Two days in the Gulf of Mexico left Environmental Defense Fund’s Executive Director David Yarnold saddened and enraged.

“Both the widespread damage and the inadequacy of the response effort exceeded my worst fears,” said Yarnold. “I’d spent a full day on the Gulf and we ended up soaked in oily water and seared by the journey.”

Back at home, Yarnold showed his pictures of the gooey peanut-butter colored oil ad blackened wetlands to his wife and 13-year-old daughter, Nicole.

“Pictures of dolphins diving into our oily wake and brown pelicans futilely trying to pick oil off their backs popped on the screen,” said Yarnold. “And, out of nowhere, Nicole put on the music from the season finale of Glee.

“With all these horrific images on the screen, she had turned on the show’s final song of the year, ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow,’” he continued. “The song–a slow, sweet, ukulele and guitar-driven version — couldn’t have added a deeper sense of tragic irony.

“I choked up,” he said. “And then that resolve kicked in: I wanted everyone to see what our addiction to oil had done to the Gulf and to contrast that with the sense of hope and possibility that ‘Somewhere’ exudes.”

Yarnold worked with two EDF staffers, Yuki Kokubo and Patrick Brown, who had been shooting footage of the oil disaster and received permission from Peter Rice, Chairman of Fox Networks Entertainment, to use the song. The result is a heart-wrenching video which you can view here.

When EDF sent the video to its members Wednesday with an appeal to write their Senators in support of clean energy and climate legislation, the video generated an outpouring of 7,000 letters in the last 24 hours.

Mike Richter, a former National Hockey League goalie, helped lead the N.Y. Rangers to the Stanley Cup and the U.S. Olympic Hockey Team to a silver medal. And now he hopes to lead his teammates, and other athletes, towards a greener life with his new organization, Athletes for a Healthy Planet. The group gathers athletes from around the country dedicated to promoting a cleaner, healthier environment.

Richter, a father of three young sons, says the impact of environmental change really hit home when he realized the frozen hockey ponds of his childhood had disappeared. Sports born in the outdoors now routinely are played indoors.

“No one has a greater stake in a cleaner, healthier planet than athletes,” said Richter. “But the state of our planet affects everyone, rich or poor, liberal or conservative. It is in everyone’s interest to understand the magnitude of the challenges and to work towards solutions. This is perhaps the defining issue of our time.”

Richter said Athletes for a Healthy Planet will capitalize on the celebrity status of athletes to serve as positive role models in “a nationwide effort to promote greater understanding of the direct relationship between the health of the planet and our health, economy, jobs, national security, social justice and quality of life.”

WASHINGTON – Sens. John Kerry and Joe Lieberman unveiled a long-awaited bill Wednesday that aims to curtail pollution blamed for global warming, reduce oil imports and create millions of energy-related jobs.

The 987-page bill, the product of more than seven months of negotiations and tweaked recently in response to the Gulf oil spill, also includes new protections for offshore drilling and for the first time would set a price on carbon dioxide emissions produced by coal-fired power plants and other large polluters.

The legislation aims to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases by 17 percent by 2020 and by more than 80 percent by 2050. Both targets are measured against 2005 levels and are the same as those set by a House bill approved last year.

“We can finally tell the world that America is ready to take back our role as the world’s clean energy leader,” Kerry, D-Mass., said at a news conference, surrounded by environmentalists and leaders from an array of energy companies.

“This is a bill for energy independence after a devastating oil spill, a bill to hold polluters accountable, a bill for billions of dollars to create the next generation of jobs and a bill to end America’s addiction to foreign oil,” Kerry said, calling stakes for the legislation “sky high.”

Lieberman, I-Conn., predicted the bill would pass, citing what he called a growing and unprecedented coalition of business, national security, faith and environmental leaders who are “energized” to work for it.

He and Kerry said in an interview that Senate colleagues have been surprised at the strong support from business leaders, including oil companies, major utilities and the nuclear power industry. Among those in attendance at Wednesday’s news conference were Jim Rogers, chairman and CEO of North Carolina-based Duke Energy; Tom Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute, which represents shareholder-owned electric companies, and Lew Hay, chairman and CEO of FPL Group Inc., a Florida-based power company.

The bill also is supported by most environmental groups. A coalition of 22 groups, including the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund and The Wilderness Society, endorsed the bill in a joint letter Wednesday.

President Barack Obama added his support, saying the nation must work to end its dependence on fossil fuels.

“The challenges we face — underscored by the immense tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico — are reason to redouble our efforts to reform our nation’s energy policies,” Obama said in a statement. “For too long, Washington has kicked this challenge to the next generation.”

Despite the lofty rhetoric, the measure faces a steep road in the Senate amid partisan disputes over the drilling provisions and other issues, including immigration reform.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who had been the bill’s only Republican backer, withdrew his support last week, saying it is impossible to pass the legislation in the current political climate.

Graham issued a statement Wednesday praising the bill but casting doubt on its prospects.

“The problems created by the historic oil spill in the Gulf, along with the uncertainty of immigration politics, have made it extremely difficult for transformational legislation in the area of energy and climate to garner bipartisan support at this time,” Graham said.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., denounced the bill as “a job-killing national energy tax” that would raise the price of electricity and gasoline for American families and businesses.

From the other side of the political spectrum, the environmental group Oceana said it was shocked that the bill allows an expansion of offshore drilling. “Expanded drilling makes slowing climate change harder. Expanding renewables, such as offshore wind, would make it easier,” the group said in a statement.

Kerry and Lieberman said the bill would offer more protections against offshore drilling than current law.

The bill would allow states to opt out of federal drilling up to 75 miles from their shores, a concession to lawmakers concerned about offshore exploration in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico spill.

It also would allow states directly affected to veto drilling plans of nearby states if they could show that significant negative effects would result from an accident. The bill requires an Interior Department study to determine whether states could be economically and environmentally affected by a leak from an offshore drilling rig.

States that can demonstrate significant negative effects could pass a law opposing a specific project.

States that go ahead with offshore drilling would retain 37.5 percent of the federal revenue generated — a shift from current policy. Now royalty revenue goes to the Treasury; states collect no royalties.

Senators in Western states are likely to oppose the change, saying offshore revenue belongs to the nation as a whole. But coastal states argue that when an accident occurs, they’re the ones affected.

Kerry and Lieberman said the bill would exempt farms and most small and medium-sized businesses from the emissions provisions, concentrating efforts on the largest polluters. Restrictions would not take effect until 2013 for power plants and transportation fuels, and 2016 for manufacturers.

Allowances would be granted to local electricity companies, which would be required to use them to help customers.

The bill also would offer incentives of up to $2 billion a year for companies that develop so-called clean coal technologies. It also has several provisions aimed at boosting nuclear power.

View article online.

By Meera Subramanian
USA Today
May 13, 2010

When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig sank to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico on April 22, 11 men were missing and a gushing well was emptying into the sea. It happened to be Earth Day.

A week later, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced federal approval for the nation’s first offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound near Hyannis, Mass., which will turn an aquatic area the size of Manhattan into an oceanic-industrial complex with 130 massive turbines reaching 440 feet into the sky. Both are reminders that all energy comes at a price.

Regardless of one’s stance on the science of climate change — either the extent or the cause — there is no debate that we pay dearly for our energy. It costs us in barrels and kilowatt hours, and it costs us in human lives. The time has come for Americans to face head-on the unsightly ways and means of our energy sources and recognize the true cost of turning on our televisions and powering up our laptops. Wind turbines off the Cape Cod coast and oil on our southern shores mark the definitive end of the era in which our energy addiction can be satiated by sources that are out of sight and out of mind.

There are no easy choices here. Fossil fuels don’t just drive our cars. They drive our economy and will for the indefinite future. But the social and environmental costs of mining, drilling and making batteries for our hybrid cars are not evenly distributed, either within or beyond our borders.

Because of geology and politics, those who benefit from cheap and abundant energy are often far removed from sources of production, whether the North Slope of Alaska or the former mountaintops of West Virginia, let alone the Middle East. It has been easy to ignore the fact that resource extraction, especially for fossil fuels, takes a devastating toll on human life — miners buried and oil riggers lost at sea are just the latest deaths caused by our voracious quest for resources. The effects of climate change may seem abstract, but what we see in the reflective sheen of this oil spill is that our unquenchable thirst for the substance that lubricates our lives is killing us along with the ecosystems we inhabit.

In the Gulf of Mexico, however, we may have found our infinite fount. This deep-water accident has no horizon. It isn’t an oil spill in the conventional sense, where a fixed amount of fuel escapes from the hull of a ship. When this rig sank, it left behind a severed umbilical cord that had tethered it to an oil borehole reaching deep into the earth’s crust a mile below the waves. We have tapped into something we quite literally can’t control.

All this is a perfect call-and-response to Sarah Palin’s imprudent “Drill, baby, drill!” cheer. No one knows how or when the spill will end. We can only speculate about the extent of the damage to vast wetlands that produce three-quarters of the nation’s shrimp — habitat that humans, plants, animals and birds depend upon for livelihoods or lives. BP’s spill could become the nation’s greatest environmental catastrophe, dwarfing both Hurricane Katrina and Exxon Valdez. Already, the uncomfortable reality of energy’s true cost is literally washing up on our shores.

Weeks ago, some of the migratory birds that are now whistling their mating songs in the idylls of Cape Cod might have passed over Chandeleur Islands off Louisiana, where the oil slick first made contact with land last Thursday. For nine years, many Cape Codders have viewed this issue from the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s perspective, arguing that despoiling their blue horizon is an unacceptable price to pay, even for clean energy.

Offshore oil rigs that dot our coasts from New Orleans to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, also mar the view, but if a wind farm fails, the disaster has begun and ended when the turbine topples into the sea. Wind, after all, doesn’t leak.

Nor does turbulent air release the greenhouse gases that oil sends up when burned, either as slicks of crude are set ablaze to save our shorelines or when properly ignited in our internal combustion engines.

Energy conservation has to come first, as California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, leader of the nation’s most energy-efficient state, acknowledged when he came out against offshore oil drilling this month. McKinsey & Co., one of the world’s top consulting firms, reported last year that Americans will save twice what we invest in energy efficiency within 10 years. But even if we are able to climb this slippery slope toward self-sacrifice, humans everywhere will continue to sop up energy from various sources. If the same mind power and engineering feats now being directed to capping the Gulf’s unruly well could be channeled into a proactive renewable energy initiative worthy of the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program, that would be a start. But no matter where our energy comes from in the future, ignorance is no longer an option.

We will all benefit from bringing the reality of energy costs closer to home — out of our windows, atop our roofs. Putting energy production in front of our eyes could bring us closer to acknowledging our addiction, the first step to kicking any habit. When it comes to energy, seeing just might be believing.

Meera Subramanian is a freelance environmental journalist and senior editor for the online religion magazine Killing the Buddha. She is based in Brooklyn and can be found at www.meerasub.org.

Read the article online.

Sens. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) introduced a compromise climate bill Wednesday, hoping public concern about the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will boost the measure’s long-shot chances for passage.

While the legislation is different from the House-passed climate bill in several respects — it seeks carbon reductions from separate sectors of the economy rather than imposing a nationwide limit, and it provides more incentives for new nuclear power and offshore oil drilling — it still faces a steep hill in attracting the 60 votes needed for passage.

“There are those who will say this is the wrong political season,” Kerry said at a news conference, surrounded by business and environmental leaders. “But we’re here today because we believe good policy is also good politics.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Wednesday that he and other Republicans will fight the legislation. “Whatever its intentions, this bill is little more than a job-killing national energy tax,” he said.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) has made it clear that the climate bill needs to be within striking distance of 60 votes before he will bring it to the floor.

The one GOP senator who helped craft the proposal, Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), abandoned the effort last month. He said last week that the bill has a diminished chance of passing, in part because of Senate Democrats’ desire to pass immigration reform this year.

The climate measure would provide financial incentives for a range of energy producers, including regulatory risk insurance for 12 new nuclear plants, $54 billion in loan guarantees, $2 billion a year for coal technologies that can capture and store greenhouse gas emissions, and $7 billion a year to improve the nation’s transportation infrastructure and efficiency.

It aims to encourage offshore oil drilling but also imposes significant checks on the activity by giving states the right to veto oil drilling off the shores of a neighboring state and opt out of drilling that would occur in waters within 75 miles of their own shores. It requires an Interior Department study to determine which states could be economically and environmentally affected by a spill, and those states would be able to block drilling by passing legislation. The states that go ahead with drilling would retain 37 percent of the federal royalties raised as a result.

The White House issued a statement Wednesday praising the two senators, saying their “legislation will put America on the path to a clean energy economy that will create American jobs building the solar panels, wind blades and the car batteries of the future.”

Graham did not endorse the bill outright Wednesday, though he indicated that he is open to backing it.

In an interview, Lieberman said he is optimistic that the support of business leaders — including representatives of Honeywell, Dow Corning, Duke Energy and the Edison Electric Institute who attended the news conference, along with ones from BP and Shell, who did not appear — makes reaching 60 votes “doable.”

“A lot of those folks standing with us today are the Republican base,” he said. “There’s more business support for this bill as of today than any Democratic initiative than I can remember.”

Read the article online.

I want my pond back