ModeShift - Part 50

Responding to a Candidate on Traverse City Biomass Resistance

by Keith SchneiderAugust 12, 2010September 9, 20100

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, …

How Big Was The BP Gulf Disaster? Really Big

by Keith SchneiderAugust 6, 20100

Late last month more than 1 million gallons of crude oil leaked into the Kalamazoo River in southern Michigan, the biggest oil accident in the Midwest ever. This has been the year of understanding the oil/water nexus, even if it’s seawater. This week the U.S. estimated that the BP Gulf blowout poured 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf. Even with the 800,000 barrels that BP said it collected and skimmed, the disaster is, …

Michigan’s Unsung Clean Energy Success

by Keith SchneiderAugust 5, 2010August 6, 20100

Given the dearth of new economic strategies that make sense and actually work, it’s appropriate to again take note of what’s happening here in my home state of Michigan around clean energy development. The more you think about it, the clearer the significance of what Governor Jennifer Granholm (with the president in pix above at July 15 groundbreaking of a new lithium-ion battery plant in West Michigan) has accomplished becomes clearer and clearer. In short, …

Wind Chill: Young and Old Greens At Odds Over Clean Energy Projects

by Keith SchneiderAugust 4, 2010September 9, 20100

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 …

Michigan’s Building Boom in Electric Vehicle Battery Manufacturing

by Keith SchneiderAugust 4, 2010March 8, 20123

HOLLAND, Mich. â€” In February 2009, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which among other things provided $2.4 billion to encourage development of a domestic industry to make lighter, more energy-dense lithium-ion batteries to power electric vehicles. Two weeks ago, on July 15, the president flew to this small city on the shore of Lake Michigan to attend the groundbreaking for a $303 million, 650,000 square-foot battery plant operated by Compact Power, …

A Natural Gas Gusher in Michigan Could Mean Big New Play, and Trouble

by Keith SchneiderJuly 31, 2010July 31, 20100

Photo Â© Heather Rousseau / Circle of Blue The aptly named Pioneer natural gas well, near Lake City in Missaukee Countyâ€™s Pioneer Township, is a stack of gauges and metal piping that rises about 7 feet from a bed of crushed stone at the center of a five-acre clearing surrounded by Michigan hardwoods. The only sound in the clearing is of songbirds hidden in the trees. The sole scent from the straight-as-a-gun-barrel well–drilled and tested …

Copenhagen’s Fallout: Senate Drops Climate Action From Energy Bill

by Keith SchneiderJuly 22, 2010September 9, 20100

Until December 2009, the idea of acting to cool the Earth was on a roll. High points included 2007 Nobel Prizes for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s breakthrough science and for Al Gore’s astonishing work to elevate global warming to an international priority, They also included Barack Obama’s winning 2008 presidential election, and the formation of global online grassroots activism led byÂ 350.org and TckTckTck, a project of the Global Campaign For Climate …

Obama To Visit Holland, Michigan For Battery Plant Groundbreaking

by Keith SchneiderJuly 13, 2010July 13, 20100

President Obama will be in Michigan on Thursday for the groundbreaking ceremony of a new LG Chem-Compact battery plant, which will make the power sources for the Chevy Volt, expected to be introduced later this year. The plant is one of 17 new manufacturing facilities in Michigan connected to battery production for electric vehicles. On May 26 ModeShift published a full account of the federal and state-financing that leveraged the more than $6 billion total …

Climategate Is Over, The Moment to Act on Warming and Energy is Here

by Keith SchneiderJuly 8, 20100

As cities on the East Coast sweltered in the sort of dispiriting record-breaking heat that climate scientists accurately predicted, the Obama administration’s lawyers were in a federal appellate court in New Orleans today to reinstate the moratorium on deep sea oil and gas exploration the Interior Department issued in May. Last month a federal district judge with investment interests in the energy industry struck down the temporary ban on new drilling. It’s been that kind …

Science Vindicated as Senate Edges Toward Climate and Energy Debate

by Keith SchneiderJuly 7, 2010July 7, 20100

The 20-year global campaign to cool the planet, one of the most influential civic movements in human history, was built on two points of reference. The first is visible evidence on every continent of escalating temperatures, melting ice, more ferocious storms, fiercer droughts, and deadlier floods. The second is the wealth of scientific data that proves Mother Nature’s erratic behavior is no accident. It’s the result of the combustion of fossil fuels that is steadily …