The California power grid wants to make sure it can keep electricity flowing as residents rely on a greater amount of wind and solar power and strict water rules force the shutdown of power plants along the coast in the next few years, the agency said.

California has the most ambitious plan of any state to expand use of renewable resources to 33 percent by 2030, by boosting wind and solar generation.

California is also ahead of other states in efforts to dramatically reduce the amount of ocean-water used for cooling at existing natural gas-fired power plants built along the coast.

via Calif. seeks flexible power rules as wind expands | Reuters.

The situation in the Youngstown area has attracted extensive national and local media attention.

The Dec. 31, 2011, earthquake shook Youngstown and reportedly was felt in several states and as far away as Ontario, Canada.

The earthquake may have awakened many more citizens to the serious health and safety issues reported by those living near fracking and injection wells and to reports of drinking-water source contamination, meeting organizers said.

via Youngstown News, Meeting will address quakes, injection wells.

Coal ash holds metals that can be toxic in high doses. But the elements most widely detected at the power plants, iron and manganese, also occur naturally and aren’t considered health risks.

State regulators now have to figure out which is affecting the wells.

via Metals found in water at coal plants | CharlotteObserver.com & The Charlotte Observer Newspaper.

via An Oil Minister, Plugging Renewables? – NYTimes.com.

During a Republican presidential primary debate last June, Michele Bachmann lit into the Environmental Protection Agency, recommending it be renamed the “job-killing organization of America.” Her fellow contenders nodded in agreement, each explaining how shutting down the EPA, or at least instituting a moratorium on regulations, would be a priority in their White House.

The GOP’s desire to kill America’s chief environmental regulator hasn’t just been grist for the bizarre sideshow that is the Republican Party’s presidential primary. Over the past year, Republicans in Congress — in actual positions of power — have succeeded in massively defunding the EPA. In March, no less than nineteen riders were floated on the floor of the House of Representatives to cut the EPA’s budget. Fifteen Republican senators even proposed deleting the EPA as a cabinet-level agency. The harshest of these legislative bombs were diffused, but the cuts that prevailed added up to the largest single year drop in EPA funding since 1981 when President Reagan (“Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do”) began his unprecedented assault on the greens.

Republicans by no means have a monopoly on the “job killer” trope. Moderate, so called-Blue Dog Democratic senators like Jay Rockefeller and Ben Nelson, who hail from states with huge corporate energy interests, have co-sponsored legislation to ditch specific EPA standards. Even President Obama recently reinforced the mythology that environmental regulations are counterproductive to economic development, saying in September that his decision to rescind ozone air-quality standards was essential to the nation’s economic recovery. Both parties also are seriously pursuing environmental deregulation of industry, and cuts to the nation’s major cleanup programs.

The problem with all of this, however, is that California’s economy is now crucially dependent on environmental regulation and remediation. This is especially true in cities where decades of industrial pollution have created an environment not only toxic to human health, but also economic investment.

In fact, cleaning up toxic sites has become a fundamental driver of the Bay Area’s economy. As a result, cutting the EPA’s budget, and possibly reducing funds for the state agency responsible for partnering in cleanup, the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), will stall job creation and condemn huge swaths of urban California as economic dead zones.

But the fallacy that environmental laws kill jobs doesn’t end there. According to economists who study the impact of regulation on markets, California’s economy will likely add more jobs and develop new vibrant sectors of activity much faster if politicians embrace ambitious environmental goals. According to this emerging school of thought, environmental regulations aren’t only pivotal for human health and environmental quality, they stimulate innovation, and innovation is the key to California’s economy.

Read the rest here.

The Yasuni National Park, known as "the lungs of the world" and one of the most bio-diverse places on earth, is under threat from oil drilling. The race is on to find the funds required to develop new sustainable energy programmes that would leave the oil – and the forest – untouched.

In the early light of dawn, the Napo River, running swiftly from its headwaters in the high Andes, swirled powerfully past the bow of our motorised canoe.

Suddenly, a dense cloud of green parrots swooped down from the canopy of the jungle and in a cackling din started scooping tiny beakfuls from the exposed muddy bank.

The heavy mineral rich clay, the birds seem to know, is an antidote to the toxins present in the seeds of the forest which are a major part of their daily diets.

via BBC News – Race to save Ecuador’s ‘lungs of the world’ park.

On November 6, 2011, Bill McKibben arrived at Washington, D.C.’s, Lafayette Park to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, designed to carry oil 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. McKibben, a Vermont writer and environmentalist, had been one of 1,252 people arrested in front of the White House in August and September, protesting the same pipeline. He’d spent two nights in the district’s Central Cell Block, and now was back with thousands more people and a bold new plan.

“We can’t literally occupy the White House,” McKibben had told his fellow protesters, “so the next best thing is to surround it.” And that’s what they would do, encircle the White House in a “giant hug” to remind President Obama of his campaign promise to “end the tyranny of oil.” McKibben wasn’t sure how many people he would need to “hug” the White House, though, and was worried that he wouldn’t have enough.

via The man who crushed the Keystone XL pipeline – Boston.com.

Huge thanks go to Brett Shipp for staying on this story. To recap:

• A chemical plant blew up and I knew right away that fracking was involved.
• Chemical fire spawns fish kill, criminal investigation
• Waxahachie chemical firm cited for environmental violations
• Chemical plant relocation upsetting Ellis County residents
• Ellis County Commissioners catch heat from chemical plant foes

So that was that. A bunch of fish died, people got sick, water was contaminated, the plant wants to locate next to a diary and… life goes on.

Then it started raining.

Now the rain is washing away the containment areas and the chemicals are causing massive foaming in the creeks. Here is Shipp’s story with some great video.  But, don’t worry because Jerrell with TCEQ is on the scene and they are monitoring it.

People, people, PEOPLE!!!  This is nothing new. We have been trying to tell you about foaming creeks, ditches and well water for years now.

WFAA-TV posts video with a report on its site.

President — finally — stands up to GOP, Big Oil

President Barack Obama finally seems to be standing his ground in the philosophical fight with Republicans over the direction of the country.

The decision to not approve the Keystone oil pipeline was the right one. Obama clearly signaled to Republicans, Big Oil and his own supporters that he won’t be blackmailed into a rushed judgment on an environmentally sensitive project that has not been adequately studied.

Now, of course, the GOP will say that Obama failed to grasp an opportunity to create jobs. But he’s on solid ground. This was an obvious political ploy, and caving in would have left the president — and the nation — in a far worse position.

House Republicans, backed by the petroleum industry, forced the president’s hand by inserting language into the payroll tax bill that required him to say yes or no to the pipeline within 60 days. It was preposterous. The 1,700-mile route from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico hasn’t even been established, in part because of possible risks to Nebraska’s drinking water. And that’s not just environmentalist carping. Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman, a Republican, is one of many who think the proposed route doesn’t work because it runs through a crucial aquifer in his state.

Heineman knows the risks are real. A similar existing pipeline has leaked nearly a dozen times in the past year, and a spill from a tar sands oil pipeline in Michigan in 2010 dumped 800,000 gallons into a creek that feedsthe Kalamazoo River, causing severe damage and proving to be significantly more difficult to clean up than expected.

Pipeline proponents are hammering the president’s decision, repeating assertions that the pipeline oil supplies would create as many as 250,000 jobs across the country over the long term. According to GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney, “If Americans want to understand why unemployment in the United States has been stuck above 8 percent for the longest stretch since the Great Depression, decisions like this one are the place to begin.”

However, the oil industry’s job numbers for the project are wildly inflated. Like job estimates for the high-speed rail project in California, Keystone really counted job years — one year of work for one person — and expressed them as jobs. Independent sources now are estimating about 6,000 actual temporary construction jobs, which would barely put a dent in national unemployment numbers.

Obama didn’t rule out the pipeline altogether, but he should have. Rather than encouraging huge investments to eke out a few more years of fossil fuel addiction, the United States should be encouraging clean energy projects that are proven job creators, building on Silicon Valley tech expertise and making the country more competitive on the world stage. Oh, and reducing global warming: The pipeline and the method of oil extraction that would feed it are horrific generators of greenhouse gases.

Obama’s decision postpones that debate for another day, but he did what he needed to do now. He showed he would not pander. He also showed that he will stand up for the rights of Americans to clean water supplies — even Americans in Republican states such as Nebraska.

Good thing Heineman didn’t have to rely on his own party to watch his back.

The Fairfield, California Reporter has a different view:

Pipeline not delivering oil, but plenty of politics

The Washington insider newspaper Politico described President Barack Obama’s decision to reject the planned Canada-U.S. Keystone XL pipeline as a political “win-win” for both parties.

The reasoning is that the Republicans would attract independent voters angered by high gas prices — although it would be years before the Canadian oil would reach the market and affect prices — and attract generous political contributions from the oil companies, a slightly better bet politically.

Meanwhile, the environmentalists would be jolted out of their political lethargy and hit the bricks for Obama’s re-election, and the construction unions, who really want the project and the jobs, would have no choice but to stick with Obama because the Republicans have become anathema to most of labor.

Whatever the political benefits of the decision, it is a lose-lose for domestic energy policy and our relations with Canada.

Technically, the pipeline is not dead; a final decision has only been delayed while a more acceptable route through an environmentally sensitive region of Nebraska is negotiated. Obama is merely rejecting the project to circumvent a Feb. 21 deadline imposed on him by Congress, giving him more time to review the route.

The White House would like to stall the whole business until after the election, but he may not have that luxury.

The Canadians professed themselves “profoundly disappointed” by the decision and pointedly noted that there is another energy project on the boards, a $5.4 billion pipeline from the Alberta oil sands to ports in British Columbia where the oil could be sold to eager Asian buyers.

Already, the Republicans are trying to make the pipeline a campaign issue. “Obama is destroying tens of thousands of American jobs and shipping American energy security to the Chinese,” said House Speaker John Boehner, exaggerating on both counts. (The number of potential jobs tends to fluctuate wildly depending which side of the argument is trying to make the case.)

Obama insisted that his announcement was “not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline,” but on “the arbitrary nature of the deadline.” OK. The deadline is now a moot point, but negotiations should begin on an acceptable route and protections for the water table. After all, the disputed section is only 65 miles in Nebraska, a small fraction of the line’s 1,700-mile length.

Sparsely populated western Canada and eastern Alaska have immense oil and natural-gas reserves, and the lower 48 states are the natural market for them. Ethanol, solar panels, windmills, dim light bulbs, bike paths and switchgrass are all very nice, but they’re not going to do it for us. At best, they chip away at the margins of our energy needs.

North America has the capacity to be self-sufficient in oil and gas, but we shouldn’t wait until a crisis point — or the politics are just right — to do something about it.