In the video below, GOP Senator Roy Blunt, a longtime, ardent defender of the fossil fuel industry – which has, in turn, been most generous with him – explains that he is opposed to President Obama’s plans to combat climate change because he believes it will drive up energy costs for poor folks and seniors on fixed incomes. This is the same Roy Blunt who consistently votes against raising the minimum wage. In fact, in 2011, Blunt was given a score of “D” by the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty law based on his votes on bills that had potential to alleviate poverty. Interesting that he’s so worried about how the poor, particularly poor seniors, will cope with a shift to clean energy, isn’t it?

However, if we assume that Blunt is really sincere in his concern about impact of the President’s climate change proposals on the economy and on the poor – I know, I know, it stretches the bounds of credulity, but bear with me – someone needs to put his fears at rest. He’s dead wrong on all counts.

In fact, ignoring the impacts of climate change is costing us money now as we taxpayers foot the bill for the increasing numbers of climate-related natural disasters. The situation will only get worse as climate change escalates. The American Security Project has analyzed the costs that will be incurred in each state if we continue to ignore climate change.  Among their findings for Missouri:

–Corn and soybeans, currently staple crops for Missouri farmers, will likely no longer grow if climate continues in its current change trajectory. Forests will die out. The impact on the state’s economy will be major:

Farmers would have much to lose if crop yields fall. Missouri’s forest products generate nearly $1.69 billion in revenue, nearly 2% of the state’s gross state product. Agriculture commodities account for nearly 3% of the U.S. total. Climate change will significantly damage this industry.

–Extreme weather such as flooding and changes in terrain will put fishing, hunting and wildlife viewing at risk “placing roughly 57,000 jobs and $3 billion in income at stake.”

–Then there’s those increased energy costs that Senator Blunt’s so worried about. Of course, electricity will also become more expensive if we ignore climate change and do nothing:

Missourians will also pay more than necessary for electricity. If business continues as usual, consumers will pass up an opportunity to directly save $175 million on their natural gas bills, and, over the next five years, will overpay by $457 million for electricity. Furthermore, by failing to pass statewide energy conservation policies, specifically the International Energy Conservation Code, a model energy regulation policy supported by the U.S. Government, Missourians will have wasted over $108 million by 2020.

On the other hand, If we could get politicians like Blunt to stop whining about imagined or short-term economic impacts and do something constructive to help us cope with climate change, we’d realize some positive economic benefits as well as an improved quality of life. Coal, just like climate change itself, is costlier than it seems. Clean energy, however, is a growth industry that has the potential to generate many, many jobs:

Renewable energy investment around the world topped $257 billion in 2011 (80% of the investment in fossil fuel capacity), approaching half of all new electrical generating capacity globally. Energy efficiency and “green-buildings” have also become multi-billion-dollar markets, and growth is showing no signs of slowing.

Furthermore, as the technology that enables renewable energy continues to evolve, the cost drops – for instance, wind power is already competitive with fossil fuels in terms of costs. And, as the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 proposed, if you’re really concerned about folks who may be penalized by slightly higher energy prices during the transition, you can always subsidize their energy use. I personally would prefer that taxpayer-funded subsidies go to the poor rather than continue the generous subsidies that Senator Blunt regularly fights to preserve for the very prosperous fossil fuel industry.

I read that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) believes that the “right should not cede the moral high ground” on poverty. Senator Blunt’s comments today certainly proved Ryan’s point; it can be very convenient for a dyed-in-the-wool corporatist to invoke the suffering of the poor from time to time.

The folks opposing the renewable energy initiative got some more money.

Today, at the Missouri Ethics Commission:

C121149 05/02/2012 MISSOURIANS AGAINST COSTLY MANDATES Union Pacific 6455 E Commerce Ave. Kansas City MO 64120 4/30/2012 $15,000.00

[emphasis added]

Because you don’t need to transport wind and solar by rail, right? Except maybe the parts for those wind and solar farms. Hey…

Previously:

Campaign Finance: If an oxymoron falls in a forest, will it have an environmental impact? (April 20, 2012)

Campaign Finance: If the dinosaurs had PACs we’d all be food in Jurassic Park (April 11, 2012)

( – promoted by Clark)

On June 29th, the St. Louis County Council gave the green light to updated residential building codes that will save homeowners hundreds in energy costs through new energy efficiency standards. St. Louis County is home to approximately one million residents, part of the Greater Metropolitan St. Louis area.

The savings are particularly beneficial for Missourians in the long term due to projected coal-generated energy costs rising faster than in other states.

Some facts to consider:

* 82.4% of Missouri’s power is coal-generated, while its only 50% nationwide

* US Residential Electricity prices have gone up 50% in last decade

The adoption of the new codes means that updated energy efficiency building standards will be in effect everywhere in St. Louis County that is unincorporated or in municipalities that look to the County for code enforcement. St. Louis County is home to over 90 municipalities, many of which enforce their own building codes. There is still work to do among those municipalities that perform their own code enforcement and have yet to adopt the updated energy conservation codes.

Although eventually near-zero energy buildings and ultra-low energy homes may be the ultimate sustainable solution, the 2009 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) establishes a set of minimum energy efficiency standards that will save homeowners on average between 12-15% energy usage.

The Energy & Cost Savings Analysis of 2009 IECC Efficiency Improvements from the Energy Efficiency Codes Coalition concludes,

“ICF International’s analysis estimates that homes built to the 2009 IECC standards will save 12.2% under the simple “prescriptive” method and could save 14.7% or more using the more complicated “performance-based” method.”

The City of St. Louis is not within St. Louis County, so this code adoption does not affect the city. There is, however, hope that the City of St. Louis will follow the lead of St. Louis County soon, as well as St. Charles County, which lies to the West of St. Louis County. St. Charles County has a population of approximately 350,000, and is one of the fastest growing counties in the country, which makes the adoption of energy efficient building codes extremely important.

Ultimately, “sustainability” means behaving in such a way as to preserve and protect the existing ecosystem for future generations to enjoy-leaving things just how you’ve found them.

On sustainability,

“There is abundant scientific evidence that humanity is living unsustainably, and returning human use of natural resources to within sustainable limits will require a major collective effort. Ways of living more sustainably can take many forms from reorganizing living conditions (e.g., ecovillages, eco-municipalities and sustainable cities), reappraising economic sectors (permaculture, green building, sustainable agriculture), or work practices (sustainable architecture), using science to develop new technologies (green technologies, renewable energy), to adjustments in individual lifestyles that conserve natural resources.”

Energy Efficiency is the fastest and cheapest way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote a cleaner and more sustainable environment. National groups like the Sierra Club, US Green Building Council and local ones, the Missouri Association of Accredited Energy Professionals (MAAEP) and the Home Builders Association of St. Louis and Eastern Missouri all support the new codes. Through the adoption of the 2009 Energy Conservation Code, energy efficient homes and businesses will make a substantive contribution creating a cleaner environment tomorrow.

Note:  (4/27/2010, 4:40 p.m.) This posting has been substantially edited so as not to duplicate the content of an earlier posting, “Wash U Students Kick Ash.”

(Above: Clips from the Great Coal Debate, April 27, 2010; see entire debate here)

Tuesday evening, Fred Palmer, VP of of Government Relations for Peabody Coal, and Bruce Nilles of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign squared off to debate the pros and cons of coal-based energy before an audience of more than 500 people at Washington University’s Graham Chapel. The “Great Coal Debate,” moderated by Bryan Walsh, Environmental Correspondent for Time Magazine, was an outgrowth of student concerns that the University’s embrace of the Peabody-funded Consortium for Clean Coal Utilization might serve coal industry anti-regulation goals as much as the University’s research goals.

Sarah Jo has summarized the the proceedings below. Take a look at her reactions which were spot on.

I will only add to Sarah Jo’s impressions that for me the real icing on the cake was Fred Palmer’s answer (or as Nilles put it, his non-answer) to the moderator’s question about whether or not Palmer believes that climate change was caused by human activity. After a lot of careful hemming and hawing during which he allowed that a lot of smart people, President Obama and Washington University Chancellor Mark Wrighton among them, do believe in anthropogenic climate change, and the respect with which Peabody coal holds these smart people means that the company will work to reduce CO2 emissions, he took refuge in a straw man argument. He declared that he, and, one assumes by extension, Peabody coal, is not inclined to trade the welfare of people right now in order to fix some hypothetical event in the future – as if an either/or scenario were the only possibility.  

Kinda says it all – big, important business people who understand strategic planning don’t believe in taking a huge scientific consensus seriously when weighing future outcomes that affect public welfare. Of course, maybe this live-for-today attitude just might mean that the public welfare is not what moves Peabody coal?

From Think Progress via Steve Benen at Washington Monthly:

McCaskill: I’m Going To Make ‘My Friends On The Left Very Unhappy’ On Clean Energy Legislation

Last month, the House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which aims to transition America to a clean energy economy while combating climate change. After the bill’s passage, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) tweeted that she wanted to “fix” the bill’s cap on carbon pollution because it would “unfairly punish” Missouri’s families and businesses….

….[excerpt from a radio interview] MCCASKILL: Well, I’m going to make people, my friends on the left, very unhappy and I’m going to make those who don’t think global warming is real very unhappy because I’m probably going to be working with a group of moderates in the middle to try to come up with a bill that doesn’t punish coal-dependent states like Missouri. We’ve got to be very careful with what we do with this legislation. For one, we need to be a leader in the world, but we don’t want to be a sucker. And if we go too far with this, all we’re going to do is chase more jobs to China and India, where they’ve been putting up coal-fired plants every ten minutes. So, I’m very conscious of the fact that Missouri businesses and Missouri families don’t have a choice as to where they get their utilities generation. It’s coming primarily from coal now and it will take a decade or longer to move to either sequestered coal or other forms of energy that will be more responsible as it relates to get out from underneath the thumb of foreign oil and reducing our carbon imprint. So, I’ll be, I won’t vote for the version ever that was voted on last year in the Senate. I would vote against that version. I don’t think the version that passed the House will pass the Senate in the same shape, so I’m going to be one of those trying to craft it in a way that is very gradual, that is not going to hurt a state like Missouri that is so coal dependent…

Senator McCaskill on cap and trade in Kansas City on December 15, 2008:

…Question: I’d like to start with an easy issue and that is climate change. [audience laughter] I, I’ve been told that you are reluctant to support a cap and trade program or some other major federal effort to address climate change until the economy improves. It seems that every week, there’s a new study that comes out that says that the consequences of climate change are coming much more rapidly and much more severe than we have anticipated. And my, my concern is that we’ve really got to address this climate change issue early. We need to expect, in this climate change, for all of us to share some sacrifice. I have some pain, if a cap and trade program or a carbon tax, or something like that, is the best way to begin to address climate change. I believe we’ve got to do it.

Claire McCaskill: Well, let me, say that I – first of all, I support cap and trade. And my hesitation is not as much about the economy but the way it was, it was drafted in the beginning. And I think we’re going to do a better job as we got back at it again under the Obama administration. First of all, I hope that you noticed that the person who is going to head the Department of Energy is, his foremost expertise is in the area of global warming and climate change. And so, I think we’re going to have somebody at the head of the department that certainly understands the scientific risks that our planet faces because of what’s going on in our atmosphere. The way the bill was originally drafted, we were talking about fifty possibly, trillion dollars, as much as fifty trillion dollars being pre-spent. What they’ve done is they’ve divided up this money, and this is the money that would come about as a result of the auction. Essentially what you would do, is you would trade a commodity, a commodity is your ability to pollute. So if you were polluting, you’d have to pay for it. You’d have to buy goods to allow you to pollute. And if you weren’t polluting you earn benefits. So it’s really putting into the free market system an incentive to not put out carbon emissions. That’s essentially the simplest way to explain cap and trade. You, so, it becomes a free market. Now they’ve done this in Europe and they’ve had some success, but they’ve also had some failures. And we can learn from that. One of the things I didn’t want to see happen is, they were so busy handing out this money, to California and other – to buy them off, and this was all money that we weren’t going to spend in Congress. It was going to be spent by a board. Well as a former auditor, the idea that we were going to pre-spend fifty, over fifty trillion dollars without a whole lot of oversight kind of frightened me. And what I was most worried about was that the money wasn’t going to help citizens who were going to be faced with astronomical increases in utility costs. I want to make sure that we take the money from the auction and get it back to regular folks to help pay the utility bills. So it’s not, I’m, I’m for cap and trade, the devil’s in the details about how this is going to work. And I think we’re going to find that middle. And I know that Senator Obama agrees with me on this, he completely supports cap and trade, as did in fact, John McCain. They both were in favor of cap and trade. Now we’ve got to figure out how to make it work in a way that doesn’t damage working families and the middle class any more than they’re currently being damaged by this economy. And I think we can do that. I think we can do that. Okay, yes…

Some of the comments at Think Progress are very interesting:

spencers mom:…Right. Because only people on the left will be affected by global climate change…

Lefty Liberal:…I live in her state of Mizzery, and I voted for her in 2006. If she keeps siding with the coal and energy companies, then she won’t get my vote in 2012.

The way Obama is pandering to the right, and now Clair McCaskill, I’m not sure there will be anyone on the ballot I can vote for…

MontereyDean:…She’s right, you know. If saving the planet means being unfair to Missouri, it’s just not worth it.

I used to think this woman was one of the few remaining senators with a brain. You live and learn….

EugeneDebs:…Before we all go the way of the triceratops I think we ought to build a monument for whatever creature comes after us, perhaps a cross between cockroaches and Kieth Richards. It would be letters written a hundred feet high on the wall of th Grand canyon saying. We could have saved it but it would have cost too much money…

As for making some people unhappy Senator McCaskill, you already have. The right doesn’t want compromise, they only want your failure: And that’s how Washington works – an infinite loop until time runs out.

Somehow I don’t see Mayor Slay or Mayor Funkhouser taking this step:

It’s now time to meet the carbon challenge. Our second goal for the next four years is to put L.A. on a path to permanently break our addiction to coal. Coal currently accounts for roughly 40% of the DWP’s power portfolio. Breaking the coal habit is a long term proposition demanding a long-term commitment. It’s going to require investment from ratepayers. Our future depends on pricing power in relation to the environmental cost.

During my first term, we set high standards for green development and we’ve taken action to meet them. Los Angeles will get 20% of its energy from renewable sources by next year. We rolled out the most far reaching green building standards of any big city in America.

And this month, the largest city-owned wind farm will start delivering clean power to L.A.’s families. Moving forward we’re aiming to get 40% of our power from renewable sources by 2020 and go 60% carbon-free by the end of the next decade.

Today, I am directing the CEO of the Department of Water and Power to take every action necessary to reach these goals and eliminate the use of coal by 2020. Meanwhile, we’re going to move beyond the clean air action plan – the most aggressive effort to cut emissions at any port worldwide. We are going to electrify goods movement at our harbor.

I mean, Peabody Energy’s HQ is in Saint Louis. So is Arch Coal’s. They are the number one and number two private coal companies in the entire world.

Brad Johnson at Think Progress has a good post regarding Claire McCaskill’s tweet on the climate bill that I mentioned yesterday. While McCaskill claimed that cap and trade needed more work to defend Missouri families and businesses from extra costs imposed on coal dependent states, Brad points out that courtesy of congressmen in coal-dependent districts, like Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA), the House bill already includes billions to make sure coal is protected for decades. I wonder what changes McCaskill would like to make to the bill in order to make ACES even more friendly to Big Coal.

Missouri currently gets a lot of of its electricity from coal-fired power plants (85%), but we get practically none of that coal from our own state. Over 90% of our coal is transported via rail from Wyoming. It’s not like tons of jobs in Missouri depend on coal mining. And it’s not like electricity is magically getting cheaper with coal – the PSC has approved rate hikes for Ameren in 2007 and again in 2008, for example.

According to a study from the NRDC, when you take in to account the incentives and resources provided for energy efficiency (which the CBO largely did not), in 2020 even coal dependent states like Missouri will have a lower average electric bill ($6.32 less per month per household) and lower transportation costs ($13.93 per month per household) than if we had done nothing but continue with the status quo of relying on coal.

So instead of relying on the status quo, why not invest in making sure that Missourians have the job-generating clean energy economy that we voted for in overwhelming numbers over the entire state last November?

I was in a relatively good environmental mood today. The heat finally broke in St. Louis and most of what I’d read or heard today had been positive. But, reading this article posted on AlterNet, was the equivalent of watching The Basketball Diaries after . . . well, anything that doesn’t make you want to kill yourself.

The article, “Big Banks Are Selling Us Out on Climate Change”, is one of the most frustrating pieces I’ve read recently. I think Tara Lohen knew I was having a good day and just wanted to kill my buzz! Anywho, the gist is that the two biggest banks in the U.S., Citi and Bank of America, are financing crazy amounts of heinous coal development, which counters their efforts to green themselves and their businesses on such a scale that the latter seems laughable. I’m not beating around the bush here, and neither is Lohen. From her piece:

“Global leaders are putting their heads together to come up with solutions. Across the world, countries and municipalities are passing legislation to limit GHG emissions; people are cutting consumption; new technologies are being developed to further alternative energy sources. And yet, in the United States, the coal industry has us poised to move in the absolute wrong direction. Right now, there are about 150 new coal-fired power plants on the drawing board. The amount of polluting emissions they will release is staggering — between 600 million and 1.1 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year, for the next 50 years. And this, according to Rainforest Action Network (RAN), will basically negate every other effort currently being considered to fight climate change.”

Fah-bulous, and it gets better. Also, according to Bill McKibben, who apparently wrote the first book on global warming for a general audience:

“The final question as to whether we can address it in serious fashion is whether the coal that is in the ground stays in the ground,” said McKibben. “We already know that we are going to burn all the oil we can get our hands on because we have gotten our hands on most of it and it is intensely valuable. Coal, on the other hand, is the question. If the 150 power plants get built, there is no use talking about compact fluorescent light bulbs or mass transit or any of those other things … we’ll have no hope of averting climate change short of catastrophic proportions.”

What the hell? The article gives a list of major coal projects financed by both banks, but one to note is an investment by Citi:

“In 2006 they gave $4 billion to Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal mining company, which has been ravaging Dine and Hopi lands for 40 years, taking 2.5 million gallons of water out of their desert watershed each day and leaving behind a trail of toxic waste.”

Peabody is based in St. Louis for those of you who don’t know. Yeah us!

The best part of the article is called “The stupidity factor” and details how ginormously idiotic this country’s behavior is in regards to all aspects of coal. Not one piece of evidence supports its continued use, which is substantial because no is currently being charged for the environmental damage its mining and use has on the planet. Lohen ends with this:

“Fortunately, we have the choice to move this country in the right direction by pressuring Citi and BOA to fund clean, instead of dirty, energy. If those banks took the $141 billion they plan to spend on building new coal plants, and instead invested it in energy efficient measures, they could reduce electricity demand by 19 percent by 2025.”

I’m not holding my breath, which, incidentally, will probably kill me too.

Originally published on green|rising