After Gutenberg

One Comment

1. jcwinnie
   Posted 2011-3-23 at 5:46 pm | Permalink

   Gristz Glenn Hurowitz observed that “Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced yesterday an enormous expansion in coal mining that threatens to increase U.S. climate pollution by an amount equivalent to more than half of what the United States currently emits in a year.” Guess Gristz editors couldn’t get David Roberts to stop banging his head against the wall long enough to file the report.

   A statement from Wild Earth Guardians, Sierra Club, and Defenders of Wildlife put the announcement in perspective:

   When burned, the coal threatens to release more than 3.9 billion tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, equal to the annual emissions from 300 coal-fired power plants, further cementing the United States as a leading contributor to climate disruption … Salazar’s announcement is a stark contrast to his call for clean energy. Interior, for example, touted that in 2010, 4,000 megawatts of renewable energy development were authorized. And in today’s press conference, Secretary Salazar announced Interior’s intent to authorize more than 12,000 megawatts of renewable energy by the end of next year … Yet in opening the door for 2.35 billion tons of coal mining, Salazar’s announcement effectively enables more than 300,000 megawatts of coal-fired energy—30 times more dirty energy development than renewable energy.

   
   “Coal will be a part of the energy portfolio in America for the future,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said yesterday.

   In other words, despite his administration’s rhetorical embrace of clean energy, Obama is effectively using modest wind and solar investments as cover for a broader embrace of dirty fuels. It’s the same strategy BP, Chevron, and other major polluters use: tout modest environmental investments in multi-million dollar PR campaigns, while putting the real money into fossil fuel development.

   President Obama seems to be rushing to make this embrace even tighter: in the last week, the administration announced four new permits for deepwater offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico—the same type of exploration that led to the BP oil spill disaster. Like most of his giveaways to polluters, however, this one failed equally to generate much praise from major polluting industries:

   “We look forward to the day when a single permit on plan doesn’t merit a press conference by the Secretary of the Interior,” said the American Petroleum Institute’s Erik Milito in response.

   …when Obama talks about “green” energy now, it’s typically the environmentally destructive type. In [a recent visit to] Brazil, he touted the country’s reliance on biofuels and hydropower, both of which are blamed for Brazil’s massive deforestation. Sugarcane development for biofuel has eaten up more than half the country’s Cerrado, “a vast plateau where temperatures range from freezing to steaming hot and bushes and grasslands alternate with forests and the richest variety of flora of all the world’s savannas,” such as jaguars, blue macaws, and giant armadillos, as the Washington Post’s Sabrina Valle reported. And hydropower projects like the proposed Belo Monte dam threaten to inundate vast areas of forest—a whopping 150 square miles in the case of the Belo Monte—while displacing thousands of indigenous Kayapo people.

   Taken together, Obama’s deepening (and generally unrequited) love for big polluters represents a real challenge for the environmental movement, which has always allowed its hopes—and its fear of the far right—to obscure the dirty realities of Obama’s actions. But we’re now confronted with the prospect that Obama’s pro-fossil fuel policies threaten to dwarf positive steps such as increasing fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks—and his EPA’s (court-mandated) “modest” regulation of greenhouse gases.

   This blog wonders whether Obama’s lack of accountability to those that advocate on environmental issues and count themselves among his supporters might have contributed to the Energy Czarina’s decision to vacate the Palace?