deaths, 64 heart attacks and 620 asthma attacks.
"This is good news for West Virginia because those plants will no longer be polluting our air and water like they have been for 60 years, said Jim Sconyers, chair of the West Virginia chapter.
Bill Price, the Sierra Club's environmental justice organizer, said the company should invest in clean-energy technology and create new jobs to help its workers.
"Closing these old, dirty plants is only the beginning of the responsibility that FirstEnergy owes to the surrounding communities," he said.
The "Act Now" page at BeyondCoal.org sez:
"... with 500 coal-fired power plants still operating,
spewing out deadly pollution,
we have our work cut out for us
as we create the citizen movement that will
shut down coal ..."
Posted by: Mannie Sherberg | Thursday, 09 February 2012 at 04:15 PM