Cross-posted from the Huffington Post
The Washington Post reported this week that President-elect Obama was considering Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers for Secretary of Energy. While the challenging economic times and Obama's campaign promises of bipartisanship demand that we give him some latitude on administrative appointments, the appointment of Jim Rogers would truly represent "change we can grieve in" for a President-Elect that has promised to aggressively confront climate change and curtail mountaintop removal coal mining. Calling such an appointment "change" may actually be overly generous as it would represent a continuation of the Bush policy of appointing industry foxes to guard our nation's natural resource "hen house."
And "fox" is a pretty apt description of Mr. Rogers.
As one of the nation's top energy executives, Jim Rogers is a leader of what one colleague calls the "coaligarchy" - shorthand for the coal-based electricity industry that has long held an iron-fisted grip on the people, communities and ecosystems wherever coal is mined, processed, burned and disposed of as air pollution and other hazardous post-combustion waste. Along with companies like Massey Energy, the nation's #1 producer of coal from mountaintop removal mines and the recent recipient of the largest penalty for clean water violations in the history of the Clean Water Act, Duke is a member of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a group that spent $50 million this election season on a campaign to sell Americans and politicians on the false promises of so-called "clean coal technology."
While privately contributing to ACCCE's misinformation campaigns that downplay the importance of climate change and question the hazards of mercury pollution from power plants, publicly Mr. Rogers waxes poetic about our need to address global climate change. But aside for Duke's quiet support of ACCCE, those of us who live in Duke's service area know that Mr. Rogers is not one to sacrifice profits for the saking of protecting the global climate or the people and communities of Appalachia that pay the price for what Rogers calls "cheap energy." As it turns out, Duke Energy is the nations's third largest consumer of coal from mountaintop removal mines.
On the left is a photo of one of the mountaintop removal mines in Southwest Virginia that supplies coal to Duke Energy's power plants, while all of the connections between Duke Energy's North Carolina power plants and mountaintop removal mines between 2002 and 2006 are shown in the image to the right.
If Mr. Rogers' actions reflected his public statements about minimizing the impacts of coal-based energy, he would not have proposed to build two 800-megawatt coal-fired power plants in North Carolina and one in Indiana. While the N.C. Utilities Commission mercifully denied one of the two plants, Duke is feverishly constructing the other, even before they have acquired the proper permits. Even at half the originally proposed size, the Cliffside plant is estimated to pump the air pollution-equivalent of one million additional cars into the atmosphere during each of its fifty-year lifespan. Moreover, while North Carolina is experiencing one of the worst droughts in its history, the new plant is expected to evaporate 21 million gallons of water per day for cooling.
Worse, Duke manipulated the political process in order to ensure that its ratepayers - rather than shareholders - bear the financial risks of proceeding with this plant whether or not it's ever completed! Worst of all, however, is the fact that the electricity from the new plant may be unnecessary for meeting alleged growing demand. According to the Raleigh News & Observer, Duke "appears to be lining up cities it hasn't previously served to be future customers."
As a mea culpa for foisting this plant upon us, Mr. Rogers and Duke have made several promises to North Carolinians in exchange for their complicity in allowing Duke to move forward with new coal and nuclear power plants. First, Duke softened the blow of making ratepayers responsible for financing the new coal plant by agreeing to a provision that it deploy some renewable sources of energy. In terms of addressing global climate change, the goal is no better than rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
Second, Mr. Rogers has promised that the new coal-fired power plant will be the last one built in the state. This promise rings hollow when one considers the fact that impending climate change legislation will likely require new power plants to capture, transport and store carbon dioxide. Because North Carolina has no viable storage sites, Duke would need to build a cost-prohibitive pipeline in order to move the captured carbon.
Third, Duke is seeking to implement an energy efficiency program euphemistically known as Save-A-Watt. Save-A-Watt has been lambasted as being too expensive and accomplishing too little. According to a Winston-Salem Journal criticizing the program:
Duke is seeking "a much higher return on the investment it makes trying not to sell us electricity than it is guaranteed for the investment it makes producing the electricity we use. ... the principle is ridiculous. ... The effort to save energy should be part of a utility's normal course of business. Considering that utilities are guaranteed a profit on the costs of doing that business, the profit from trying to save electricity would have been in line with that for trying to sell it."
Finally, Duke has ignored pleas from North Carolina residents to minimize the impacts of mountaintop removal coal mining - the most destructive form of surface mining which has transformed more than 470 mountain peaks into flat, eerily lifeless moonscapes and buried more than 1200 miles of streams in Appalachia. Duke glibly claims that it has no control over how coal is mined. However, if Bank of America, headquartered in North Carolina can do it, so can Duke.
In sum, the evidence is clear. While Mr. Rogers speaks eloquently about cleaning up his industry, his actions as a prominent "coaligarch" reflect no compunction about the devastating impacts his industry has on the people, communities and ecosystems wherever coal is mined, processed, burned and disposed of as air pollution and other hazardous post-combustion waste. If Mr. Obama seeks "change we can believe in," he must appoint a visionary and effective leader at the Department of Energy in order to create that change.
Please join me in contacting the Obama transition team and request that he appoint a leader willing to create green jobs, not snow jobs.
Via phone: 202.540.2000 (After instructions, press "2" to speak to staff.
Via the transition team website: http://change.gov/...