Were you one of those noticing–and fretting–in 2001 when Dick Cheney called the nation’s top air polluters into his holy of holies to secretly chart the nation’s energy policy? If so, you may not have noticed how thoroughly stymied the coal industry has been. It wanted a “coal rush” of 150 new coal plants. It had the blessing of a Republican administration and legislature, and it got … none. The Sierra Club has fought new plants by organizing communities to oppose them, stopping 153. And now Sierra Club is going on the offensive. Its Beyond Coal campaign aims to retire one third of the nation’s aging coal fleet by 2020.

Sierra Club has received a $50 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies to spread the anti-coal message. According to a press release:

In the U.S., coal is the leading cause of greenhouse-gas emissions, and coal’s pollution contributes to four out of the five leading causes of mortality — heart disease, cancer, stroke, and respiratory illness. Coal emits almost half of all U.S. mercury pollution, which causes developmental problems in babies and young children, as well as being a major contributor to asthma attacks. Coal pollution causes $100 billion in health costs annually.

Coal. Isn’t. Cheap. Solar panels don’t cause asthma attacks or hasten global warming. Windmills don’t contribute to strokes. But the wind industry does employ more people than the coal industry.

John Hickey, who six months ago filled the Sierra Club’s vacant Chapter Director position in Missouri, doesn’t know how much of that fifty million will come to our state, but he does know that he’ll be getting an additional paid organizer in the fall. And he insists that Missouri should get a sizeable share to reflect our sizeable number of coal plants. The St. Louis area alone has four coal plants. Compare that to the state of Washington, which has one–and that one is slated to be demolished. Oregon too has only one coal plant–also slated to be demolished.

Missouri, says Hickey, gets 85% of its energy from coal, and here’s the bite: we’re buying it from Wyoming! So we are shipping our dollars to another state instead of creating jobs here. Importing coal is not as senseless as refusing to raise the debt ceiling, but it’s pretty damn stupid.

The Sierra Club will do all it can to change that picture, and if the past is any prelude, they’ll succeed.

Picture courtesy of Bruno and Ligia Rodrigues

On short notice, about 50 opponents of any plan to allow a casino to be built near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers showed up Wednesday morning to get their point across to the Missouri Gaming Commission.  With their “CasiNO” buttons and leadership from a local minister and well-organized environmentalists, the protesters surrounded County Executive Charlie Dooley prior to the meeting and let him know they weren’t happy with him or the county council.  Dooley lost his cool and got in the face of one protester, jabbing both hands at the man’s face and repeating “Listen to me, listen to me.”  That was right after Dooley blathered on about how “all county citizens have the right to be heard and the county council will listen.”  He evidently couldn’t see that he was contradicting his own pronouncement by cutting the man off.

Another noteworthy conversation some of us had was with the president of the Hazelwood school board.  He was there in support of building the casino because his district would get direct money, not just from the general revenue where gambling funds end up.  His point was the money had to come from the casino or from taxpayers.  We tried to tell him it was sad that he was put in the position of having to make this false choice.  There should be better ways to support public education than by encouraging people to gamble away their money.  In fact, shouldn’t schools be teaching students to stay away from gambling?  Oh, that’s right.  It’s not “gambling.”  It’s “gaming.”  If hypocrisy were a disease, we’d all be terminally ill.

Once the “Gaming” Commission meeting started, the chair informed the audience that there are currently no more licenses available for new casinos, but, if and when one becomes available, there will be a public hearing on any aps for that license.  Whew, I sure feel better, don’t you?

Representatives of Pinnacle Entertainment gave a final report on the new River City casino built in Lemay on land straddling the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County. The Commission gave unanimous approval which will allow the slots to start jingling March 4. I thought it was interesting that the areas where the gambling machines are located are called gaming “pits.”

So, when you lose more money than you can really afford, you can literally say you’re “in the pits.”

 Casino companies are required to keep track of gambling addicts.  On the Gaming Commission’s website, under “Problem Gambling,” we find this rather general rule of thumb.  

Over 80% of Americans participate in some form of gambling. For most people (95%), gambling is an occasional recreational activity in which they participate responsibly. However, a small percentage of the population experiences problems from their gambling behavior, and for some, it can be a progressive disease. Missouri has taken a broad based approach to address problem gambling issues.

I find it hard to believe that 80% of Americans gamble unless you consider things like driving the interstates at rush hour or marrying a dope fiend hoping to “cure him” as gambling.

Doing a little math and starting with approximately 300 million adult Americans, that would mean 12 million of them are “problem” gamblers.  If 12 million of us had swine flu, you can be sure it would be headline news !  

But, oh, the lengths we will go to deceive ourselves.  According to the Chief Operating Officer for St. Louis County, Garry Earls, the county is “delighted to be number 13” (as in the 13th casino in Missouri.)  And, in a more ominous tone, he said they’d be happy to be number 14 also if and when another opportunity arises- like in the bottomland along the Missouri River where eagles and other migratory birds rest on their trips north and south.

But who cares about birds when there is money to be made?  And how will we explain this to our grandchildren when they ask us why we didn’t speak up?  

On Wednesday, I attended Conservation Lobby Day in Jefferson City and tried to keep up with all the bright and energetic people half my age. That’s me above the y in efficiency

The event was co-sponsored by Missouri Sierra Club, Missouri Coalition for the Environment, and Missouri Votes Conservation

The day was very well organized, and we could choose one of four topics to discuss with the legislators on our list.  I chose water resources because I live close to Labadie where Ameren UE wants to enlarge its coal ash dump next to the Missouri River.  Fortunately, a group of Labadie residents are already organized and fighting the utility company on this. The Labadie Environmental Organization website has a beautiful photo of the river and the plant in the distance.  While you are checking that out, sign their petition, “No Landfills in a Flood Plain.”

For an even better view of the proximity of the power plant to the river, go to this satellite photo

Everyone downstream of Labadie should be concerned about this.  For those who believe nothing bad will happen and that the utility company is protecting us from toxic spills, just remember Taum Sauk.  Term-limited Sen. John Griesheimer couldn’t care less about this potential disaster and didn’t even pretend to be interested in anything our group had to say.

We got a little better reception from the state rep for that district, Scott Dieckhaus.  At least he admits that river bottom land is fragile and porous.  He blushingly told us a little secret he’d heard from “a reliable source.”  Some company which must remain nameless may buy up the coal ash slurry mess and make  some kind of secret product in a plant whose whereabouts he doesn’t know at some unknown point in the future.  Well, problem solved!  I feel better, don’t you?

Besides bringing our concerns about Ameren UE’s plans to our reps, we were tasked with asking them to support raising the fees that polluters pay to dump crap in our streams and rivers.  The fees haven’t been raised in a decade although they’ve been studied to death.

Of course, there’s no money in the state budget to hire more inspectors to test the waters, but we weren’t asking for the public to bear that expense.  Our point was that those who profit from polluting water that supposedly belongs to all of us should pay at least enough for the Water Protection Program of DNR to protect us from a major chemical or biological disaster.

According to Joe Bachant, retired after 35 years with Missouri Dept. of Conservation, the e coli problem at Lake of the Ozarks is not just the tip of the iceberg, it’s “the fog rising off the tip of the iceberg.”  Bachant and others who know what they are talking about predict there will be a major health and safety disaster at some point in the future.

From what I could gather from folks who follow this clean water topic like most of us follow St. Louis sports teams, there is no leadership in Jeff City right now on this.  Stay tuned and don’t drink the water.

On November 14, the Executive Committee of the Missouri Chapter of the Sierra Club passed a resolution condemning Atty Gen Koster’s decision to appeal a judge’s ruling in the Arrow Rock case.

He says he’s doing this because it’s not up to judges to make legislative decisions.  You can bet a barn load of manure that he’d put this on the back burner and forget about it if he agreed with the judge.

Since there is virtually nothing progressive groups can do to intervene legally in this case, our best effort should go into making it really uncomfortable for Koster politically.  To that end, I will ask area Democrat clubs to pass this same resolution.  Koster needs to know we’re paying attention to this issue.

Whereas noxious odors and liquid waste runoffs from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations detract from citizens’ experience of Missouri’s state parks and historic sites, and constitute health hazards; and

Whereas tourism is important to Missouri’s economy; and

Whereas our parks and historic sites provide educational experiences and restorative experiences of nature to Missourians; and  

Whereas rulings in 2008 by Cole County Judge Patricia Joyce established a two-mile buffer around Arrow Rock, a historic mid-Missouri village, barring concentrated animal feeding operations within it; and

Whereas Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster has filed an appeal of Judge Joyce’s two-mile ruling, questioning the process by which Judge Joyce determined the need for a two-mile limit;

Now therefore Missouri Sierra Club protests Attorney General Koster’s decision to appeal, asks him to withdraw the appeal, and calls upon the General Assembly to pass legislation for a CAFO-free buffer zone around the fifty Missouri State Parks and thirty-nine State Historic sites.

His website says that anything having to do with agriculture/environmental issues will be routed to Dept. of Natural Resources, and I’ve not heard anything good about that Dept lately, have you?  Maybe we should deliver some samples of what we’re dealing with to his office. That would really raise a stink.

http://ago.mo.gov/contactus.htm

Keep up with what’s happening with Missouri Rural Crisis Center at

http://missouristinks.blogspot…

Perhaps you didn’t realize that every stream and river in the country supports healthy aquatic life and is safe for recreation in and on the water. The reason I know our streams are unpolluted is that the Clean Water Act mandated that states would achieve that goal by 1983. We’re 26 years–count ’em t-w-e-n-t-y–s-i-x years–beyond the due date for this particular baby. Surely it couldn’t still be gestating.

Heh. Picture a Jon Stewart deadpan at this point in my logic. Because our streams aren’t all clean and you damn well know it.

The Missouri Clean Water Commission and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources have skillfully tap danced around the EPA mandate. For example:

It’s almost cute how the DNR gets around the law that says all our streams should be clean: some streams, like the Current River and the Big Piney, are “classified” and others, like the River Des Peres in St. Louis (pictured at left), are “unclassified”. The classified streams have to meet the standards of the Clean Water Act, but an unclassified stream can be toxic enough to dispatch a T Rex with a single sip. What’s in those streams is irrelevant because we choose not to pay attention to them, says the DNR. Nifty solution, huh?

That’s a–to use a tautology–straightforward dodge. But the MDNR and MCWC also know how to twist your brain matter into a pretzel. Try following their tortured logic on the “where attainable” issue:

The Clean Water Act–section 101–requires that ALL waters in the U.S. be healthy enough that you could dunk your whole body in any of them and suffer no ill consequences. It’s referred to as Whole Body Contact or WBC. The Act says this must be accomplished “where attainable.” Oh, those two little words.

A couple of years ago, the Coalition for the Environment won a lawsuit requiring the DNR and CWC to designate all waters in the state as places where they would achieve water clean enough for “whole body contact”.

As a result, all the classified streams are on the “Whole Body Contact” list, but in some places, the DNR decided, that was not “attainable” because the streams were too shallow for anybody to get his whole body into it. Ergo, if they were too shallow for WBC, clean water was not necessary. And unless a stream had one or more pools at least a meter deep–as measured in mid-August of a drought year, no doubt–then it was “too shallow” for whole body contact.

Excuse me. You might need 39.4 inches of water for John Goodman to get his whole body wet, but a five year old can and probably will do it if he’s got six inches.

So municipal wastewater treatment plants get to continue saving millions of dollars by dumping their shit into our small streams. And  interestingly, anybody can do a Use Attainability Analysis to determine whether a stream is too shallow to be designated WBC. Indeed, many sewage treatment facilities have done their own UAAs and concluded that the water where they discharge sewage was too shallow to matter.

Enough already, the Missouri Sierra Club decided, and it has sent a Petition for Agency Action on this issue to the EPA, Area 7. The petition has been bucked up the line to EPA headquarters in D.C. The unofficial word is that scientists there agree that the one meter standard is too deep but that positive action would be more likely (by a few magnitudes probably!) if it were delayed for a few months. (You know what’s been happening at the EPA for eight years now. Figure it out.) And the Sierra Club urged the EPA people to take their time and do a good job.

A community is nothing without infrastructure. If the roads are shoddy, the electricity and/or telephone service is intermittent, and the water supply is polluted, the residents will have difficulty working, communicating, enjoying themselves, and staying healthy. Similarly, if all of the above are top-notch, but the roads lead to empty fields, or the water supply and the other utilities are only available to certain segments of the population, the same problems arise, save for the lucky few who happen to have access. And because the community needs infrastructure, people in the community work hard to provide a solid, well-planned roads (for example), not just for the sake of having good roads, but rather for the sake of the community that will be using them.

Political institutions are just the same. People don’t rush in to save a

Show Me Progress is not just a single progressive website starting up in a red state. We’re part of a much larger shift from the explosion of blogs on the national scene to a network of blogs focused on events at the local and state level. Even more than that, we’re part of a larger effort to build a sturdy progressive infrastructure that will leverage our numbers into greater political power, whether it’s fundraising for candidates, pushing politicians on the issues or highlighting candidates that deserve greater attention.

Why is this necessary, you might ask? In case you haven’t noticed, the right has been doing this for decades. They have a network of think tanks, talk radio hosts, and advocacy groups all across the nation. Look at Missouri