Lamar Alexander Destroys The Landscape

Paging Sen. Lamar Alexander! Yes, I’m talking to you, buddy. You’re shameless, you know that?

Your pitiful performance at yesterday’s TVA ash spill hearings are made all the worse when one remembers your previous jihad against wind power because you thought turbines "destroy the landscape.” Of course, it’s hard not to remember that and immediately think of your opposition to the CapeWind project on Nantucket Sound that would have interfered with the view from your $800,000 Cape Cod land.

You wanna talk about destroying the landscape? Check this out:



The first one is how they get the coal, by removing the tops of mountains.

And here’s a coal sludge pond on a good day, you know, a day where it hasn’t busted its dike and flooded a community. Do you like that landscape Sen. Alexander? Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.

As guess as far as those hearings yesterday goes, Alexander forgot what the word “oversight” means, because that’s what they were supposed to be about. Instead we got questions from the Senator on the cost per kilowatt hour to generate electricity, comparing coal to other means such as hydro, solar and, ooopsie daisy, wind. Guess who came out on the top end of that cost analysis? Of course, that doesn’t include the $100 million+ clean-up costs associated with an accident at just one coal fired plant. And even TVA CEO Tom Kilgore admitted that those costs are for older coal-fired plants, not new ones.

Look, I’m not a big proponent of wind power per se. I’m more of a solar girl, truth be told. But I’ve seen wind farms out West and I don’t find them especially ugly; they can be quite beautiful in a hi-tech sort of way. Not everyone has the same taste, I get that. But if you’re going to oppose a form of alternative energy, doing it on aesthetic grounds is pretty moronic when the one you’re touting is probably the ugliest blight on a landscape one could imagine, from start to finish. And let’s face it, Alexander’s economic argument just doesn’t hold water.

I’ve long believed that Lamar Alexander is one of those people who is riding a “moderate” image that is completely undeserved. He talks the talk but when push comes to shove he doesn’t walk the walk.

Here’s a brief look at his record on energy:

• Voted NO on tax incentives for energy production and conservation. (Jun 2008)
• Voted YES on removing oil & gas exploration subsidies. (Jun 2007)
• Voted YES on making oil-producing and exporting cartels illegal. (Jun 2007)
• Voted NO on factoring global warming into federal project planning. (May 2007)
• Voted NO on disallowing an oil leasing program in Alaska's ANWR. (Nov 2005)
• Voted NO on $3.1B for emergency oil assistance for hurricane-hit areas. (Oct 2005)
• Voted NO on reducing oil usage by 40% by 2025 (instead of 5%). (Jun 2005)
• Voted NO on banning drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (Mar 2005)
• Voted YES on Bush Administration Energy Policy. (Jul 2003)
• Voted NO on targeting 100,000 hydrogen-powered vehicles by 2010. (Jun 2003)
• Voted NO on removing consideration of drilling ANWR from budget bill. (Mar 2003)
• Keep efficient air conditioner rule to conserve energy. (Mar 2004)
• Rated 0% by the CAF, indicating opposition to energy independence. (Dec 2006)
• Open the Outer Continental Shelf for oil & gas leasing. (Jun 2008)
• Establish energy security strategy with domestic production. (Jul 2008)

And now we’re stuck with him for another six years.

Human: 1; Feline: 2

So, yesterday while live-blogging the TVA hearings one of the cats started acting up, picking fights with another cat, making a lot of noise and basically being a giant pest. So I picked him up and threw him outside.

He was not pleased.

First he climbed up on the roof above my office and proceeded to howl at the top of his lungs, “poor pitiful me I’m stuuuuck heeeeeelp me.” Being the superior species with the giant brain and the wiggly-waggly thumbs I see this for what it is: a blatant attempt to make the human do ridiculous things like struggle with a ladder or try to climb a tree. I’ve been here before. I’m not a sucker. So I told him to knock if off, get off the roof on his own, or stay outside and freeze his tail off. He glared at me in defiance.

I went to lunch, and when I came back he was still on the roof. When he howled some more, I ignored him. About 20 minutes later he was at the door asking to be let in.

Success! I win! Ha ha you furry devil, I say. Just try to beat my superior intellect, sucka!

Alas, my celebration was premature. Cat promptly gorged himself on food, then vomited it all over my router. Okay, I said, we’re even. Let’s call it a draw, kiss and make up, eh?

No can do, human, was his response. And then he took a giant whizz all over the dog bed.

The problem is that I had forgotten the secret weapon in every feline arsenal. Oh, the humanity.

Which just goes to show, in the battle of Human vs. Feline, Feline always always always wins.

Macy’s To Close Nashville Store

More signs of the times:

Macy's will shutter 11 stores in 9 states

Macy's will close 11 underperforming stores in 9 states; Dec. same-store sales fall 4 percent

NEW YORK (AP) -- Department-store operator Macy's Inc. said Thursday it will close 11 underperforming stores in nine states -- affecting 960 employees -- and lowered its forecast for the fourth quarter after one of the weakest holiday seasons in years.

Stores slated to close include locations in Los Angeles, West Palm Beach, Fla., Nashville, Tenn., and St. Louis, among others. Cincinnati-based Macy's Inc. says the closures will cost about $65 million, most of which will be booked in the 2008 fourth quarter.

That totally sucks. Lots of retail jobs will be lost. The story doesn't say which Nashville store will close ... losing the one at the Green Hills Mall would leave a huge, obvious hole in a supposedly upscale mall.

The good news:

Clearance sales at the stores begin next week.

Silver linings, peeps.

Lamar Alexander: Wanker Du Jour

It was really nice of Sen. Alexander to spend his time at these TVA hearings boosting the TVA board he helped create and touting the cost-effectiveness and other wonderful properties of “clean coal.”

No questions to Kilgore at all about how this is going to increase our utility bills. No questions about whether Mr. Kilgore might want to forego his million-dollar “incentive” bonus.

I guess Lamar has forgotten who he represents in the Senate. It sure isn’t us.

LiveBlogging TVA Hearings

Stephen Smith, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, is now giving his opening remarks.

Smith makes a great point that TVA and the community really dodged a bullet. If the sludge pond dam had broken during the summer when the area was filled with outdoor recreationists, hundreds of lives could have been lost.

“It’s outrageous that landfills that hold our household garbage are more tightly regulated” than toxic sludge ponds. Smith calls for the orderly phase-out of wet sludge ponds.

Smith basically tells Sen. Inhofe to stuff it. I missed that part of the hearing but I assume Inhofe alleged all sorts of conflicts of interest by Smith since his group is considering a lawsuit. I wonder if Inhofe cared to mention the $157,300 in coal lobby monies he received in the last Congress alone?

I'm guessing ... not.

[UPDATE 1]:

William "Howie" Rose, Director of Emergency Management Services for Roane County, is now speaking. Rose is pointing out several flaws in TVA's emergency response plan that appear to be unique to the Kingston coal plant. He says that TVA does not utilize the same national incident management system that other emergency management agencies do, the Kingston plant does not use the same emergency perparedness program as is used at TVA's nuclear and hydro plants, and TVA also did not conduct and make available to the local community a risk assessment analysis at the plant which would have helped with emergency response.

[UPDATE 2]:

Smith is pointing out that we still don’t really know what’s in the “muck,” it’s 60 years worth of coal ash waste that flooded the surrounding community.

Sen. Boxer: We cannot forget: all of the stuff that is in this muck is so dangerous that we passed laws to get it out of our air. And now it’s in our water.

[UPDATE 3]:

Sen. Alexander: "This is a real environmental tragedy, period. But I don’t want to obscure some of the things that TVA has been doing lately that I applaud. ..."

Way to throw the softballs, Sen. Alexander! No one could have predicted that. Oh, wait. Never mind.

[UPDATE 4]:

Interesting information from Sen. Jeff Merkley, (D-ORE): The dike’s containment walls were made of ash, not clay, and trees were removed that weakened the dam.

Now Sen. Carper of Delaware is asking the witnesses to introduce any family members they may have attending the hearings. Someone give me a brick so I can bash my head in with it. What an idiotic time-waster.

Now he's quoting a Roberta Flack song. Carper is the chairman of the subcommittee that has oversight over TVA. Count me completely unimpressed. What a lightweight.

[UPDATE 5]:

Hearing is adjourned. What have we learned children? Sens. Alexander and Carper {heart} TVA. Alexander is also trying to salvage the "clean coal" slogan as it rapidly gets washed down the toilet. Barbara Boxer is concerned about children and coves. Inhofe is still an ass. The only one who impressed me was Jeff Merkley of Oregon and he's the new kid on the block.

Folks, we're screwed.

Live Streaming Senate TVA Hearings Now

C-SPAN isn't covering it but you can catch live-streaming of the hearings at WATE.com.

UPDATE: Also available on the Senate Environment & Public Works website here.

UPDATE: Okay not there. Now I'm getting a prompt that the page is down for maintenance. If I had a tinfoil hat I'd be wearing it now. Boy it sure is hard for people in Tennessee to watch these hearings. I wonder why that is?

[UPDATE] 1:

My connection sucks but sounds like Lamar Alexander just said we need a series of "mini Manhattan projects" to figure out how we can safely use coal. Throws out recapturing carbon -- Um, Senator, that's what a billion gallons of just flowed into the Emory River. The question is what do we do with it when we recapture it? It's filled with arsenic, mercury, and other poisons, and it's believed to be even more radioactive than nuclear waste.

Last night I talked with a TWRA biologist who told me they are actually selling this stuff for use with gypsum to make drywall. Drywall! Made out of radioactive toxic chemicals!! Doan want!!!!!!

[UPDATE] 2:

Well it appears if you want to watch these hearings you need to take a fucking plane to Washington DC because it appears the live stream has been yanked. Thank you, everyone, for continuing to keep us ignorant and uninformed. Hey we're just a bunch of hillbillies, who cares, right?

I think I'll go kick something now.

OK maybe it was just me .... sigh .... I really miss public access television.

[UPDATE] 3:

Lamar Alexander is questioning Tom Kilgore on the cost to produce electricity, "in the spirit of turning this from an environgmental disaster into a longterm technological opportunity." He asks what it cost per kilowatt-hour to generate electricity, including the costs of building the plants.

Kilgore's answer:

coal -- 4.5 to 5-cents per kwh, for older plants.
nuclear -- 4.2 cents
natural gas -- 10 cents
hydro -- a few dollars
solar -- they don't have a figure as they buy it from other folks
wind -- 70 cents

Now Senator Alexander is asking Kilgore if "clean coal" is possible. Of course his answer is yes. I think Sen. Alexander has an agenda here but that's just me.

[UPDATE] 4:

Sen. Barbara Boxer: You have big problems. You’ve got to clean up your act there. Literally!

What about the coves? The homeowners say you have no plans to restore the water in the coves, you just plan to cover it up. Is that what you consider a clean-up for those homeowners?

Kilgore: No, that’s not a cleanup, to be blunt. There are two coves, one had deeper water than the other. I was asked if we would make that back into an embayment. I said until we could study that I couldn’t answer that directly. I didn’t want to make a promise until I know what the best options are for the environment and the neighbors.

Boxer: But my point is, at this time you have no plans to restore those coves?

Kilgore: But we don’t not have a plan, madam chairman.

Boxer: That’s not an answer! I don’t think you’d send your grandkids out to play in an area like that.

[UPDATE] 5:

Sen. Carper (D-DEL) is now throwing softballs at Kilgore. i.e., “Let’s look at best practices in the industry for dealing with fly ash. What are things you are doing that’s cutting edge and what are others doing?”

Apropos of nothing, FollowTheCoalMoney.org says Big Coal contributed $35,000 to Carper, most of it in 2005-2006.

I don’t understand why Senators are asking about scrubbing emmissions from smoke stacks. There is still waste. This is the crap that ended up in a sludge pond that broke and polluted a huge area. Do they not get it?

TVA Gives Customers The Middle Finger

Here’s a headline that was entirely predictable, and utterly despicable:

Costs of TVA sludge spill to show on electric bills

RATEPAYERS ARE ON THE HOOK FOR CLEANUP OF TOXIC ASH SITE

TVA's ratepayers will be saddled with the cost to clean up a massive coal ash slide at an East Tennessee power plant, the agency's chairman said.

The tab, likely to be tens of millions of dollars or more, will include the cost of extra workers, overtime pay, heavy machinery, and housing and supplies for families chased from their homes, along with the lawsuits that have begun to pile up.

"This is going to get into rates sooner or later," Tennessee Valley Authority Chairman Bill Sansom told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "We haven't even thought about going to Washington for it."

First of all, “tens of millions” is wildly conservative. Steve Smith of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy puts it more like $100 million, not including costs for things like lawsuits. Last night I spent the evening with a TWRA biologist who has been working on monitoring the site, and he estimated the cost to be more like $150 million.

But second of all: WTF?

Just a week ago we learned of the multi-million dollar bonuses TVA executives received:

According to federal documents, the CEO of TVA, Tom Kilgore, makes $655,000 a year. In addition to his salary, he received an incentive bonus of more than $1 million for 2008, bringing his total income to $2.4 million.

TVA's chief financial officer, Kimberly Green, earned a salary of $503,000 in 2008 and received a bonus of $493,000, which made for an income of $1.3 million.

William McCollum, the chief operating officer, earned $726,000, with a $751,000 bonus, for a total of $1.8 million.

Incentive bonus? Incentive for what--destroying people's lives? Destroying wildlife and water and soil?

Why are we rewarding these people with bonuses when they just destroyed a rather large area of East Tennessee? No way, no how. I want those bonuses back. You don’t get rewarded for causing the largest environmental disaster since the ExxonValdez spill.

TVA managers decided to cut corners on overdue repairs to their leaky coal ash sludge pond, going the el-cheapo spit-and-a-prayer route. The most expensive route would have been a $25 million “global fix” but that was deemed too expensive. And now we’re looking at “tens of millions of dollars”--try more like $100 million-plus--that utility customers have to pay to make up for their mistake. While TVA executives take in big bonuses for not doing their jobs.

Thanks a lot, TVA. Love you back, lots. Please, someone tell me how can I get off the grid, pronto.

And Now A Word From Our Sponsor

Obama’s Surgeon General pick Dr. Sanjay Gupta has been a veritable fountain of bad advice during his tenure at CNN. But the only time I ever blogged about him was to question his recommendation that financially-strapped viewers cut their prescription pills in half.

At which point an astute reader pointed me to this article outlining Gupta’s financial ties to Merck. Apparently during the time Gupta was on CNN promoting Merck’s HPV vaccine Gardasil and dismissing the dangers of Merck’s Vioxx pills, he was co-hosting an integrated marketing program sponsored by Merck called AccentHealth.

This strikes me as very bad form for a journalist, but of course Gupta is not a journalist, he’s a television personality, and of course he doesn’t know any better. This is the problem with modern broadcast news, which eschews journalists for the so-called “experts” who supposedly know more than any real reporter could.

CNN is the real culprit here for allowing this situation to exist in the first place. This opens the door wide to corporate hegemony, or what the article describes as

the growing tentacles of a corporate agenda that seeks to control every message pertaining to its corporate brands in every venue visited or medium viewed by a consumer.

We are left with questions surrounding Gupta’s judgment and whether his ties to corporations like Merck influenced his news coverage of that company and its products. We’ll never know if Gupta dismissed the risks of heart attack associated with Vioxx out of ignorance or avarice, but we do know Vioxx got yanked off the shelves and Merck settled an avalanche of lawsuits related to the product.

This does not mean to say I am out-and-out against the appointment of Gupta to U.S. Surgeon General. Seems to me that job is mostly about PR and communication, and Gupta has proved himself adept at that. But I do think most of the media snickering over Obama’s pick misses the point. “Judge Judy for the Supreme Court?” Ha ha very funny, Jay Newton-Small. The point is not that Gupta is a television personality who may be appointed to public office--have you nitwits forgotten that Ronald Reagan was a television personality, for crying out loud?

The point is to look at what it means to be a television personality in this day and age. Oftentimes it means being a shill for corporate advertisers. Someone should be looking into this, because I’m not sure we want the U.S. Surgeon General to be on Merck’s payroll.

Just a thought.

Senate To Hold TVA Hearings Tomorrow

The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works will hold hearings on the TVA spill Thursday, January 8, at 10:00 AM EST.

I can’t tell if C-SPAN will broadcast these hearings, since they only post today’s schedule on their website. If you’d like to see these hearings you need to fax their viewer services department at 202-737-6226 (an e-mail doesn’t appear to do the trick).

I urge everyone to take a few minutes and send C-SPAN a fax right away. I just did it and it took me 1 minute. A hand-written note will do.

Aren’t you just dying to see TVA CEO Tom Kilgore fold like a lawnchair under the brutal questioning of Tennessee Republican Senator Lamar Alexander?

Aw, who am I kidding!

But yeah, we need to see these hearings. So fax that letter, pronto. 'kay, thx, bai.

Poison Ponds Everywhere & No One Minding The Store

Thanks, “clean coal”! Apparently the clean coal propagandists and their de-regulating, anti-environmental minions in Washington have left hundreds of potential coal sludge disasters all across the country. Count me not shocked.

Reports the New York Times on today’s front page:

The coal ash pond that ruptured and sent a billion gallons of toxic sludge across 300 acres of East Tennessee last month was only one of more than 1,300 similar dumps across the United States — most of them unregulated and unmonitored — that contain billions more gallons of fly ash and other byproducts of burning coal.

Like the one in Tennessee, most of these dumps, which reach up to 1,500 acres, contain heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium, which are considered by the Environmental Protection Agency to be a threat to water supplies and human health. Yet they are not subject to any federal regulation, which experts say could have prevented the spill, and there is little monitoring of their effects on the surrounding environment.

In fact, coal ash is used throughout the country for construction fill, mine reclamation and other “beneficial uses.” In 2007, according to a coal industry estimate, 50 tons of fly ash even went to agricultural uses, like improving soil’s ability to hold water, despite a 1999 E.P.A. warning about high levels of arsenic. The industry has promoted the reuse of coal combustion products because of the growing amount of them being produced each year — 131 million tons in 2007, up from less than 90 million tons in 1990.

I don’t understand why the EPA keeps issuing all of these warnings about the dangerous toxicity of coal ash, and these warnings are ignored or downplayed in the face of industry and political pressure.

Look, people, this isn’t hard. Facts are facts, science is science. If the science shows dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste is bad for the soil, air and water that people use, then quit doing it. And by all means, don’t peddle this toxic sludge as some kind of new miracle fertilizer. That’s the kind of shit they pull in China.

Now we get to the meat of the matter:

The amount of coal ash has ballooned in part because of increased demand for electricity, but more because air pollution controls have improved. Contaminants and waste products that once spewed through the coal plants’ smokestacks are increasingly captured in the form of solid waste, held in huge piles in 46 states, near cities like Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Tampa, Fla., and on the shores of Lake Erie, Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River.

I’ve said this from day one: “clean coal” is a farce. You can put scrubbers on smokestacks, but that just means the waste comes in a different form. You cannot repeal the laws of thermodynamics. You do not “create” energy, you can only change its form, and when you do that there is always, always, always a waste product. Whether you change that waste product from belching smoke and acid rain to toxic sludge, it’s still a hazard and still needs to be handled carefully.

This is environmental science 101.

Something else that bears remembering is that coal ash is radioactive. I’d love to know why we are spreading this stuff around on agricultural fields and construction sites.

Someone at the EPA needs to be doing their job and digging into this stuff. Clearly the EPA bows too easily to political and industry pressure in general. The Bush years have been the worst as far as gutting the EPA is concerned, but this stuff has gone on in other administrations, too.

We need a huge sea change in this country, one which puts the health and well-being of people over the profits of industry, one which acts like responisble adults not greedy children who think they can eat ice cream and cupcakes and not feel sick afterwards.

It's time to grow up, America.