Campaign Becomes Ground Zero for National Environmental/Citizens Groups
How green is Chicago?
Thanks to a growing ward-by-ward grassroots campaign for clean energy, the Windy City has attracted the attention of national environmental and citizens organizations to ask that very question.
On Thursday, July 15th at Dvorak Park, Alderman Joe Moore and Dorian Breuer, of the Pilsen Environmental Rights & Reform Organization, will be joined by an unusually broad coalition of fellow aldermen, clean energy and health care activists, and over 50 Chicago organizations, along the Sierra Club‘s Executive Director Michael Brune and Greenpeace National Climate Director Damon Moglen to call on Mayor Daley and the Chicago City Council to adopt the nationally acclaimed Clean Power Coalition energy platform.
Thirteen aldermen have signed onto Moore’s breakthrough Clean Power Ordinance, which calls for reducing pollution at the city’s two notorious coal-fired plants by 90 percent.
With one of the worst asthma rates in the nation, the Fisk Generation Station in Pilsen and Crawford Power Plant in Little Village–where nearly 50,000 tons of toxic pollution have led to atrocious health care rates over the past three years–were built before the invention of the Model T.
The CO emissions from the two plants are equivalent to the pollution of nearly 875,000 cars. Continue reading »
National Energy Scene – Local Energy
Today I’ll focus on yet another community suffering from coal’s pollution — but this community is a little bit larger, and it’s on the front end of an emerging trend. The city is Chicago and it’s starting what could be a national movement to clean up dirty energy in the inner city.
Some of our oldest and dirtiest coal plants are located in major cities across the U.S.; and they are often located in areas with other major pollution sources, exposing residents of these densely populated areas to higher levels of harmful pollution than their neighbors.
What’s happening now in Chicago is just the beginning as residents of these communities organize and rise up against these environmental injustices, finding ways to clean up their air and water.
In Chicago, more people live near the city’s two old coal plants than any other coal plant in the nation . The plants, located on the southwest side of Chicago, cause 40 pre-mature deaths, 500 emergency room visits and 2,800 asthma attacks every year. Continue reading »
We love recycling.
We think people who take reusable mugs to coffee shops for their morning fix deserve a medal.
We offer a tip of the cap to those who eat food grown locally, eschewing plums from Chile.
There’s little doubt that screwing in energy-saving super-efficient light bulbs is a great thing.
And yet …
Laudatory as these individual actions may be, they’re not enough. Not even close, in fact. The planet won’t be saved by individual valor.
We need, rather, smart regulatory frameworks to attack carbon dioxide emissions at their source, even as all of us think of ways to “go green” in our own lives. We need, ultimately, Congress to act and deploy either a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system to deal with climate change. Continue reading »
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