Welcome to the Machine: Part Two
New Canaan Advertiser, Thursday, April 5, 2007 Page 5A
Ecoman
“Step it Up” to reduce greenhouse gases
By Richard M. Stowe
The machine’s coal, oil and gas suppliers are often located in Texas.
Dallas, Texas-based TXU boasts on http://www.txucorp.com, “TXU Power owns and operates one of the nation’s largest lignite surface-mining operations…”
In April 2006, TXU announced plans to build eleven new coal-fired plants in Texas.
By February 26, 2007, plans for eight of those plants were scrapped when Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and Texas Pacific Group purchased TXU in a 45 billion dollar leveraged buyout.
In a first for a leveraged buyout, Environmental Defense and Natural Resources Defense Council, two opponents of those coal-fired power plants, were invited to take part in a seventeen-hour negotiated agreement in San Francisco, California.
The agreement doubles wind power investments and directs $400 million toward energy efficiency programs. TXU promises to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, endorse a mandatory federal cap on carbon emissions and not expand coal operations outside of Texas.
Former Environmental Protection Agency administrator William K Reilly, now vice-president of Texas Pacific Group, invited Environmental Defense to participate in the negotiations.
Environmental Defense president Fred Krupp said “we shifted this from a local debate over generating electricity to a national debate over capping and reducing carbon emissions”
The rise in carbon emissions, which is attributable to humans burning coal, oil and natural gas, is a macro-environmental indicator.
2000 Democratic presidential candidate Vice-President Al Gore is using his brand-name recognition to focus the nation’s attention on global warming.
The 2006 Academy Award-winning documentary box office hit and accompanying book, An Inconvenient Truth, is part autobiography and part explanation of the documented and projected impacts to human health and ecosystems by climate change.
In it Vice-President Gore recounts his awe as a student in the 1960’s at Harvard University under the tutelage of Roger Revelle, the eminent Harvard scientist who in 1957, International Geophysical Year, became the first scientist to open a research station (atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii) to measure greenhouse gases.
With the esteemed Dr. Revelle as his professor, no wonder Vice-President Gore has displayed a passion for climate change.
In 2005, Australian scientist and conservationist Tim Flannery provided a more in-depth, scientific account of global warming in The Weather Makers: How Man is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth. After reading The Weather Makers Richard Branson pledged three billion dollars toward developing sustainable energy. On January 26th Mr. Flannery received the 2007 Australian of the Year award.
For a more passionate and urgent reading of climate change scenarios we may face, tap the thoughts of Mike Tidwell in his 2006 non-fiction tale, The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America’s Coastal Cities. In 2002, Mr. Tidwell founded Takoma Park, Maryland-based Chesapeake Climate Action Network (http://www.chesapeakeclimate.org/), a regional grassroots climate change advocacy group. Mr. Tidwell may be the nation’s pre-eminent regional climate change proselytizer.
In 1989, then twenty-eight year old Bill McKibben penned The End of Nature, the environmental epic chronicling the coming travails of climate change. Mr. McKibben became an instant ecological icon. Today, the prolific and lanky Mr. McKibben, who serves as scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College in Vermont, has set alight a grassroots brushfire for Step It Up: a National Day of Climate Action - http://www.stepitup07.org. Scheduled to take place on Saturday April 14, 2007. Mr. McKibben hopes to inspire a heartfelt movement to act against climate change. The decidedly philosophic Mr. McKibben is taking on a Herculean challenge to garner media attention by moving the discussion of global warming from blog suites to America’s streets. Step It Up organizers hope to mobilize Congress to pass legislation to cut carbon by 80 percent by 2050.
Ecoman
“Step it Up” to reduce greenhouse gases
By Richard M. Stowe
The machine’s coal, oil and gas suppliers are often located in Texas.
Dallas, Texas-based TXU boasts on http://www.txucorp.com, “TXU Power owns and operates one of the nation’s largest lignite surface-mining operations…”
In April 2006, TXU announced plans to build eleven new coal-fired plants in Texas.
By February 26, 2007, plans for eight of those plants were scrapped when Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and Texas Pacific Group purchased TXU in a 45 billion dollar leveraged buyout.
In a first for a leveraged buyout, Environmental Defense and Natural Resources Defense Council, two opponents of those coal-fired power plants, were invited to take part in a seventeen-hour negotiated agreement in San Francisco, California.
The agreement doubles wind power investments and directs $400 million toward energy efficiency programs. TXU promises to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, endorse a mandatory federal cap on carbon emissions and not expand coal operations outside of Texas.
Former Environmental Protection Agency administrator William K Reilly, now vice-president of Texas Pacific Group, invited Environmental Defense to participate in the negotiations.
Environmental Defense president Fred Krupp said “we shifted this from a local debate over generating electricity to a national debate over capping and reducing carbon emissions”
The rise in carbon emissions, which is attributable to humans burning coal, oil and natural gas, is a macro-environmental indicator.
2000 Democratic presidential candidate Vice-President Al Gore is using his brand-name recognition to focus the nation’s attention on global warming.
The 2006 Academy Award-winning documentary box office hit and accompanying book, An Inconvenient Truth, is part autobiography and part explanation of the documented and projected impacts to human health and ecosystems by climate change.
In it Vice-President Gore recounts his awe as a student in the 1960’s at Harvard University under the tutelage of Roger Revelle, the eminent Harvard scientist who in 1957, International Geophysical Year, became the first scientist to open a research station (atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii) to measure greenhouse gases.
With the esteemed Dr. Revelle as his professor, no wonder Vice-President Gore has displayed a passion for climate change.
In 2005, Australian scientist and conservationist Tim Flannery provided a more in-depth, scientific account of global warming in The Weather Makers: How Man is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth. After reading The Weather Makers Richard Branson pledged three billion dollars toward developing sustainable energy. On January 26th Mr. Flannery received the 2007 Australian of the Year award.
For a more passionate and urgent reading of climate change scenarios we may face, tap the thoughts of Mike Tidwell in his 2006 non-fiction tale, The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America’s Coastal Cities. In 2002, Mr. Tidwell founded Takoma Park, Maryland-based Chesapeake Climate Action Network (http://www.chesapeakeclimate.org/), a regional grassroots climate change advocacy group. Mr. Tidwell may be the nation’s pre-eminent regional climate change proselytizer.
In 1989, then twenty-eight year old Bill McKibben penned The End of Nature, the environmental epic chronicling the coming travails of climate change. Mr. McKibben became an instant ecological icon. Today, the prolific and lanky Mr. McKibben, who serves as scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College in Vermont, has set alight a grassroots brushfire for Step It Up: a National Day of Climate Action - http://www.stepitup07.org. Scheduled to take place on Saturday April 14, 2007. Mr. McKibben hopes to inspire a heartfelt movement to act against climate change. The decidedly philosophic Mr. McKibben is taking on a Herculean challenge to garner media attention by moving the discussion of global warming from blog suites to America’s streets. Step It Up organizers hope to mobilize Congress to pass legislation to cut carbon by 80 percent by 2050.
posted by Richard Stowe at 11:19 AM
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