The Empire Strikes Back

We need to act quickly to educate members of the Senate that coal ash is a hazardous substance and should be regulated as such.
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Americans hate Big Oil and Big Coal, and they disapprove of bailouts for even their iconic car companies. But we tend to have a soft spot for our local public utilities -- and that is turning out to be a very dangerous thing. For it's the political clout of Big Power (not all of it, but a swath of monopolies like AEP, Duke, and, above all, the mighty Southern Company, ruling over its empire from Peachtree Street in Atlanta) that is one of the biggest threats to our health. These utilities provide the muscle and the enforcement power to keep Capitol Hill in the bailout business for the coal and nuclear suppliers of their fuel, and their influence was on spectacular display last week.

The empire made its second strike against the newly reformed EPA and its engineer-turned-top-cop, Administrator Lisa Jackson. (The first came when the House Commerce Committee agreed to limit the EPA's ability to regulate carbon dioxide pollution from power plants in its compromise Climate Bill -- a bright-line rule that environmentalists must get fixed before final passage of any climate legislation.) The second was launched when Senators Kent Conrad and Sam Brownback began circulating a "Dear Colleague" letter to other senators telling Administrator Jackson that they oppose regulation of coal ash as a hazardous waste, which would require a permit from the EPA based on federally enforceable standards.

Instead, Senators Brownback and Conrad want coal ash -- a highly toxic mix including massive quantities of heavy metals -- treated like ordinary household garbage. If the EPA regulates coal ash as a non-hazardous waste, we'll continue to have a national patchwork of various (and likely inadequate) coal-ash disposal practices, and the residents of communities impacted by coal-ash disposal will likely have no input into the decision-making process.

This would effectively preserve the status quo that contributed to the TVA Kingston Fossil Plant coal-ash slurry spill last December. Perhaps even more insidiously, it would preserve a structure that allows the slow leaching of contaminants such as arsenic and selenium into the waterways of dozens of communities around the country -- communities that now suffer from higher rates of cancer and other diseases.

We need to act quickly to educate members of the Senate that coal ash is a hazardous substance and should be regulated as such. (It's also a great opportunity to highlight the message that the "coal industry has no shame.") Oddly, Senator Brownback comes from a state that doesn't produce any coal. In fact, Kansas produces natural gas, coal's competitor. But the utility empire has its outposts in Kansas as well, and it was able to persuade Senator Brownback to carry coal's message that, in spite of the disaster at Kingston, coal waste is -- well, simply a more abundant version of table scraps.

Utility muscle was also on display in the Senate Energy Committee when, on a long series of votes, a proposed renewable electricity standard was repeatedly watered down -- to the point where Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman made it clear that he would work to strengthen the bill on the Senate floor. Bingaman had started from a very disappointing target -- 15 percent by 2021 (including up to 4 percent from efficiency, so really only 11percent), which is business as usual or less. And new nuclear power had already been counted against a state's renewable target as a concession to the Republicans. But then Republicans offered a series of weakening amendments to include coal if its carbon is sequestered as renewable and to allow governors to opt out of the target altogether. Even worse amendments were beaten back, this time with help from Senators Dorgan and Brownback.

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