Why Solidarity is Needed More than Ever between Coal, Gas and Incinerator Fighters

- by Mike Ewall, Ener­gy Jus­tice Network

Most progress in stop­ping pol­lut­ing ener­gy and waste indus­tries is accom­plished by grass­roots activism, stop­ping one project at a time. Many assume that grass­roots groups are “NIMBY” types just push­ing pol­luters from one com­mu­ni­ty to anoth­er. How­ev­er, 50% to 95% of each wave of indus­tri­al devel­op­ment in recent decades has been blocked, be it coal, gas or nuclear pow­er plants, bio­mass or waste incin­er­a­tors, land­fills or relat­ed indus­tries. Most groups quick­ly move from NIMBY to “Not in Any­one’s Back­yard” (NIABY) mind­sets once they see the big­ger pic­ture and get net­worked with sim­i­lar­ly-tar­get­ed communities. 

We need to step up the sol­i­dar­i­ty in the face of new trends, how­ev­er. We’re see­ing coal use declin­ing, but ris­ing record lev­els of nat­ur­al gas use, and stronger-than-ever push for waste and bio­mass incin­er­a­tion as a cli­mate solu­tion. We’re even see­ing this in the Oba­ma Admin­is­tra­tion’s CO2 and waste dereg­u­la­tion rules, which threat­en to do more harm than good as coal pow­er plants are encour­aged to switch to these false solutions.

It’s now fair­ly well doc­u­ment­ed that nat­ur­al gas is worse than coal for the cli­mate, due to leak­age through­out the sys­tem and the fact that methane is now known to be 86 to 105 times worse than CO2 over a 20-year time-frame. It’s also now well-doc­u­ment­ed that trash incin­er­a­tion is 2.5 times as bad as coal for the cli­mate, and that bio­mass incin­er­a­tion is 50% worse — and that these are not “car­bon neu­tral” as claimed. It’s also a fact that trash incin­er­a­tion is far worse than coal by every oth­er mea­sure of pollution. 

Despite these facts, EPA is push­ing an unprece­dent­ed dereg­u­la­tion effort that will allow wastes to become “fuels” that can be burned, unreg­u­lat­ed and with­out com­mu­ni­ty noti­fi­ca­tion, in coal pow­er plants and even your neigh­bor­hood ele­men­tary school’s boil­er. This waste-to-fuels rule is a giant, undis­cussed loophole.

It’s urgent that we band togeth­er com­pre­hen­sive­ly as anti-com­bus­tion advo­cates. Just as it’s not accept­able to stop a coal plant and encour­age it to be built in the next coun­ty or state, it’s not accept­able to allow the coal plant in your area to switch to burn­ing trees, trash or gas when those impacts will be felt local­ly, glob­al­ly, and across a dif­fer­ent set of impact­ed com­mu­ni­ties where gas or trees are extract­ed, pipelines are built, or tox­ic ash is dumped.