Where does electricity come from?

Do you know where your electricity comes from?

Fifty percent of the electricity in the U.S. is generated from burning coal.

Despite all of the industry hype about "clean coal", there is no such thing, and there never will be. Coal is dirty from start to finish: mining, mountaintop removal, watershed pollution, transportation, burning, greenhouse gas emissions, mercury and acid pollution of waterways, and toxic solid waste.

Isn't it high time to invest more into renewable energy, make the transition to a clean energy economy and create new jobs for coal miners and many others?

"The Story of Coal" video, below, was produced by a company that sells solar panels that use the free energy of the sun to make electricity. Other types of clean, renewable energy come from wind, hydropower and geothermal sources.

Watch the video to learn more about dirty coal.

Moving Beyond the BP Oil Spill

Beyond BP
Restoring the gulf will take decades. But we can start getting off oil now.
By MICHAEL BRUNE, Executive Director of the Sierra Club.

It looks a lot worse out on the water than it does on TV. The Gulf of Mexico is literally a sea of oil, with countless orange-brown waves of sludge washing into its beautiful salt marshes. We passed oil-drenched pelicans and dolphins, with no rescue crews anywhere nearby. It was heartbreaking.

If we can find ways to get from Point A to Point B without financing terrorism and cooking the planet, there's no reason we can't finally move—as BP's 2000 corporate rebranding effort put it—"beyond petroleum."

Here's the good news: When the Exxon Valdez ran aground 21 years ago, we didn't have the wealth of alternatives to oil that are available today. For example, we could save more than 25 percent of the oil that's extracted from the Gulf of Mexico if we used alternate energy sources for home heating and electricity production. We could save more than the total amount of oil produced in the gulf (or all the oil we import from the entire Persian Gulf) by moving freight from highways to railways and repowering commercial vehicles with cleaner fuels.

As individuals, there is much that we can and must do to cut oil consumption, starting with walking, biking, and riding transit whenever possible. The single most effective thing we can do as a country to get off oil, however, is to electrify transportation. The days of tinkering around with tiny increases in fuel economy should be long gone.

The full article is here.

Coal Power: Clean and Green?

While traveling along Interstate 70 in Pennsylvania, I saw several billboards like the one shown here. The message reads: "Welcome to Coal Country. COAL. Pennsylvania's #1 fuel for Electricity. NOW Clean and Green with New Technologies".

Amazing! Coal power is not only Clean, but also Green? Really? Ironically, one of the billboards was sited right in front of a wind farm! The wind turbine blades were spinning around, generating REAL Clean and Green Electricity. No need for a billboard advertising clean and green wind power when you've got the real thing! Big Coal is funding ads for the clean & green coal myth in order to remain in power, in more ways than one. Who are they fooling?

I don't know about you, but my image of coal is quite different than that portrayed by the coal power industry and their advocates. Everything about coal is dirty, and certainly not green: from extraction (including mountaintop removal, mining, and toxic runoff into waterways), to transportation (CO2 emissions plus coal dust from open railroad cars), incineration (massive CO2 emissions plus mercury, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen causing smog and acid rain, ozone pollution) and waste disposal. The photo of the two coal miners portrays some of the realities of coal...Not clean, Not green. Everything about coal is also Not healthy for people and other living things.

Coal power is on the way out, and renewable energy is moving in. Al Gore recently raised the bar on the clean energy time-line, calling for 100% renewable energy within 10 years. The coal industry is desperately fighting this sort of thinking, and is struggling to clean up its act and even trying to green it's image. Don't buy it. There's no such thing as clean coal power, and there never will be. And coal will be green...when pigs can fly.

A transition to 100% renewable energy would mean that coal miners will loose their jobs. Aware of that important concern, Al Gore said "We should guarantee good jobs in the fresh air and sunshine for any coal miner displaced by impacts on the coal industry. Every single one of them." I agree wholeheartedly.