A wreath and a list of the 29 miners who died at the Upper Big Branch disaster at the state coal miners' memorial on the first anniversary of the explosion. Photo: AP/Jeff Gentner

No amount of money will bring back the 29 men who died because of Massey Energy’s gross disregard for safety, but hopefully this will help their families start to feel a sense of justice.

According to the Charleston Gazette: “Alpha Natural Resources will spend $200 million on fines, victim restitution and mine safety improvements to resolve enforcement actions and some criminal matters arising from the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster.”

The NYT is reporting that it’s “the largest settlement ever in a government investigation of a mine disaster”.

This announcement comes a year and a half after the explosion at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia on April 5, 2010, which killed 29 of 31 workers in the worst U.S. coal mine disaster in 40 years. The Mine Safety and Health Administration subsequently issued a report finding that “Massey’s corporate culture was the root cause of the tragedy” and fined the company $10.8 million, the largest fine in MSHA history.

What is especially notable about this settlement is that while Alpha Natural Resources is protected from future criminal charges, individual Massey executives are not.

For a more detailed analysis of the settlement, check out Coal Tattoo’s blog.

Reverend Billy has been acquitted of all charges for last year’s action on Buy Nothing Day at UBS in New York City. During the action, the Stop Shopping Choir dressed as angels in flowing white robes and wings, filled the lobby, and handed out information about UBS’s financing of mountaintop removal.

More recently, Reverend Billy has been lending his talents to the Occupy movement. According to the Rev: “We are meditating on this year’s Buy Nothing Day activities, with all the Occupy Wall Street energy. Certainly surprised by the acquittal. The judge was a former prosecutor and apparent Republican. Maybe he’s come over to the 99%.”

Here’s the choir’s anthem, “We are the 99% (as we gather together)”:

The marathon runs right past the Fisk plant. In other words, Bank of America is lending its name to an event that promotes health and fitness while also contributing to the dirty air that runners and Pilsen community members are forced to breathe.

That’s why I woke up early for the Chicago marathon this morning. I didn’t run the race — instead, I joined dozens of activists in Pilsen to use Bank of America’s sponsorship of the race as an opportunity to protest the bank’s financing of coal plants that spew toxic pollution into the air that thousands of people breathe every day.

While Bank of America is touting the economic benefits of its marathon sponsorship, its core business practices are causing a drag on Chicago’s public health and the economy. The Bank of America marathon should be about supporting physical health and Chicago’s future. Sadly, as the lead financier of Chicago’s toxic coal plants, Bank of America is doing far more to keep the city’s air polluted and asthma rates up.

We held a banner along the race route where the Fisk power plant is visible, and we joined the race while wearing gas masks to provide a stark reminder to Bank of America of its role in polluting Chicago’s air. View more photos of RAN activists at the Chicago marathon on Flickr.

RAN planned today’s action with PERRO, the Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization, to challenge Bank of America to take responsibility for its impact on people’s health. PERRO has worked for many years demanding that the City of Chicago shut down the Fisk plant and protect the air quality for their neighborhood. The Fisk plant is one of two dirty coal plants that Bank of America is bankrolling in Chicago.

“As a resident of Pilsen, I’m glad that Bank of America is endorsing exercise and sponsoring the marathon, but I am not happy that the bank is helping contaminate the air we breathe by providing funding to some of the country’s worst air polluters,” said Pilsen resident Leila Mendez, who works with PERRO. “Fisk and Crawford coal plants, just a few blocks away, need to be shut down. We need to breathe clean air.”

Our goal was to challenge Bank of America to take public health seriously enough to develop a policy that eliminates their involvement in coal-fired power plants like the Fisk plant in Chicago. Thousands of marathoners, as well as Pilsen community members, would thank them.

Senator Carter Glass (D—Va.) and Congressman Henry B. Steagall (D—Ala.). Image via Wikipedia.

A great article from Forbes appeared in my Google alerts last week and I had to share.

The article begins as yet another article describing the sad state of affairs at big US banks, namely Bank of America and Citi. The article goes on, however, to give a refreshingly short and simple explanation of how the banks got to the terrible position we find them in today:

Should either Bank of America or Citigroup fail, there will no doubt be much finger pointing. But, rather than ask who caused it, we should be asking what caused it. In 2001, the great complaint from US banks was that the European and Asia banks had competitive advantages over US banks in that they could engage in retail banking, commercial banking, investment banking, brokerage, insurance, hedge funds, private equity, and the like. Whereas, the Glass-Steagall Act unfairly limited them to retail and commercial banking.

Mama always said to be careful of what you ask for because you just might get it. The lack of a Glass-Steagall Act in Europe has led European banks to wobble under the weight of their underwriting of European government debt and other investment banking challenges. US banks got just what they asked for.

And, as we all know all to well, less regulation for the banks has meant a much less stable industry that almost took down the entire global economy. In this recession-weary country, we are all still feeling the consequences of big bank wobbles, stumbles and crashes.

What this article doesn’t address, though, is how the banks can take on a MUCH more responsible role in the world economy. Hopefully questions like the one that RAN asked BoA’s CEO Brian Moynihan on Monday can help lead the banks toward more responsible investing that will be better for the economy, and the planet.

Mr. Moynihan was less straightforward, however, when it came to discussing coal. Brant Olson from RAN attended the conference and stood up during the question and answer portion of Mr. Moynihan’s speech to draw a connection between investments in sub-prime mortgages and investments in coal, a dirty, dangerous, and sun-setting industry.

Check out Brant’s question to Brian Moynihan below:

As Bank of America rebuilds itself to (hopefully) be a more responsible and stable financial institution, now is also the time for the bank to look to invest in long-term solutions for a low-carbon economy. Next time RAN asks Bank of America about its responsibility to the environment, maybe we will hear a straightforward answer instead of silence.

The scale and reach of Bank of America’s investments in coal are immense, as well. While the bank claims to take its responsibility for its investments’ impacts on the environment and climate seriously in its corporate social responsibility reports, Bank of America is a leading investor in dirty, polluting coal. In fact, over the past two years, Bank of America has invested $4.3 billion in the coal industry, more than any other bank.

Bank of America invests in every dirty aspect of the coal industry, too. The bank routinely underwrites hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to Arch Coal and Peabody Energy, two of the biggest coal mining companies in the Powder River Basin that are desperately trying to secure a West Coast terminal facility to ship coal overseas and export coal pollution to Asia. Bank of America is also invested in companies like Edison International that own the old, dirty Fisk and Crawford Plants in urban Chicago.

Investments in major infrastructure projects like coal terminals and existing coal-fired power plants commit us to burning coal for decades to come. It’s long past time that Bank of America shift its investment dollars away from coal and toward clean, green renewable energy.

RAN is demanding that Bank of America spend Not One More Dollar on coal. Its time that this bank make responsible investments in green energy solutions instead of bankrolling the coal industry. Our demands include:

• No financing for companies pursuing new coal-fired power plants and life-extending retrofits of existing coal-fired power plants.
• No financing for companies engaged in mountaintop removal coal mining.
• No financing for companies pursuing coal export infrastructure.
• Shift the balance of energy financing to support power generation that is less threatening to our health and environment.

Bank of America has an opportunity to lead the banking industry by developing a comprehensive coal policy that commits the company to shifting its financing away from coal and toward investments in renewable energy.

Join RAN and help Bank of America become the Bank of Solutions instead of the Bank of Coal!

For more information about Bank of America and our efforts to get the bank to stop investing in coal, check out RAN.org/BoA.

A coalition of earth activist groups including Art Not Oil, Climate Rush, UK Tar Sands Coalition and Liberate Tate recently approached the Church of Earthalujah to “EXORCISE BP” from the Tate Modern museum in central London. The results were astonishing!

British Petroleum, or BP, is a contributor to the museum and features its logo on the building. This event concluded a 9 city tour of Europe and the UK that Rev. Billy embarked on, with actions in lobbies of Deutschbank, ING, UBS, and HSBC branches.

The document, titled “Opportunity in Motion,” is  87 pages of information about how the company conducts global business and holds itself accountable to “customers, employees, shareholders and communities,” according to an introduction from BoA CEO Brian T. Moynihan.

The section addressing Bank of America’s environmental policies is toward the end of the report and breaks into two sections: “Financing a Low Carbon Economy” and “Operations.” While banks absolutely should promote energy efficiency, recycling and green-building in their operations, RAN is much more interested in the investments that banks make (or don’t make) in environmentally impactful industries — so we took a close look at how, exactly, Bank of America says it is financing a low carbon economy.

The chapter opens with a quote, “[We] have consistently operated from the firm conviction that business and environmental objectives go hand in hand.” It’s great that Bank of America acknowledges its responsibility to environmental concerns. The company goes on to promote its much-publicized Environmental Business Initiative, which was started in 2007 and commits BoA to spending $20 billion over 10 years to address “climate change through our lending, investing, products and services, and enhancing the efficiency of our own operations.” As of 2010 BoA has spent $11.6 billion of that $20 billion in a series of investments that are not specifically listed in the report and don’t appear to be on the company’s website either.

This lack of transparency makes it hard to thoroughly analyze Bank of America’s Environmental Business Initiative investments. Instead, we’re left to wonder what, exactly, BoA means by “innovative companies addressing climate change issues” when it describes its “Strategic Environmental Investments.” Or how, exactly, Bank of America “invests in transactions that finance emission reductions in the global carbon markets.”

Bank of America goes on to state that it has “increased our investments in and financing of advanced energy technologies to encourage the growth and development of cleaner renewables and other low-carbon energy such as solar, wind, biomass and biofuel.” They provide examples of  investments in wind and solar energy. To test this assertion I looked up Bank of America’s investments in alternative energy in RAN’s Bloomberg database. It would appear that in 2010 Bank of America invested over $590 million in alternative energy. But a closer look shows that the money was invested in 5 companies, one of which is a “clean” coal company, one biomass, two natural gas and only one solar company. This research indicates to me that Bank of America’s “other low-carbon energy” investments could mostly be investments in false solutions rather than true clean, green, renewable energy sources.

At the end of the chapter, Bank of America includes two short paragraphs to describe its coal policy. Part of the statement reads, “Our coal policy is focused on advancing technologies, including carbon capture and storage, supporting best practices in managing the environmental impacts attributed to coal and addressing the surface mining of coal, in particular in eastern Appalachia in the U.S.” This statement is unimpressive for a number of reasons.

First, I suspect that Bank of America means central Appalachia and not eastern Appalachia — a minor but telling mistake.

Second, instead of committing to financing less coal, the company describes investments in “clean” coal and mediating the impacts of the coal industry. This is unsurprising, since Bank of America is the #1 bank invested in the coal industry, according to Bloomberg. In 2010 BoA invested $3.9 billion in coal companies — compared to the aforementioned $590 million in “renewables and other low-carbon energy,” such as it was.  If Bank of America invested this money in its Environmental Business Initiative instead, imagine how quickly they would reach their goal of $20 billion for the environment!

Third, Bank of America is trying to spin its role in bankrolling the devastatingly destructive coal industry as environmentally responsible. Shame on Bank of America.

If Bank of America wants to position itself as an environmentally responsible corporate citizen, the company has a lot of work to do. It has a long way to go before BoA can transparently demonstrate a shift away from investment in dirty fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources. I look forward to Bank of America becoming a true financier of low-carbon energy.

Earlier this month, AEP announced that upcoming EPA clean air regulations (which have now been announced) may mean that the company will need to close 25% of their coal fleet. This proclamation was of course meant to scare legislators into taking the EPA’s power to enforce the Clean Air Act away. Then news broke that AEP is putting its money where its mouth is — lots of money.  AEP spent a reported $2 million lobbying in the 1st quarter of 2011. $2 million in just 3 months!!!

The New York Times responded to AEP  in an editorial blasting the company for misleading the public about impacts of EPA regulations, bullying the agency, and failing to address real concerns about its aging coal fleet. The EPA also responded during a US Senate hearing by clarifying that most of AEP’s plant closures won’t be because of the EPA, they will be because AEP’s fleet is too old to compete in energy markets.

Over the past month, AEP has demonstrated that it is a coal company that is willing to lie to the public and spend millions to influence politicians and erode the ability of democratic institutions such as the EPA that were created to ensure clean air and water for all Americans. Which leads me to wonder, which banks are behind AEP?

A quick look at AEP’s financing shows that in the past 2 years (since June 2009) several banks have provided large sums of money in the form of bond underwriting to AEP. Some of the most interesting include*:

• Barclays Bank provided $300 million
• UBS provided $190 million
• Morgan Stanley provided $175 million
• Citi and JP Morgan Chase each provided $87.5 million
• Wells Fargo and Credit Suisse each provided $75 million

All of these banks should cut ties with AEP. Financing a company like AEP that undermines democracy and burns climate-killing coal is irresponsible at best.

* All research is sourced from Bloomberg

Well we gathered in NYC here, and started this ‘Earthalujah Church.’

Why? Well we’re agnostics or what are we — over-cultured — and something about this time in which we live, with hate-crimes against the Earth from one side and freak storms rising from the other…  And we are caught in the middle waiting for death in a different way than we used to. We love the gift of life, but haven’t had the chance to thank life for it. And then it occurs to us that nobody is really shouting EMERGENCY! down in the empty Tahrir Square with enough force.

Don’t we like it here?  The whole culture is sort of listless now.  It’s Waiting for Godot time. So if gratitude to the Earth comes in songs, and rituals and prayers… Maybe the Ear can give us more juice for that shout we all need to inhale and blow at our fellow humans. Earthalujah!

Thanks Reverend!

The Chicago 6 being arrested for protesting at Crawford Coal Plant in Chicago. Photo by Liz Nerat

All six of the activists arrested yesterday at the Crawford coal plant have been released from police custody and are safe and sound — and hopefully resting!

While actions can seem glamorous and fun — and they sometimes are — we often forget that sitting and waiting for people to be processed and released from jail is an incredibly long and boring but extremely important role to fill in any direct action scenario. Yesterday afternoon and evening I sat in two Chicago courthouses waiting for the arrestees to come out from behind bars. I waited with several other activists who played support roles during the action, and during the (nearly 12) hours that we waited for our comrades we had a lot of time to reflect on the events of the day.

We woke up early in the morning and met close to the Crawford coal plant to do one final run-though of the action plan before everyone set out to play their roles. The activists who planned to climb the fence and onto the giant coal pile that feeds the plant nervously prepared to risk arrest while the rest of us buzzed about making sure that we were fully prepared for the day.

We left for the Crawford plant just before 10:00am and, before I knew it, six activists bravely climbed over the fence surrounding the plant and up a mountain of coal to unfurl a giant 7’ by 30’ banner reading “Close Chicago’s Toxic Coal Plants.” The banner was situated just next to the plant and a conveyor belt carrying coal — it was quite a site to see in front of a backdrop of cold, grey Chicago sky. Two additional activists unfurled a second banner reading “Si Al Pueblo no Al Carbon” — “Yes to the People, No to Coal” in Spanish — in front of the fence. The two banners communicated a strong message demanding clean air for Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood.

Security from Midwest Generation, the company that owns the Crawford plant, quickly arrived on the scene, and Chicago Police followed a short time later. After an hour of holding the banner atop the mountain of coal, the six activists were arrested and taken into custody by the police. The arrests, like the action, were nonviolent, peaceful, and orderly.

Photo by Liz Nerat

Several organizations worked together to make sure that today’s action went as smoothly as possible. The Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) has spearheaded the local campaign to shutter the Crawford plant and we hope that this action furthers their efforts to force city leaders to protect the health of Little Village residents by closing this dirty coal plant immediately. Rainforest Action Network, along with our Chicago-based chapter, RAN Chicago, joined Rising Tide North America and the Backbone Campaign to donate their time, labor, and energy to today’s events. We are thrilled with how today’s action went, and look forward to working together again soon.

Check out pictures of the action and, if you can, please donate to help with legal support for the Chicago 6.  Many thanks to everyone for all your hard work and support!

Activists representing Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), Rising Tide North America, Rainforest Action Network, and the Backbone Campaign are demanding that the City of Chicago close both the Crawford plant as well as the nearby Fisk Street plant in Pilsen.  Both plants are owned by Midwest Generation, a subsidiary of Edison International.

The action today is part of an ongoing campaign led by LVEJO and other local organizations demanding that Chicago replace their dirty, polluting coal plants with green energy alternatives. As a part of this campaign, LVEJO is also hosting an extraction fair in the afternoon as a part of the Day of Action Against Extraction, educating community members about the destructive impacts that extractive industries have on people living in Little Village and beyond.

Take Action

If you’d like to stand up to the coal industry with RAN, it’s easy to get started. Just sign up for action alerts at ran.org/energyalerts.

Update

The six activists, all local Chicagoans, were arrested by Chicago Police after two hours atop the massive coal pile. Activists included Jeff Lucas, Peter Hoy, Ellen Magin, Mike Durschmid, Gloria Fallon and Carlyn Crispell.

The groups are demanding the closure of the plant just one day before the much-anticipated Clean Power Ordinance hearing, which could force the plant to undergo major modifications to upgrade its pollution controls.

Researchers at Cornell University just released a study (pdf) that argues that using natural gas for energy actually causes more, not less, greenhouse gas emissions than coal.

The reason that natural gas is so greenhouse gas-intensive is because of “fracking,” or hydraulic fracturing, the process required to extract natural gas from far underground. The study’s authors found that during the fracking process, enough methane is released from underground to make natural gas actually dirtier than coal.

According to the study: “Compared to coal, the [climate] footprint of shale gas is at least 20 percent greater and perhaps more than twice as great on the 20-year horizon and is comparable when compared over 100 years.”

This news is especially distressing because coal plants across the United States are converting to natural gas in response to upcoming EPA air pollution regulations. Instead of switching from one dirty fuel to another, communities need to replace dirty power plants with truly clean, green energy — and banks need to stop financing false solutions like natural gas and instead invest in the renewable energy solutions that will replace fossil fuels once and for all.

For more information about natural gas extraction and fracking, check out RAN’s official position statement on hydrofracking, or get involved with Earthworks, a great organization working to protect communities from the devastating effects of gas development.

Rainforest Action Network and the Sierra Club released the 2011 Mountaintop Removal Report Card today. The report card exposes relationships between 10 of the biggest banks in the world and the top companies practicing mountaintop removal mining in central Appalachia.

Some of the findings:

• Since January 2010, Bank of America, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, GE Capital, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, PNC, UBS and Wells Fargo together provided more than $2.5 billion in loans and bonds to MTR companies.
• The top three financiers of MTR are PNC, Citi and UBS.
• Of the 10 banks in the report, Wells Fargo and Credit Suisse have the strongest MTR policies.

Since 2010′s MTR report card was released last spring, five banks released policies addressing mountaintop removal: JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, PNC, UBS and Credit Suisse. The MTR report card has served as an excellent tool for RAN to engage with executives at the biggest banks and help them move away from financing the devastating practice of mountaintop removal.

We hope that this year’s report will continue to pressure the biggest financiers of mountaintop removal to develop meaningful policies limiting their exposure to MTR mining companies, and to push banks with existing policies to make them stronger. You can send a wake-up call to banks and call on them to stop funding the horrendously destructive practice of mountaintop removal by sending them our new video, “Mountaintop Removal: An American Tragedy,” which shows exactly what they’re bankrolling.

Ironically, the day of release also marked the first day of the RBS-sponsored Climate Week in the UK.

Platform is using RBS’s involvement in Climate Week to push the bank to stop greenwashing its corporate image by sponsoring climate-related events and, instead, to get serious about reducing its financing of the fossil fuels industry.

Download the report, view the online presentation summary, and watch the accompanying video:

Of the hundreds of news reports covering these one-after-another disasters, one Bloomberg article caught my eye with a very interesting question: how will Japan’s nuclear meltdown impact the future of energy?

As the nuclear meltdown in Japan continues, the conversation about the impact this disaster will have on our energy choices is an interesting one. There seem to be two competing answers: expand the use of coal as a clear alternative to nuclear power, or push for clean energy, like wind and solar, that does not explode, spill or meltdown. Which would you choose?

Apparently, two of the biggest coal mining companies in the world, Siberian Coal Energy Co. and OAO Mechel, have responded to Japan’s energy crisis with a plan to increase coal shipments to Japan by 3 million to 4 million metric tons a year. The stock market also seems to point to coal as a good alternative to nuclear, at least at this moment in the news cycle. The Wall Street Journal reported that coal companies including Peabody Energy, Consol Energy, Alpha Natural Resources, Cloud Peak Energy and International Coal Group are trading higher since the nuclear plant explosions.

However, the New York Times is reporting that solar and wind stocks are surging amidst nuclear fears as well. The demand for renewable energy is picking up. With Bloomberg reporting that: “Equipment makers for solar and wind energy climbed as much as 27 percent, rallying for a second day on speculation that clean energy will benefit in the aftermath of Japan’s nuclear-reactor accident.”

It is disgusting to think that any company, dirty energy or clean, would “benefit” from this disaster. However, it is also horrifying to imagine that as a global community we would not heed the warnings that disasters like the BP oil spill and this week’s nuclear meltdown are sounding.

As country’s like Germany and Switzerland suspend plans for nuclear plants and fear over this unstable fuel justifiably surges around the globe, we have two paths for our energy future: to stay the course, pumping our countries full of coal, oil and nuclear energy, or transition to renewable sources of energy like solar and wind.

In my estimation, replacing nuclear energy with energy from burning coal is a foolish path. Coal has a long and shameful history of devastating accidents, including the TVA coal ash spill in December 2008, which dumped 2.6 million cubic yards of fly ash across hundreds of acres just outside Knoxville, Tennessee, and Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine explosion in April of 2010, which killed 29 miners. These are just two recent examples from the United States. It would take a much longer blog post to cite all the recent accidents at coal plants and mines around the world.

The debate around the future of nuclear energy will surely rage for many months. It is critical that those of us who have been watching the disaster in Japan unfold not let pundits, politicians and journalists decide to replace one dangerous power source for another.  Energy shouldn’t cost lives.

In 2008, when controversy surrounding the Cliffside coal plant was at its height, six major banks developed and adopted a mechanism for addressing banks’ roles in financing high-carbon-emitting industrial projects. Deemed the Carbon Principles, environmentalists welcomed this bank-led commitment as a  means of accountability for financing high-carbon projects like new coal-fired power plants. We hoped that banks adopting the  Carbon Principles meant that they were getting serious about their role in financing global warming.

RAN’s new Carbon Principles report makes clear that we were too optimistic. Duke’s Cliffside plant serves as an example of exactly the kind of project that the banks should have been moving away from. Instead of taking the Carbon Principles seriously, however, five of the six Carbon Principles banks — Citi, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and Wells Fargo — provided nearly $1 billion in financing to Duke Energy in 2 different bond offerings, both of which were within a year and a half of the adoption of the Carbon Principles by those banks.

Yesterday, I traveled with climate justice activists from Charlotte, North Carolina who worked to stop the Cliffside’s expansion to visit the plant. We held a banner in front of the plant to draw attention to the need for banks to develop meaningful climate policies that push them to stop investments in dirty coal and instead invest in the renewable energy of the future.

Its time that banks get the message and make real commitments to stop bankrolling plants like Cliffside that will spew global warming gasses into the atmosphere for decades to come.

Take action and demand that the Carbon Principles banks stop funding coal plants!

This is great news. California’s AB 32 is by far the strongest climate legislation in the country and is clearly succeeding in reducing emissions in the state. In addition, California is leading the way for other regions around the world to enact similar laws that can begin a shift away from high-emissions fossil fuels to cleaner, greener energy sources.

While it is exciting to see California move away from fossil fuel dependency, I wonder what we are moving toward. Who are the companies that are supplying our clean, green energy anyway?

Conveniently, the California Energy Commission’s website hosts a list of “large solar energy projects” that includes the names of the companies that own each project. The companies associated with solar projects  include Beacon Solar, Abengoa Solar, Solar Millennium, Solar Partners, BrightSource Energy, Imperial Valley Solar, Genesis Solar, NextEra ™ Energy Resources, Calico Solar, and Tessera Solar. This is of course only a partial list, and while my short search didn’t turn up a complete list of solar companies providing energy to the state or a similar list of wind or geo-thermal companies, I think that this list can still be informative.

Of this small group of solar companies, it turns out that most are small, less than half are publicly traded, and many are  headquartered outside California. One of the companies on this list, BrightSource Energy, happens to be a subsidiary of NRG Energy. NRG  is well-known to anti-coal activists because the company owns both existing and proposed coal-fired power plants across the country, including a large new plant that has caught the attention of climate activists in Texas. Additionally, NRG is involved in the development of highly controversial carbon capture and sequestration projects and the expansion of nuclear facilities.

My point in highlighting BrightSource Energy’s relationship to NRG is not to fault a fossil fuels company for moving into the renewable energy market. There is money to be made in renewable energy development, and it’s not surprising that both existing and new energy companies are scrambling to fill the growing demand. Rather, I think it is critical that as the renewable energy industry grows in stature and influence, we keep their power over our political systems in check.

The oil, gas and coal industries spend millions of dollars every year on lobbying, advertising and political donations and have played a huge role in slowing legislation and regulations aimed at transitioning our society away from dirty energy. Right now, renewable energy companies don’t have the same stranglehold over our democratic systems that the fossil fuels industries do. Stories of coal companies buying judges to influence court cases don’t yet apply to companies developing wind farms or solar arrays. However, just because a company is “green” doesn’t mean it would not try to obstruct the judicial system, bankroll a misleading ad campaign, or put heavy-handed pressure on elected officials.

The fight over climate policy is an incredibly huge indicator that corporations have far too much power in our society. While shifting to green energy is necessary, it is also necessary to look at corporations as the source of the problem. It is critical that movements to stop climate change also participate in efforts to roll-back corporate influence. The SEIU campaigns to organize workers employed by major industries are one example, organizations working to keep corporate money out of politics are another. Of course, the Rainforest Action Network also tirelessly campaigns on some of the world’s most destructive corporations.

As the fossil fuels industry (hopefully!) fades from power and the renewable energy industry takes its place, we need to work to make sure that we don’t find ourselves at the mercy of a cleaner and greener — but just as severe — corporate lobbying campaign in the future.

For those who’d like a better understanding of the credit crisis, check out this great video from crisisofcredit.com

The PNC protest was a success. Shortly afterward, PNC announced a new policy on financing companies engaged in mountaintop removal.

The four arrestees, Alexa Ross, Liz Nerat, George Lakey and Reverend Billy Talen recently appeared in a DC courthouse to face charges of illegal entry at PNC’s bank branch. The presiding judge happened to be a former civil liberties lawyer who discussed having seen the Beehive Collective’s presentation on mountaintop removal coal mining. The PNC Four were able to tell the Judge about the bank’s role in MTR financing, PNC’s new position on the issue, and why the group felt compelled to protest inside the bank.

All four accepted a plea agreement. As long as they do not get arrested for nine months, all charges will be dismissed. Thanks to the PNC Four for playing such an important role in pressuring PNC to take mountaintop removal mining seriously!

TAKE ACTION

Interested in taking action to stop mountaintop removal coal mining in America? Tell EPA head Lisa P. Jackson to veto the largest MTR site ever proposed in the history of the United States.

COMMENT

Tell us below how you’d like to get involved with putting en end to the barbaric practice of MTR.