Climate Recovery Partnership News and Events

Airing the Truth About Coal

 

In August, Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal organizer Whitney Pearson appeared on the Oklahoma News Network, a statewide PBS television affiliate, regarding Oklahoma's lawsuit to block the EPA’s plans to control regional haze, a type of air pollution caused by coal-fired power plants.

Oklahoma’s 14 coal-fired power plants emit millions of tons of harmful air pollutants, which cause health problems and decrease visibility at the Wichita Falls Wildlife Refuge and other Oklahoma landmarks.

Going head-to-head with U.S. Senator James Inhofe in the interview, Pearson explained that "the coal that’s mined in Oklahoma has a high sulfur content, which means it's actually dirtier than coal in other states." Pearson also emphasized health issues, explaining that "the same pollution that creates haze problems is the same pollution that cause health problems like asthma … and that’s something that Oklahomans need to deal with. We have 100,000 Oklahoma children suffering from asthma … [T]hese coal plants are one of the largest sources of pollution that are hazardous to our health."

Check out the interview here (story starts at 17:38).

 

More Big Wins in Virginia

Just days after the city of Alexandria and GenOn announced the retirement of the Potomac River coal plant, Virginia's largest utility, Dominion Resources, said yesterday that it will shutter its Chesapeake Energy Center by 2016, shut down one coal-fired boiler at Yorktown Power Station by 2015, and convert a second coal-fired unit to gas. The Chesapeake Energy Center and the Yorktown Power Station emit tens of thousands of tons of soot annually, triggering asthma attacks and aggravating respiratory ailments among the hundreds of thousands of local residents.

"Today's announcement of the retirement of the Chesapeake and Yorktown plants in another critical win for the residents of Virginia," said Sierra Club's Executive Director Michael Brune. "These two plants are a major source of pollution in coastal Virginia, and the decision by Dominion to responsibly phase them out means kids will have the opportunity to breathe cleaner air. Local activists and everyday Virginians have been working for years to ensure that plants like these get cleaned up or phased out; today they all celebrate this victory."

Coverage of this important news spanned local outlets such as The Daily Press and PilotOnline, and earned national attention in the Houston Chronicle and the energy industry magazine Power Engineering.