Modeshift

This morning I received an email message from Tom Mair, a Green Party candidate for the Grand Traverse (Michigan) Board of Commissioners, who wanted to know what I thought about the decision in June by Traverse City Light and Power to abandon its proposal to build a wood biomass plant. I served as communications and engagement consultant on the public hearings the utility held this winter.

Tom’s message and my response follow:

good afternoon Keith,
Tom Mair from the Greens here…
where are you on biomass and TCLP now that the TLCP board seems to have shelved biomass?
I’m concerned about biomass in Michigan… is there any regulation of the number of plants (that’s power plants) and the capacity? Seems like there should be. Otherwise every town could build one. Before long there would be too many plants and fewer plants to cut down.
I’m running for GT County Bd of Commissioners Dist 7.
peace,
Tom

Tom:
You raise good questions about oversight and management. The TCLP proposal included a sustainable forestry initiative to assure steady fuel supply. After all, what sense does it make to build a biomass plant that couldn’t secure fuel at an affordable rate, causing electric rates to rise? By the way, TCLP had a plentiful supply of fuel from cherry orchard tree wastes, which are routinely burned in giant bonfires with no emissions control or harvesting of heat value at all.

The easy politic here is the flat out lying, exaggeration, misinformation, and fear-mongering of opponents. It was eye-opening to me and reflected the stiff resistance at the grassroots to clean energy projects. I’ve written extensively about that on my ModeShift blog. Check out the bottom of this piece.

Clean energy development is dividing American environmentalism in interesting and potentially harmful ways. The inflexible ideological wing, expressed by TC biomass proponents, essentially wants to do nothing different. The risk of doing something to take care of baseload generating needs was rejected, and the utility’s 30 by 20 goal is likely dead for a good while. That’s a shame if you are convinced that anything we can do to reduce the effects of climate change are worthwhile.

I’ve worked and reported on the climate and energy sector for years and know there is no easy answer.

Some in the TCLP public meetings called for more natural gas generation, but the risks of doing that have been very high in the Antrim play — shredding the forests with 10,000 well pads and thousands of new miles of roads and pipelines. The risks of the new deep shale play are unknown in Michigan but similar formations in other states are raising havoc with water supplies. I also wonder whether Traverse City residents are any more willing to build a right-size natural gas-fired plant within city boundaries.

Some called for reversing a public decision two years ago and rebuilding the Boardman dams, which generate 2 mw. The cost is high and the environmental goal of restoring the river’s natural flow would be halted.

Some called for more efficiency, a good idea and well worth pursuing, as TCLP is doing with more success than most Michigan utilities. But saving energy doesn’t replace the need to also generate it. It also doesn’t obviate the need to replace coal-fired baseload generation.

Some called for more wind, which TCLP is executing. Wind has an important role but is intermittent and doesn’t replace the need for baseload energy.

So the utility pursued a path I call radical pragmatism. If your goal is to reduce reliance on coal, the dirtiest and most resource-wasting fuel there is, and you want to do so with a local source of renewable energy to replace baseload coal-fired electrical generation, then TCLP had a reasonable response. Build a right-size, 10 mw, clean-burning, state-of-the-art, wood-burning, gasification plant that generates heat and power and makes a lot of sense.

It generates half the C02 emissions of a coal-fired plant and burns much more cleanly than the wood-burning stoves that operate in the northwest Michigan homes of its critics. It produces no mercury to contaminate water and fish and no heavy metals, like a coal-burning utility. It will never account for anything like the 29 mining deaths that occurred earlier this year in an Appalachian coal mine. And it produces little if any of the health-threatening particulates that the sham “authorities” contended would sicken women and children. In fact all those light trucks, SUVs, diesel-powered, and gasoline-powered cars the critics drive each day actually produce and stir up health-threatening particulates, as do the western strip mines and coal-burning power plants that provide the region’s electricity.

Lastly, building that state-of-the-art biomass plant would permanently employ 20 or 30 people in good benefits-paying jobs and keep in the community the $4 million dollars that TCLP is sending each year downstate to generate power and to western strip mines and railroads to bring the fuel to Michigan.

As you can see I’m no politician. It’s just clear to me that when weighing the risks and benefits a right-sized modern biomass plant makes more sense than what’s almost certain to occur now. TCLP will be forced to sign contracts with coal-fired utilities to provide Traverse City electricity at reasonable cost. One of those contracts could be with a proposed new plant in Bay City that some of those very same biomass critics have been fighting, in order to block its construction.

What happened with the biomass plant reflects all kinds of social and economic trends that are colliding, including an oppressive fear of the future that has produced a crippling politics of stasis — on the right and on the left.

Best of luck in your campaign, Keith

– Keith Schneider

Gabrielle Gurley, a writer for Commonwealth, the magazine of the think tank MassINC, has a rigorously balanced assessment in the most recent issue of the simmering dispute in American environmentalism about big clean energy projects. All across the country, including Massachusetts, where Gurley bases her reporting, grassroots environmentalists are fighting to block clean energy installations.

In the battle between principle and pragmatism, the efforts by older green activists is producing a generational schism in the movement, one of several fractures opening in American environmentalism around clean energy and climate issues.

“Younger environmentalists, alarmed by climate change, seem to have less patience for the siting battles,” reports Gurley. “Alyssa Pandolfi, in her third year of environmental science studies at Northeastern University, is a member of the Husky Energy Action Team, which looks for ways to get students and university departments to reduce their energy usage. She gets frustrated with environmentalists who are more concerned about blocking wind farms than they are about greenhouse gases, acid rain, or the chronic diseases that affect people in coal mining states like West Virginia and Kentucky. “What’s a wind turbine on the horizon if we are killing people [with] our current energy system?” she asks.

Craig Altemose, a graduate student at Harvard and the coordinator of Students for a Just and Stable Future, lobbies on Beacon Hill for a task force to research how the state can move toward 100 percent clean energy statewide in the next decade. He believes that there is no legitimate way to oppose wind projects based on their impact on the environment.

“Every place that you try to preserve today is going to be a different place a hundred years from now if we don’t stop putting carbon and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,” he says.”

Readers of ModeShift know how concerned I’ve been about the environmental movement’s response to scaling up the clean energy sector. Earlier this year I designed and helped to execute a public engagement process to help a local utility, Traverse City Light and Power, generate 30 percent of its energy from local renewable resources. The utility wanted to build a right-size, 10 mw, wood burning biomass gasification plant  to replace  dirty coal-burning baseload generation.

Grassroots leaders objected, asserting the plant would “slaughter” forests, “injure” public health with particulates, and cause all sorts of other entirely fictional results. The utility board, after initially voting to approve the biomass plant, abandoned the idea in June citing public opposition. One of the board members who approved and participated actively in the communications plan, Jim Carruthers, who’s also a Traverse City commissioner, then ripped me in the local news for doing “a horrible job” in the engagement process. So  much for working with political pipsqueaks.

By no means, though, was the utility’s experience with such opposition unique.

• The resistance at the grassroots to wood biomass is occurring in Michigan and six other states.
• Grassroots resistance to geothermal energy is occurring in California and Hawaii.
• Grassroots opposition to new transmission lines is occurring in seven states.
• California is a hotbed of opposition to solar thermal projects.
• Opposition to wind projects is occurring in 13 states.

There will be more reporting on this divide in environmentalism. It represents a threat to the air, water, and land that environmentalists assert they want to protect. It also represents a threat to the movement’s credibility, which this year is sustaining huge damage with its failure (our failure, my failure) to move a nation to action on energy and climate. How can a movement remain influential when one sector — national groups in Washington — actively fights for clean energy investment that a second significant sector — the grassroots — doesn’t think is valuable and is organizing to block. Answer: it can’t.

– Keith Schneider

After six months of evaluation, a Massachusetts research center said yesterday that the greenhouse gas-reducing benefits of replacing coal and natural gas with wood biomass for electrical generation are lower than previously thought.

But the study by the Manomet Center for Conservation Science also found that specific wood biomass technologies, particularly state-of-the art wood biomass plants that generate combined heat and power, produce less than half of the CO2 emissions generated by a coal-fired power plant and 19 percent less than a plant fueled by natural gas.

The 180-plus page report, “Biomass Sustainability and Carbon Policy Study,” was commissioned by the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources. In its most important finding, the study’s authors concluded that the use of sustainably harvested forest biomass in conventional plants to replace coal would actually increase carbon dioxide emissions 3 percent over coal-fired power by 2050.

Lower Emissions in Combined Heat and Power Plants
But the authors also found that replacing coal-fired power with combined heat and power biomass plants would produce significant carbon emissions reductions. A conventional coal plant produces 642 pounds of carbon emissions per million BTUs of energy generated, said the Manomet study.  A combined heat and power biomass plant produces 287 pounds of CO2 per million BTUs, less even than a natural gas plant, which produces 355 pounds of CO2 per million BTUs.

“These findings have broad implications for clean energy and the environment in Massachusetts and beyond,” said Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Ian Bowles, in a statement. “Biomass energy can be renewable over the long term and it has benefits in independence from imported fossil fuels. But now that we know that electricity from biomass harvested from New England forests is not ‘carbon neutral’ in a timeframe that makes sense given our legal mandate to cut greenhouse gas emissions, we need to re-evaluate our incentives for biomass.”

The Manomet research could significantly influence the alternative energy policies in other timber-rich states hoping to advance wood biomass to replace coal, the dirtiest fuel of all. The study could also sway the investment decisions that utilities are making to meet the renewable energy requirements established by 35 states and whether wood biomass plants make sense for lowering carbon emissions and making the transition from fossil fuel.

That question is very much in play in my home state of Michigan. Full disclosure: Earlier this year I assisted Traverse City Light and Power develop a communications and public engagement program for its plan to develop 30 percent of its energy from local renewable resources by 2020. One facet of the utility’s plan included generating part of its power from a state-of-the art, combined heat and power, 10 mw wood gasification biomass plant.

Biomass Splits Communities
That proposal split the Traverse region’s environmental community, with a group of advocates asserting, among other things, that the carbon emissions from the new biomass plant were too high. The Manomet Center study provides the first scientifically-qualified evidence this year that carbon emissions from the proposed combined heat and power plant would be much lower than coal, and nearly 20 percent lower than a natural gas fired plant. Traverse City Light and Power continues to pursue its plan to construct a combined heat and power 10 mw wood biomass plant in or near the city of 15,000 along the northern shore of Lake Michigan.

Similar civic resistance greeted wood biomass developers in Massachusetts and 17 other states. Late last year Massachusetts declared a moratorium on new biomass projects pending the results of the Manomet Center study.

The Manomet study was praised by activists who’ve been fighting to halt biomass energy proposals in four Massachusetts cities, and criticized by biomass energy  executives, who disputed some of the assumptions behind the findings.

“They’re making a fundamental assumption that is not correct,” said Bob Cleaves, president and CEO of the Biomass Power Association, in reference to the Manomet study. “I think they missed the point that the overwhelming feedstock for biomass projects in the country is tops and limbs from the forest products industry, rice hulls, orchard prunings, all byproducts of another process.”

He added: “To issue a study like was done yesterday and baldly assert that biomass is less carbon friendly than coal is flatly misleading, irresponsible and not an accurate portrayal of our industry.”

EPA Wants to Regulate Biomass Plants
The conclusions reached by the Manomet Center about carbon emissions from biomass are consistent with findings of other research groups in recent months, and were anticipated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In May, the EPA issued a “tailoring rule” that described how it would use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases. The agency said it would not exempt carbon emissions from biomass plants, a decision that the biomass industry is vigorously disputing.

Until very recently scientists concluded that the cycle of tree growth-harvest-combustion-and replanting would produced what they called a “zero emissions factor” for carbon dioxide because carbon released during combustion would be absorbed by growing new trees for fuel.

The Manomet researchers concluded that burning wood biomass in conventional plants would indeed produce an emissions bonus, but it would take 21 years to develop when using wood biomass to replace coal as a fuel source. That same 21 years, the Manomet researchers noted, is the time scientists say the world needs to act to significantly reduce carbon emissions to prevent the the worst effects of climate change.

As the scientific community tilts toward viewing wood biomass as a riskier clean energy alternative, it is not yet clear what the consequences will be for replacing fossil fuels to generate electricity globally. Last year, the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21) reported that 52 gigawatts of biomass power capacity existed worldwide, about evenly split between developed and developing countries. The European Union and United States accounted for 15 GW and eight GW of this capacity, respectively.

– Keith Schneider

Kirk Johnson of the New York Times this morning published a interesting piece on how solar energy development in Colorado is being impeded by local resistance to new transmission lines. The many examples of how community or landowner or other resistance to clean energy projects has been well covered here on ModeShift. The trend represents another authentic risk to the nation’s ability to make a transition to a low carbon economy. There are oil companies on one end of that conversation, and ordinary Americans on the other. Make no mistake. If the transition occurs, it will be the hardest economic change America has achieved since the Civil War.

– Keith Schneider

As the expanse of the Gulf slick widened this week and climate advocates reckoned with an American public focused on more urgent risks closer to their front doors, 15 big activist organizations and a coalition of 200 grassroots advocacy groups from across the country, many of them green, lashed the American Power Act.

Greenpeace last Thursday called the measure “more of a ‘dirty energy bailout’ bill than anything else.” In a statement issued a day earlier, the 200 small groups said the Power Act would spur coal, oil, and nuclear development,  “would be ineffective at addressing the climate crisis,” and vowed to kill the bill if the conventional energy provisions were not dropped.

That’s no surprise. The American Power Act calls for federal investments and regulatory changes designed to secure domestic supplies of conventional fossil fuel and nuclear energy sources. Oil, coal, and nuclear power represent the foundation of a profligate way of life that has put the domestic economy and environment in peril. Over the last four decades green groups built an important and effective civic movement to deal with the consequences of dirty energy.

The American Power Act, though, also contains provisions for substantive federal investments in clean energy, transit, Smart Growth, efficiency, and energy-conserving practices. And it calls for capping carbon emissions, trading carbon allowances to generate substantial new revenue, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 80 percent of their 2005 levels by 2050. Because of these provisions some of the most prominent environmental organizations support the American Power Act as a strong step in the right direction, although with reservations about the conventional energy provisions.

Green v. Green
Green versus green is nothing new in the history of American environmentalism. The competition between pragmatism and principle is an insistent undercurrent that has surfaced periodically, for example in the rivalry between the big organizations with Washington offices, and the small organizations working in the field.

The differences expressed about the American Power Act, though, may reveal a new and very troublesome dimension to the green vs. green meme. The disagreement over national climate and energy policy underscores a growing trend, little noted in the environmental movement or the media, that involves fierce grassroots campaigns in more than 30 states to defeat big clean energy projects.

The grassroots opposition to clean energy development, most visibly displayed in the nine-year battle to permit the offshore Cape Wind project in Massachusetts, is having the effect of hindering clean energy development, and by extension, climate action.

It also appears to be opening a schism in American environmentalism that could threaten the movement’s credibility. Simply put, at a time of real crisis for the economy and the environment, what kind of leadership can be expected from American environmentalists? Can American environmentalism be a major force for good if it lets ideological principle trump pragmatism?

I Was There
Full disclosure: Last year at this time I was writing about the energy rebellion sweeping the nation as citizens and small organizations worked to close coal-fired power plants, shut down mountaintop removal coal mining, protest rate hikes in utility commission hearings, and take other actions to block expansion of the use of fossil fuels. The momentum leading to the Copenhagen climate summit included significant activism at the grassroots to block conventional polluting energy sources and spur clean energy development and jobs.

Late last year, though, a small utility near where I live in northern Michigan asked me for help, under a consulting contract, to design a communications and public engagement process for their proposal to acquire 30 percent of the utility’s energy from local renewable resources. One facet of the proposal included a plan to build a 10 mw, right-sized, state of the art, clean burning, combined heat and power, wood gasification biomass plant to replace coal-fired power.

The response from some prominent community environmentalists to that idea was intense and surprising. The win for green activists, of course, was to kill the plant, which meant under the circumstances of the utility’s power supply needs continuing to generate energy from coal.

Investigation Reveals Big Trend
I spent several weeks investigating whether the push back was an anomaly or emblematic of something more significant. I found considerable evidence that the opposition to the biomass plant in northern Michigan was part of a national trend at the grassroots to oppose big clean energy projects in dozens of states.

• The resistance at the grassroots to wood biomass is occurring in Michigan and six other states.
• Grassroots resistance to geothermal energy is occurring in California and Hawaii.
• Grassroots opposition to new transmission lines is occurring in seven states.
• California is a hotbed of opposition to solar thermal projects.
• Opposition to wind projects is occurring in 13 states.

Clean energy developers, of course, haven’t stopped proposing new projects. They are just much more aware of the civic storm such plans are capable of stirring up. Google just invested in a big wind farm in North Dakota. Scandia Wind is proposing a big offshore wind farm in Lake Michigan that has generated considerable support and opposition. Battery manufacturers are settling around Detroit, anticipating breakthroughs in development and sales of the next generation of clean vehicles. Still, the distaste for the scale and number of clean energy projects needed to supplant fossil fuels is unnerving citizens, and they are expressing their concerns in town hall meetings, active opposition campaigns, and in the media.

Last week Linda Cree, an activist in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, expressed these concerns about proposals to build industrial-scale wind farms in a forested region that is steadily losing industry and residents: “What is happening with wind power is that its potential to be an earth-gentle, inexpensive, decentralized source of energy is being co-opted by large energy firms,” she wrote on Enviromich, a statewide environmental e-mail thread. “Going with their program means mega-wind-farms and massive transmission lines – - and the ecological damage and visual blight that accompanies such large scale industrial development.  It means allowing these huge energy corporations access to great swaths of land for their lucrative projects, and encouraging Americans to feel entitled to ever greater amounts of energy.”

“Environmental Rapists?”
Added Amy Cree Dunn of Michigan’s Wild U.P., “Will the environmentalists of today become the environmental rapists of tomorrow?  I certainly hope not.  Industrial colonization is industrial colonization whether it be coal-fired power plants or a mega-windfarm off the wild shores of Lake Superior – with, of course, the accompanying web of high-voltage powerlines criss-crossing the rural-wild landscape and polluting the areas with herbicides and, that nasty phenomenon, stray voltage. ”

In response to such sentiments Barbara Hill, director of Clean Power Now, a Massachusetts non-profit environmental organization that advocated for development of the big Cape Wind offshore development, said in an interview that grassroots opposition to the tools that will help reduce use of fossil fuels and solve climate change will force the environmental community to reexamine its principles and priorities. “We have to ask what we want to accomplish as environmentalists,” Hill said. “Do we not attend change here? Do we just hold holy the things we consider sacred and the hell with development?”

Scale Up
In a new article about the opposition trend in Outside Magazine, Randy Udall, an energy analyst in Colorado and a member of the greenest political family in America, said “renewable-energy developers are running headlong into half a century of very successful environmentalist opposition to large energy projects. He also told the magazine, “The notion that if we just cover rooftops, we can leave the deserts alone, that we don’t need new wind farms, and don’t need to build new transmission lines—that doesn’t pass the mathematical sniff test.What I say to these people is: Buy a calculator. Run the numbers. We’re going to have to scale up renewable energy in a way we can hardly imagine.

The American Power Act, as introduced, is the second major bill to recognize that point since President Obama took office. The first was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, enacted in February 2009, which invests over $100 billion in clean energy production and practices and is one of the big financial drivers behind the new projects facing grassroots opposition. The new climate and energy bill has billions more for clean energy investment, plus cap and dividend provisions to reduce carbon emissions.

Frankly, the American Power Act provisions to produce more conventional fuel sources make sense, too, even if they curl an environmentalists’ hair. They are meant to buy time until the clean energy economy takes hold, and stave off the continued demise or even the collapse of the quality of life most Americans understand is at grave risk.

By allying themselves with that reality, disturbing as it is, environmentalists nevertheless have a shot with the American Power Act to take meaningful steps to begin curbing the consequences of climate change. Is American environmentalism mature and prudent enough to recognize that opportunity? Let’s hope so.

– Keith Schneider

Over 70 years ago, in the General Motors-sponsored Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, an estimated 10 percent of all Americans were transported across a landscape of innovation, creativity, and optimism that became the economic and cultural foundation of the great American century. The Futurama exhibit was a huge diorama of a highway-heavy, congestion-free, car-dependent, time-efficient, leafy green urban and suburban all American pattern of civilization that no one had ever seen before.

What astute observers recognized — among them Lewis Mumford and Walter Lippman — was that GM’s new American geography needed enormous public investments in the roads, sewers, education, research, planning, and industrial infrastructure to make it reality. The vision, though, of an airy, prosperous, shining, and mobile American way of life was powerful and eminently achievable. Over the next two decades voters elected to Congress and the White House lawmakers of both parties who cooperated in steadily enacting big and expensive bills — the GI bill to educate veterans, the 1956 Highway Act to start the Interstate System, water and sewer spending bills, research grants for engineering, just to name a few — to change the way America looked and functioned.

American Power Act Tactics
Last week, Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut introduced The American Power Act, a big and expensive spending bill that is in every way a response to that incredibly accurate 70-year-old GM vision. Its central goal is to preserve American choice and mobility — the two central features of our way of life — in the face of an oncoming train wreck of accumulating economic and environmental consequences.

Kerry and Lieberman propose to execute this impossible task by laying out two paths for legislative action that need to be achieved simultaneously. The first is to generate more supplies of conventional energy sources — oil, coal, and nuclear — in order to stave off the slow demise or even the collapse of America’s convenient, have it your way, drive through economy.

The proposal provides incentives to coastal states to pursue more offshore oil and gas development, while also giving neighboring states the power to block development within 75 miles of their shoreline. It includes $2 billion-a-year in research grants to coal-burning utilities to test carbon capture and sequestration. It proposes to invest tens of billions in loan guarantees and other support to encourage the construction of 12 new nuclear plants.

The second tactical step in the legislation is to push America as insistently as politically practical toward more energy-efficient transportation, and home-grown, renewable, and much cleaner sources of energy. The idea is to spur innovation, new patterns of compact development, and new industrialization that also generates much less carbon pollution.

Kerry and Lieberman proposed spending $70 billion over 10 years on transit, clean vehicles, energy efficiency and other Smart Growth innovations. They lay out a plan for farmers to gain income by siting renewable projects on their land and to grow biofuels. There is money for solar and wind development. And the bill contains provisions to reduce carbon emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and over 80 percent by 2050.

Carbon Pricing and Pragmatism
The bill envisions putting a price on carbon, and providing for trading carbon allowances that applies to large polluters and could generate billions of dollars annually, a portion of which would be rebated to citizens.

As a study in pragmatism, the American Power Act does pretty well. The legislation addresses most of what’s possible and practical in the place where energy, economy, the environment, and politics now meet. It’s as big and bold as it dares in an era when the boom-boom-boom of dire risks to our way of life — climate change, declining competitiveness, rising energy costs — is greeted in political circles with the squeak of small ideas and the clanging of ideological idiocy and anger from every side.

In almost every instance, environmental organizations and business groups commended Kerry and Lieberman for such a solid first draft. And in almost every instance — the exception was the Smart Growth community’s enthusiasm for the $7 billion-a-year investment in transit, clean car, and other transportation and efficiency measures — groups said the intricacies of the bill needed serious reworking.

Environmental groups are not thrilled with the oil, coal, and nuclear provisions. They aren’t thrilled with a section that would withdraw some authority of the EPA to regulate carbon emissions from certain sources. And climate groups are concerned that the bill’s proposal to start in 2019 to dedicate some of the revenue from carbon allowance trading to helping developing nations make the transition to a low-carbon economy is too little and too late.

Many business executives, meanwhile, are nervous about the carbon emissions limits. Democratic lawmakers from the Midwest want more investment in clean tech manufacturing. And the bill’s former sponsor, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham who dropped out following an ideological fit, said the proposal would not survive the — so far — uniform Republican opposition.

Transition and Trouble
America, of course, has not always had such trouble responding to change and transition. The America that resulted from executing the Futurama vision was industrious, optimistic, and capable of reacting to favorable market trends. The suburbs and highways, cul-de-sacs and three-car garages, homes with more bathrooms than TVs were made possible by cheap energy (most of which we generated ourselves), cheap land, core competitiveness in major industries, reasoned population increases, growing personal income, wealthy governments, and a willingness of taxpayers to invest in the nation’s future.

We’re not dealing well with the new market trends of the 21st century. Energy prices are steadily rising. Land is expensive. Whole industries have moved beyond our borders. The U.S. is the third fastest growing industrialized nation in the world. Incomes are declining. Governments operate with enormous deficits. Taxpayers are unwilling to invest in a collaborative future.

The result is a nation that is uncharacteristically hesitant and operating in fear. And while ideologues on all sides shout past each other, and make holding office at any level a thankless and grueling experience, the real danger in our governing circles is the entrenchment of the politics of stasis. Doing nothing. Holding the line. Not deciding. Not acting.

The American Power Act contains a suite of reasoned ideas that make sense. Hopefully it not only survives the blizzard of amendments but is strengthened. The sole provision that could be considered a breakthrough, and needs to survive intact, is the bid to put a price on carbon and then to generate revenue by trading allowances. By itself that provision sets the basic foundation to reduce emissions, spur clean energy investment, and prove to the world that the United States is serious about being a leader in the global work to solve climate change. Taking into account the political and economic context, the bill’s passage would be a step, arguably a big step, for America’s future.

– Keith Schneider

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Laureate economist,  Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The New York Times, and friend of most things green wrote a piece over the weekend that should give environmentalists heartache. In a column about the big Gulf oil spill, Krugman described how the environmental movement has been steadily losing political momentum because it’s been so successful in scrubbing the skies and clearing the waters of the visible hazards of pollution. He also lays the blame for the movement’s diminishing influence on the persistent attacks of the right who constructed “a narrative in which advocates of strong environmental protection were either extremists — “eco-Nazis,” according to Rush Limbaugh — or effete liberal snobs trying to impose their aesthetic preferences on ordinary Americans.”

Krugman then adds this: “I’m sorry to say that the long effort to block construction of a wind farm off Cape Cod — which may finally be over thanks to the Obama administration — played right into that caricature.” Ouch!

For any reasoned environmental advocate, myself included, that is a warning sign of the damage to the movement’s credibility that is gradually unfolding as a result of the schism between national environmental leaders — strong advocates for clean energy investment and projects — and grassroots environmental organizations working so hard in more than 30 states to halt the projects in their communities.

The juxtaposition of an expanding environmental disaster in the Gulf — an event that unites all of environmentalism — with the grassroots push back on the available alternatives to fossil fuel has proven irresistible to some writers and prompted pleas of sanity from clean energy advocates and prominent environmentalists.

In a letter to the editor last week responding to a town councilor’s criticism regarding Cape Wind’s decision to purchase turbines from the German manufacturer Siemens, Barbara Hill, the executive director of Clean Power Now made this statement.

“Back in 2003, GE had a 3.6-megawatt turbine it was ready to begin manufacturing in the U.S.; but the resistance in Massachusetts from the well-funded and politically connected opposition at that time, including the late Sen. Kennedy, Gov. Romney and the Barnstable Town Council, led it to move to a place that was wind friendly: China. The only offshore wind turbine manufacturers are overseas, because that is where the market is — as well as the national policies and subsidies to advance the industry and the associated jobs. And it doesn’t take nine years to get an offshore wind project fully permitted. Had opponents focused on a larger vision instead of their myopic view we would be the benefactors of all those jobs and economic opportunities.”

Bill McKibben, the author and environmentalist, also pleaded last year with local green organizers to consider the outcomes of their protest, which is to raise concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere steadily beyond the safe threshold of 350 ppm. “We are already well beyond 350 and accelerating rapidly in the wrong direction,” he wrote. “So when local efforts to delay or stop low-carbon energy projects come into conflict with the imperative to act urgently on global warming, they have to take second place. Because even if we win every other battle, if we lose 350, it won’t make any difference at all. You can “keep” every river and bay and lake and mountain and wilderness, but if the temperature goes up 3 degrees globally, it won’t matter. The fish that live there won’t be able to survive, the trees that anchor the landscape will die, the coral reefs will bleach and crumble. Whatever the particular part of the world that we’re each working on, it’s still a part of the world. Global warming is the whole thing.”

And Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki echoed that concern in an article last year. “I’m worried about the escalation of rhetoric on both sides,” said Suzuki. “Yes, it is urgent that we find ways to tackle the problems caused by fossil-fuel use and excessive energy consumption. And it is true that some opponents of technologies such as wind power are motivated more by NIMBY self-interest than science or true environmental concerns.”

– Keith Schneider

The US Chamber of Commerce and many of its state-based affiliates, including the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, are nests of ideological movement conservatives devoted to all manner of influential key words that have shaped how states and Washington view their duties to mother nature. The Chamber has promoted such concepts as “free-market environmentalism” — which means allowing market trends to strip the earth — and “sound science,” which is a euphemism for ignoring science-based fact whenever possible.

Last summer the Chamber came under fire for what Pete Altman of the Natural Resources Defense Council called “its obstructionist stance on clean energy and climate legislation.” A number of the Chamber’s highest profile members broke with the organization and Greenpeace in December called the Chamber a “global warming crime scene.”

But in my research on the grassroots opposition to big clean energy projects around the country I learned about the Chamber’s Project No Project Web site, which characteristically attacks what it calls “environmental extremists” and NIMBY’s, but also documents energy projects around the country that have faced resistance at the grassroots, among them dozens of clean and renewable energy projects.

“No one objects to a fair and timely process whereby projects are examined and the affected communities can be heard,” wrote Thomas J. Donahue, the Chamber’s president and chief executive, in an op-ed last year in the Washington Examiner that accompanied the launch of Project No Project. “But reasonableness and common sense must carry the day. The  simple truth is that it takes too long to build almost anything in our country today—even  clean, green, and renewable energy resources that create jobs, enhance our energy security, and improve our environment. It’s time for change.”

This week, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar awarded federal approval to the Cape Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts after nine years of review and public confrontation that included fierce opposition from the Kennedy family and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Local environmental groups also aligned with Indian tribes in fighting the project. And yesterday the leaders of those organizations said they would pursue their work in the courts.

Cape Wind exposed a fault line in the environmental community that threatens to become the most important schism in the history of the modern American environmental movement. The NRDC, Greenpeace, the Conservation Law Foundation, and a number of other prominent state, regional, and national environmental organizations supported the project.

The same green vs. green trend is emerging in other projects and across the clean energy and climate realm. On the one hand, major environmental organizations are pushing hard in Washington and in states to secure more funding for renewable energy projects, and for regulation and statutes that cut emissions of climate changing gases.

On the other hand local organizations are using every veto tool in the opposition playbook to kill clean energy projects. In a growing number of instances they’ve succeeded in producing long delays that threaten projects. In other cases, clean energy developers confronting public  resistance have walked away.

My friends and colleagues in the environmental community and the clean energy development community tell me that almost every clean energy project of any size and scale is running headlong into civic opposition that in most cases is led by local environmental groups. The only region that appears to be ready to accept big clean energy projects is the South, where a colleague says she hasn’t picked up any signs of resistance.

Outside Magazine just published a very good piece on grassroots opposition to clean energy projects that includes telling quotes from leaders of both sides. “Renewable-energy developers are running headlong into half a century of very successful environmentalist opposition to large energy projects,” said Randy Udall, an energy analyst in Colorado and a member of the greenest political family in America.

He also told the magazine, “The notion that if we just cover rooftops, we can leave the deserts alone, that we don’t need new wind farms, and don’t need to build new transmission lines—that doesn’t pass the mathematical sniff test.What I say to these people is: Buy a calculator. Run the numbers. We’re going to have to scale up renewable energy in a way we can hardly imagine.”

Developers are more than aware of civic resistance to their projects and its source. “Local opposition to proposed wind farms arises because some people perceive that the development will change what they are used to,” write executives of the Wind Capital Group, a developer of Midwest wind farms that is based in St. Louis. “It is true that a large wind farm can be a significant change, but while some people express concern about the effect wind turbines have on the beauty of our landscape, others see them as elegant and beautiful, or as symbols of a better, less polluted future. The visual effect of wind farms is a subjective issue, but most of the criticisms made about wind energy today are exaggerated or untrue and simply reflect attempts by particular groups to discredit the technology, worry local communities and turn them against proposed projects. In the electronic age, myths and misinformation about wind power spread at lightning speed.”

– Keith Schneider

Monday, in the parlance of Washington policy and journalism, was scheduled to be a potential day of breakthrough in the work to achieve action on the warming climate. Senators John Kerry (Mass.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (Conn.) had announced that they’d come to consensus on what a bipartisan energy and climate policy fit for the 21st century looked like. The results were to be unveiled at a news briefing that had global import.

Instead nothing happened. It was like reeling in a sailfish, all fight and silvery splash, only to have the beast die on the way into the boat.

This is the third time in five months that that I’ve been involved in climate and clean energy campaigns that culminated in less than they promised. “Just say no” is emerging as a far easier answer than saying yes to progress.

In Copenhagen in December, nearly 200 nations gathered at the largest summit ever with the express purpose of reaching agreement on a climate treaty. Instead what they came up with was a novel accord that points in the right direction and may not achieve more than that.

In Traverse City, a small utility’s bid to acquire 30 percent of its energy from local renewable resources, including a state-of-the-art clean right-sized clean burning 10 mw wood biomass plant, generated such fierce hyperbole about unfounded risks among some environmentalists that you’d have thought the utility was proposing a 100-acre toxic waste site for the middle of town. The local push back, led by a grassroots environmental group, is consistent with similar resistance in 30 other states to proposals for new wind, solar, geothermal, wood biomass, and transmission lines. This week, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is expected to decide on a big offshore wind farm in Massachusetts that has been the focus on a popular opposition campaign. The clean energy transition may not be televised.

Now comes the Senate’s attempt to push through a climate and energy bill, which over the weekend got washed up on the shoals of partisanship, immigration policy, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s re-election, and the powerful climate change-denying communications machine operated by America’s fossil fuel collective.

Today, Senator Reid retreated just a bit and sought to assure his Democratic and Republican colleagues that debate on the climate and energy bill would come before debate on the immigration bill. That makes sense since there is no immigration bill to debate in the Senate. But Graham, a very lonely Republican in the climate and clean energy space, has not yet indicated whether he’s ready to participate in introducing the ready-to-go energy bill that he’s spent months shaping with Senators Kerry and Lieberman.

The politics of stasis — of doing nothing — is brought action on climate change to a crawl, and that may be kind. The public will to act, to reduce emissions of carbon, to provide for the safety of the planet and all its inhabitants, is just not apparent in the United States, or in much of the rest of the developed world.

Clearly, a new operating program is needed politically and a new communications frame and strategy needs to be developed. Today the Environmental Protection Agency made public a new report on climate change effects that are getting worse:

• Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are increasing. Between 1990 and 2008, there has been about a 14 percent increase in emissions in the United States.
• Average temperatures are rising. Seven of the top 10 warmest years on record for the continental United States have occurred since 1990.
• Tropical cyclone intensity has increased in recent decades. Six of the 10 most active hurricane seasons have occurred since the mid-1990s.
• Sea levels are rising. From 1993 to 2008, sea level rose twice as fast as the long-term trend.
• Glaciers are melting. Loss of glacier volume appears to have accelerated over the last decade.
• The frequency of heat waves has risen steadily since the 1960s. The percentage of the U.S. population impacted by heat waves has also increased.

Still, people in the United States aren’t much concerned. They are clearly indicating,  in grassroots fights and in support for lawmakers who counsel to do nothing, that they are satisfied with the way things are. That is a dangerous sentiment in an unsettled world making powerful and swift transitions in every important sector — the economy, markets, the environment, energy, population, and competition for resources.

– Keith Schneider

Just in time for Earth Day’s 40th celebration, the Traverse City Light and Power board voted last night to proceed with more due diligence – analysis, fuel studies, engineering designs, zoning decisions, many other data points — to acquire 10 mw of renewable energy with a state-of-the-art clean renewable wood biomass plant. Congratulations to the staff and board for making a tough and courageous decision. And thank you to Skip Pruss, director of the state Department of Labor and Economic Growth, and to Governor Jennifer Granholm, who today was recognized for the Leadership in Renewable Energy Award by the Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association. Both Pruss and the governor provided vigorous support for the TCL&P proposal to build a small wood biomass plant.

Disappointing in all of the work that went into last night’s vote was the fact-thin, emotional, sanctimonious activism of the Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council, which allowed and enabled extremists to hijack their organization. Not once did NMEAC offer a credible alternative for generating baseload power in an era of fossil fuel dependency that has produced documentable and visible damage to Michigan. Instead NMEAC embraced wild assertions about the risks to the region’s forests, the supposed threat from ash, the plant’s emissions, even providing a forum for irresponsible fear-mongering. At one of its forums in February a NMEAC-sponsored extremist stated as bald fact an outright fear-provoking falsehood –  that an old and much larger wood biomass plant in Cadillac burned tires for fuel.

It doesn’t and never did. How do I know? As a senior staff member of the Michigan Land Use Institute I helped a local environmental organization develop and execute the public interest strategy that denied the plant from obtaining a state permit for burning tires as fuel. NMEAC never corrected that whopper or any of the others it fostered.

TCL&P showed steady resolve and exceptional resilience in hearing from citizens, responding to their concerns at a time when the plain fact is that nothing they would say would satisfy the polemical, polarized conversation that NMEAC encouraged and that Traverse City’s weekly and daily newspaper inflamed. Once again, though, facts led to a reasoned decision and Traverse City’s reputation as a center of green progress was enhanced.

– Keith Schneider