CleanTechnica

Mix steel, oil, and chemical companies together with the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and you have a chunk of the financial backing behind the Southeastern Legal Foundation, which has just filed a petition challenging the U.S. EPA’ recent determination on greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.

In challenging the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gasses, the Southeastern Legal Foundation joins the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a number of companies including  Massey Energy (which includes mountaintop removal in its coal mining operations).  Though these actions are taken against a government agency, they are also yet another indication that an epic battle of titanic proportions is brewing in the private sector, pitching old school fossil fuel industries against climate-conscious companies including Nike, Starbucks, Apple, and Exelon (the nation’s largest utility) – each of which has protested the Chamber’s position on global warming.

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Waiting for the Senate to move forward on climate and clean energy legislation seems like waiting for the Polar Express. A wide variety of parties from every corner of society seem to be getting anxious, though, and are pushing on Congress to get moving.

From rappers to Iraq veterans to the business community to the White House to winter sports communities to major Hollywood actors, people across the country are pushing for Congress to move in their own unique ways.

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As a follow up to the post from Sunday (Social Media Day of Action on Mountaintop Removal), this is a reminder that today is a big day of social media activism to stop mountaintop removal coal mining!

Visit Rainforest Action Network’s website to join thousands of others in taking action to encourage Chase bank to stop supporting mountaintop removal coal mining in the Appalachian Mountains.

Why?

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Australian solar physicist John Cook of Skeptical Science has created a nifty little iPhone app that includes numerous climate skeptic arguments as well as the science-based counterarguments to those (since we are all tired of the misinformed myths about climate science but normally can’t cite scientific articles and data off the top of our head).

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Recovery Act stimulus funding for a technology that will make geothermal power available in every state is being invested in Senator Inhofe’s Oklahoma by the Department of Energy’s Geothermal Technologies Program, in a $3 million R&D program to increase the volume of hot rock from which heat can be extracted.

Solutions will be found to:
1. Reduce costs for drilling and well completion and
2. Increase the volume of hot rock from which heat can be extracted.

The Recovery Act stimulus funds is providing $2,399,999 to the Oklahoma project, and a company from out of state;  Impact Technologies will put up the other $600,000 of the funding, and a patent-pending system for drilling and completing micro-holes into deep 300°C geothermal reservoir rocks. Read the rest of this entry »

FERC is close to approving the Tres Amigas high-voltage interconnection hub project in Clovis, New Mexico, designed to be the first step in a renewable energy transmission superhighway.

But five groups are filing against the project. The largest, Occidental Petroleum; is asking FERC to dump the project.

Occidental Petroleum’s main argument is that it would put local power companies selling higher-priced power to consumers at a disadvantage. They couldn’t compete with marketers buying at lower prices and routing their power through Tres Amigas.
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In a critical step to move international action on climate change forward, the United Nations (UN) just formed a climate financing taskforce. This high-level taskforce will be co-chaired by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. The taskforce will investigate ways of raising $100 million per year, starting in 2020, to help poorer nations cut their emissions and cope with the effects of climate change.

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There they go again: just one day before Nike, Starbucks, and a slew of clean energy companies are uniting with labor leaders to launch the Race for American Jobs in support of  green jobs related to climate and clean energy policies, environmentalleader.com reports that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has filed a petition challenging the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gasses under the Clean Air Act.

Nike has already resigned its position on the Chamber’s board over the organization’s backward-looking environmental policies. Other major companies have withdrawn outright because of the Chamber’s over-the-top lobbying.  Last fall Apple and Exelon (the nation’s largest utility company) quit in protest, along with utilities Pacific Gas & Electric and PNM Resources.  Leading paper company Mohawk also withdrew, telling the Associated Press that the Chamber’s naysayer position on climate change was hurting the company’s cred on environmental issues.  With friends like these, right?

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As California moves to implement cap and trade to reduce harmful greenhouse gases, the UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy and the Environment has published a new study designed to help lawmakers in California fine-tune the legislation.

As with the studies by the German Marshall Fund with its Ten Insights from Europe on the EU Emissions Trading System – the UC Environmental Law Center studies those who have gone before us.

They want to fine-tune legislative ideas that can help us reduce greenhouse gases by holding polluters accountable, and by using the proceeds to implement clean and safe renewable energy that builds a prosperous economy in California.

One interesting finding is that the EU cap and trade system grew China’s clean energy. Read the rest of this entry »

The UK Climate Change Act, introduced in 2008, is now bearing fruit and thus providing the seeds for similar legislation in over a dozen other European countries.

Friends of the Earth and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office have been hosting a series of seminars in European embassies lately in order to explain the benefits of the UK Climate Change Act, which includes legally binding emission targets and carbon budgets which must be continued by successive governments.

They are looking to encourage similar or better legislation in other countries and it seems that a handful of countries are interested and tilling the soil for such legislation.

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