Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings today issued a decision to halt construction of Georgia’s first proposed Coal-Fired power plant in twenty years. Judge Thelma Wyatt has charged the Georgia Environmental Protection Division (EPD) with failing to REGULATE CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS from the plant, a decision that will have NATIONWIDE APPLICATION. This is the first time since the April 2, 2007 Supreme Court Decision which required the EPA to regulate Carbon Dioxide Emissions, that the ruling has been applied to emissions from industrial sources like Coal Fired Power Plants.

Students with the Southern Energy Network, community members, and concerned citizens from around the state have been fighting Dyengy’s LongLeaf Proposal in the courts, in shareholder meetings, and in the streets for nearly Seven years.

Yet, today’s ruling is significant far beyond the borders of Georgia, as it puts up yet another economic, political, and beauricratic hurtle for those attempting to develop new Coal-fired power plants in the country. (including the 5 other Coal Plants Dyengy is attempting to build across the country). As one plant falls, we can use these victories to hault the horrors of similar proposals across the country.

Plaintiffs in the Georgia Dynegy case argued that a look into best available control technologies for carbon dioxide were not included when the Longleaf Air Quality permit was issued. Dyengy now has the option of re-completing the air-quality permit application process (which they began 5 1/2 years ago) or appealing the case and risk taking their arguments to the supreme court. The Judge also ruled on several other accounts, including Fine Particulate matter control, that the Georgia Environmental Protection Division was out of compliance with regulations required in writing air quality permits.

Today’s ruling will act as a landmark decision in the fight to transform America’s energy economy away from the dirty grip of our coal affliction and onto a renewable energy and energy efficiency fueled future.

Party Invitations Coming Soon.

Keep Up the Good Fight!

This summer, join people from throughout the southeast and beyond for the second annual Southeast Convergence for Climate Action.

After the resounding success of last year’s convergence we are excited to continue the struggle for climate justice in the southeast with an engaging week of workshops, strategizing, and direct action! This year’s convergence will be hosted in Virginia, where communities are fighting uranium mining, nuclear power, mountaintop removal coal mining, and new (as well as old) coal plants. Once again we will unite to fight the coal industry’s stranglehold on our region while rejecting the deadly nuke industry’s attempt to position themselves as the solution to the climate crisis.

The convergence is a place to strengthen our movement, network with new allies, and take action against dirty energy while working to build a more community-based, sustainable world. Workshops will include: community organizing, direct action 101, debunking false solutions to climate change, blockades, sustainable living systems, media, anti-oppression, disaster response, fighting nukes and coal, and much more. The convergence will culminate in an empowering action to show that the southeast is serious about tackling climate change.

For more information check out: www.climateconvergence.org

Email: risingtide@mountainrebel.net

PO Box 7586, Asheville NC 28802

KNOXVILLE, Tennessee (13 June 200 - Legendary energy advisor S. David Freeman, “The Green Cowboy”, joined professional climate advocates and grassroots community organizers for an evening of discussion and reflection on the future of American energy policy.  Mr. Freeman has fought for renewable energy at the highest level of politics for decades, and his years of experience have recently been brought to bear on an ambitious new policy reader, Winning Our Energy Independence: An Energy Insider Shows How.  Anyone interested in a new direction for US energy policy could gain a wealth of insight from Dave’s historic perspective.

Video from a lunch conversation at Barley’s Taproom in Knoxville will be posted in the next few days.

On March 25, 2008 Duke Energy broke ground and began construction on Cliffside, an 800 MW coal-fired power plant located in Cliffside, NC.

Months prior to this, a team of non-profit grassroots agencies, activists, students, lawyers, grandmothers, and outraged citizens had formed a coalition dedicated to stopping this travesty. We were, and are, committed to stopping Duke Energy’s construction of a coal-fired plant that will release six million tons of CO2 per year and lock us into another fifty years of fossil fuel dependence. This disregard for our precarious climatic state is criminal, and our state and federal legislature is simply not taking the necessary steps to slow imminent climate chaos. Instead, our elected officials are permitting the expansion of the fossil fuel industry and, like NC state representative Tim Moore, spouting nonsense such as:

“Coal may not be the best thing in the world but it’s probably the most efficient that we have.”

How about ACTUAL efficiency and conservation? How about small-scale, localized clean energy? How about addressing the core issues of the problem: the fact that Duke Energy is a utility monopoly, an employer of greenwashing scams, and an enormous detriment to ecological and community health? Maybe we need to come to terms with the fact that cheap energy is over and it’s high time that we drastically reduce our consumption. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have clean water to drink and clean air to breathe than somewhere to charge my ipod/ microwave/cell phone/ tv/ blowdryer/ electric toothbrush/ lava lamp or whatever other crap that we’ve all been convinced is essential to our survival. In any case, another antiquated coal-fired power plant is the last thing we need.

“I think this is a wonderful thing for this area. It’s a wonderful development for this state and most importantly it’s critical to our customers to be able to have affordable, reliable electricity in the future,” said Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers.

Get real, Jim! I don’t think that mercury in our watersheds, filthy air, and climate change are “wonderful developments”. And as for those THIRTY jobs (yes, thirty jobs, that’s it) that the Cliffside plant would bring, well, you can shove those jobs up your multi-million dollar ass. And, as for our “critical” need for the plant, NC WARN, a grassroots organization involved in the fight to stop Cliffside recently published a report stating that the Cliffside expansion will actually create an energy glut in our state, saying:

“Data from SERC, a southeastern utility consortium, show that planned expansions, if completed, could create excess generation capacity of 63,000 megawatts in the next decade, equivalent to 60 large plants. According to the SERC report, ‘This is significantly more than the generation capability needed for reliability/adequacy in the region.’ The agency also confirms that out-of-region sales are already occurring and likely to increase.”

http://www.ncwarn.org/docs/news%20rel/nr-03-17-08IndustryDataProvesNewPlantsNotNecess.htm

Jim Rogers and Duke Energy are building this unnecessary plant in North Carolina, putting the cost of it’s construction on North Carolina ratepayers, using massive amounts of water from North Carolina watersheds, polluting North Carolina rivers, exacerbating the already poor air quality in North Carolina, and then selling the energy to other states for extra corporate profits!

So, we’ve been taking matters into our own hands. We’ve asked questions, locked down, faced arrests and police brutality, held rallies, called our representatives, debunked Jim Roger’s greenwashing scams, filed lawsuits on behalf of our air and water, written editorials, handed out fliers, pulled media stunts, submitted consumer complaints, demanded public hearings, sent letters, and we are not through!

from DemocracyNow.org

Extreme Weather & Global Warming: Floods in Iowa & China, Wildfires in California, Heat Waves on the East Coast, Tornadoes Across the Midwest

Ride for a Sustainable Tennessee

Like bikes? Want to raise money for the TN network of student activists? At the end of the summer, in the first two weeks of August, there is a bike ride through Eastern and Middle Tennessee. The ride is a fundraiser and outreach tool for Tennessee Alumni and Students for Sustainable Campuses (TASSC). This is the most awesome state network of student environmental groups this side of the Mississippi, and this is the perfect opportunity for you to get involved and ride your bike for a week. As we pass through major cities (Nashville, Knoxville, Chattanooga, Johnson City, and more) the riders will meet on a central campus with student activists from the area. My goal is to end the ride critical mass style up to the legislature and lobby for clean energy legislation and alternative forms of transportation. If you are interested in joining the adventure in its entirety, spots are limited. However, we need as many people as possible on bikes for rides through major cities and especially through Nashville. There is the possibility of organizing a one day fundraising ride that can join up with the main group as we ride through, if you are interested. If you have any desire to make Tennessee more sustainable and ride bicycles, email me at sjorda10@utk.edu. This ride could be the best experience of your summer! Yours truly, Sam Jordan

from The Guardian (<<check out the video)

13 June 2008

NORTH YORKSHIRE, England - A team of activists, dubbed “raiders” by The Guardian’s Martin Wainwright, stalled a coal train headed to Drax power station, the largest coal-fired power plant in Britain, last Friday. The activists came equipped with climbing gear, food and water, and a portable toilet for an open-ended siege against Gordon Brown’s pollution-based economy. The strategy began with agents dressed as maintenance flagging down the train using official safety methods with orange vests and caution flags, then a larger team climbing into the traincars stalled over a bridge, making removal by law enforcement high-risk, resource-intensive, and time-consuming.

Media agents on site were dressed as canaries, orange beaks and yellow feather jackets, delivering the action’s message. The messaging linked the action to the recent series of direct action against Britain’s heaviest polluters, including Heathrow Airport at last year’s Climate Convergence. The action coincides with the international movement for climate justice represented by the worldwide Convergences for Climate Action, with this year’s Southeast Convergence falling on August 5 in Louisa County, Virginia.

The National Conference for Media Reform 2008 kicks off this weekend in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with over 3,000 activists, journalists, scholars, and community organizers gathering to make media democracy a key issue in public discourse and the upcoming elections. The conference features many well-known names in American grassroots movements, including Ella Baker Center for Human Rights executive director Van Jones, Ruckus Society executive director Adrienne Maree Brown, and Democracy Now! executive producer Amy Goodman. Videos of the addresses delivered at the conference are available on the website of the Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund, presenters of the conference.

US Media Reform & Mineral Colonialism: Links and Lapses

While the urgency of media reform in United States politics should be self-evident to any organizer, a recurring theme in the discussions is that we are at the perfect moment for a truly profound revolution in communication and information in this country’s history, with the advent of broadband spectrum media and the war over privatization or public-interest communications looming on the horizon. The media-industrial complex of Comcast, AT&T, Bill O’Reilly, and Rupert Murdoch is closing ranks in the ongoing battle for media justice, a framework for this transformation first developed at the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee.

Information technology in the service of social change is a divisive issue among many environmental activists, not only because of the destruction of the natural environment implicit in the development of communications infrastructure, but also because of the perceived isolation and invasion of privacy with which computers, cellphones, and television have become associated. All sides are agreed that the methods of communication employed by a society have a profound impact on the nature of relationships, community, and social change in that society. While the image of a communications infrastructure powered by renewable energy is appealing to ecobloggers like your correspondent, the primitivist strain within our movement brings a valid and justified critique to any high technology system with a negative ecological footprint.

Like public transportation, general hospitals, and sewage systems, mass communications represents a grey area between revolution and reform, between radical change and renewed simple society. Anarcho-primitivists advocating the collapse of industrial civilization see the use of such technologies as a classic example of “anthropocentric” (human-based) organizing that neglects the fundamental habits of society that brought us to the present brink of collapse in the first place. Activists working within a strictly social justice frame see the conservation of the natural environment as an incidental (and therefore expendable) consequence of the change that “really matters” to human beings. Notice that this National Conference on Media Reform features no representation from indigenous communities engaged in resistance to neocolonialism, a struggle that is traditionally aligned with the fights against nuclear imperialism and mineral capitalism more familiar to biocentric activists.

While the opening remarks delivered by Free Press executive director Josh Silver obliquely reference the history of oppression in Peru, the narrative he presents unwittingly reduces the culture to an unqualified stereotype of ethnic violence and gruesome absurdity, while the rainforest and the indigenous community serve as a backdrop to the “transformative moment” of a white, male, middle-class college student. Although “transformative moments” are perhaps necessary for young people raised in the floating castle of white privilege, the politics of representation implicit in the narratives that come out of these moments only reproduce the patterns of injustice and oppression from which they have supposedly been “liberated” if the historical agency and dignity of exploited communities is not adequately addressed. Perhaps more than any other type of organizer, media activists must pay special attention to the identities they portray in the stories they tell, particularly in narratives of personal transformation.

These gaps in the imaginations of organizers from across the contemporary political spectrum are perhaps inevitable, but if we want to build a truly comprehensive movement for a planet comprising deeply sustainable communities, we have to articulate and negotiate these competing interests and focus points. We are dealing with conflicting visions of what sustainability is: do we draw the line at electronic trains, at “smart energy” digital power grids, at surplus agriculture, at basic tool use? At present, there aren’t many First Nations activists fighting media consolidation, and there aren’t many media activists fighting uranium mining. We may all call ourselves allies, seeing the hint of a common thread in anyone who’s ever picked up a picket sign in public space or locked down on private property, but do we really understand how to be allies in ways that cultivate substantial progress across all of our campaigns? A comprehensive vision of all the struggles against exploitation and domination, and an inclusive movement for democracy and sustainability, will require such an unbound breadth of discourse, a pluralistic community of thought and action.

Activists and Experts Gather to Resist the U.S. “Nuclear Relapse”

COLUMBIA, SC — Grassroots organizers from around the country gathered at U.South Carolina-Columbia this weekend to plan a nationwide movement of resistance to the “nuclear relapse” proposed by the United States Government. Activists shared stories of their victories and challenges in their connected campaigns against the nuclear industry, with participants at the summit ranging from students new to the cause and veteran demonstrators imparting the wisdom of decades in the field. The key areas of focus at the summit included bridging the gap between campaigns against nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, synthesizing climate and nuclear issues within an organization’s policy, and comparing the advantages of large-scale programs sponsored by private industry and government to grassroots initiatives organized by concerned citizens.

The National Summit was organized by the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (link), a research and activism network working to bring together and support the full spectrum of campaigns within the anti-nuclear movement. The keynote address was delivered by Dr. Frank von Hippel, speaking on the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, a new initiative by weaponized states to launch a “nuclear renaissance” as a so-called solution to the worldwide climate and energy crisis. The summit concluded with a talk from Dr. Arjun Makhijani who discussed his new book, Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy (link). Dr. Makhijani is an expert advisor to lawmakers, scientists, and energy industry leaders around the world. His message: with the planet in a state of intensive care, we cannot afford to waste what little time we have on the risky and disastrous project of nuclear energy, and must turn our full attention to the application of present technologies in renewable energy and energy efficiency before it is too late. You can download his new book free of charge and subscribe to the journal of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, Science for Democratic Action, at [ieer.org].

The summit featured discussions with activists who focus on every point in the nuclear supply chain, from Defenders of the Black Hills organizing against uranium mining in First Nations territory, to women’s groups and civil society organizations in the Southeast fighting proliferation reprocessing, to activists in the Southwest protesting waste transit and deposit at Yucca Mountain. The highest priorities that emerged during the weekend’s discussion included the upcoming Lieberman-Warner Bill on U.S. climate policy, lobbying Tennessee Governor Phil Bredeson to oppose the import of waste into the Southeast, and mobilizing resistance to the Department of Energy’s new license application to dump tons of radioactive waste into Yucca Mountain. For more information on each of these issues, you can join the NIRS listservice at [http://www.nirs.org/].

Mountain Justice Activists Hold Fourth Annual Gathering

Action Camp equips Appalachian citizens to resist mountaintop removal

Blanton Forest, KENTUCKY - Last week, citizens young and old from coalfield communities across Appalachia flocked by the dozens to historic Harlan County, Kentucky, for the fourth annual Mountain Justice Summer Action Camp. Folks came together to prepare for action, share their stories, and teach each other important skills in the fight against mountaintop removal, all while camping out in Kentucky’s beautiful Blanton Forest. The Action Camp is a full week of events organized each year by a coalition of civil society groups that have been working together across state lines for over four years, each member passionately dedicated to social and environmental justice in the Appalachian region.

2008 marks the first year that coalfield communities in Kentucky played host to the Action Camp, which is held in a different part of Southern Appalachia every summer. This year’s camp clearly showed that the pan-Appalachian movement for Mountain Justice is growing in numbers, growing in support, and growing in vision. People are coming together for a long-term campaign to abolish mountaintop removal and the devastating consequences it has on the land and the people of Appalachia. The community of folks getting involved in Mountain Justice stretches from California to Maine, from Texas to Florida. The attendance at MJS Camp 2008 proved that this grassroots movement has taken root not only in the communities impacted by mountaintop removal but nationally.

Campers from outside Kentucky were made to feel right at home by the local folks. The banjos and ballads were in no short supply at the “No Talent” Show where campers discovered the cultural roots that connect everyone’s histories to the mountains of the region. According to one camper, “I really feel like this neighborhood protected us this week.” The families on the 840 loop in Wallins Creek, Kentucky, can now count themselves among the growing number of communities proud to be known as Mountain Justice folk.