SELC in the News

A sampling of the most recent articles and op-eds featuring SELC:

The dirty truth about clean coal
June 19, 2008
Business Week

Get ready for the selling of "clean coal." A $40 million industry-sponsored marketing and lobbying campaign has launched, with one national television spot featuring a farmer, a teacher, and a woman in a white lab coat declaring: "I believe"—while a voiceover describes how coal can be burned in an environmentally friendly manner.

Nashville ranks among nation's worst carbon emitters
May 29, 2008
Tennessean

Tennessee's four largest cities rank among the worst of the nation's carbon emitters, largely because of urban sprawl, cheap electricity and a major dependency on autos for transportation, according to a report released today from the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank in Washington.

Sprawling southeast counteracts efforts to reduce air pollution
May 5, 2008
Tennessean

Officials in the Northeast and West are rethinking the way their communities grow and operate, all with an eye toward reducing greenhouse-gas emissions... Yet even as these regions are working aggressively to soften their carbon footprint, the proliferation of exurbs in the Southeast is worsening the problem.

State, local efforts needed to make goals
April 7, 2008
Tennessean - Op-ed by SELC's Trip Pollard

The Environmental Protection Agency took a modest step forward this month in meeting its obligation to protect public health — it lowered the amount of ozone, a harmful pollutant, allowed in our air. By a fraction. The EPA ignored the unanimous recommendation of its own panel of scientists and health advisers that a lower, more protective standard is needed.

Growth, poor management strain water resources
February 27, 2008
Tennessean - Op-ed by SELC's Rick Parrish (1 page; pdf)
It jumps out at you immediately — the dark-red blob stretching across five Southern states, including Tennessee, on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's "Drought Monitor" map. The agency's color-coded index indicates that much of the area still is in extreme or exceptional drought.

Attorney fights power plant proposal
February 21, 2008
NBC29
A proposed power plant in southwest Virginia is igniting controversy. Dominion wants to build a $1.8 billion coal-fired facility, as the demand for electricity grows. But it's what that plant will burn that has so many people angry. Cale Jaffe wants the clean mountain air to stay that way. An attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville, Jaffe is part of team battling energy giant Dominion Virginia Power on their quest to build a new coal fired power plant in Wise County.

1 percent may alter plans for (Wise Co.) coal plant
February 8, 2008
Richmond Times-Disptch
The fate of a proposed coal-burning power plant in Wise County could hinge on whether state regulators allow Dominion Virginia Power 2 percent in extra profit for building it. If the utility is not granted the extra profit, it would have to assess what its next move might be, Virginia Power Vice President Paul Hilton said at a State Corporation Commission hearing this week.

Georgia loses federal case in a dispute about water
February 6, 2008
New York Times
ATLANTA — Georgia lost a major court fight in the Southern battle over water rights on Tuesday when a federal appellate-court panel said the state could not withdraw as much water as it had planned from an Atlanta-area reservoir.

Navy ditches Plan A for landing field site
January 23, 2008
News & Observer
The U.S. Navy is dropping plans to build a jetway for aircraft pilots to practice landings in Washington County, focusing instead on two potential sites in northeastern North Carolina and three in Virginia.

 

Environmental groups critical of new power plant
January 23, 2008
Post & Courier
Santee Cooper's proposed $1 billion coal-fired power plant in the Pee Dee would violate pollution laws by releasing poisonous mercury in an area that already has a serious contamination problem, two environmental groups said in extensive comments submitted to state health officials Tuesday.