Reggie James, ED of the Lone Star chapter of the Sierra Club spoke at the Crowley Theater last Tuesday night in Marfa. James suggested that the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign that closed or phased out 240 coal plants in the country between 2009 and 2013 saved Americans 100 billion dollars in health costs. He said the legal strategy simple used laws already in place, primarily the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts of the Nixon administration. The coal companies could not meet the pollution standards. US electricity generated by coal dropped from 50% in 2005 to less than 1/3 in 2012. James went on to say that fossils fuels, primarily gas and oil will likely die out in the next 30 years with the present level of subsidies and exclusions from environmental regulations. “Without the subsides and artificial support,” he said, “I would think fossil fuels dies 10 years earlier.” James said that renewable energy is already cheaper pointing out that 2/3 of all new electrical capacity installed in 2015 was wind or solar.
Coal Extractors in the Powder River Basin, a strip of land running through Montana and Wyoming that produces 40% of America's coal, were stunned last month when US District Court Judge Brian Morris ruled that the Bureau of Land Management officials must plan reductions in coal mining. Environmentalists who were pushing for complete closure of coal mining were cautiously optimistic. Mike Scott of the Sierra Club Montana said in a press release, “For decades, the federal government has kept their head in the sand over the climate impacts of fossil fuel extraction on public land. This ruling is the latest example of courts forcing the federal government to be honest with the American public about how coal, and oil and gas leasing is contributing to the growing impacts of climate change.”
The
Dos Republicas coal mine near Eagle Pass Texas continues to export
low quality lignite coal to the Mexican Electricity company known as
CFE. The coal is burned at
Carbon
1 and Carbon 2, in Piedras Negras 10 miles from the Texas border, 20
miles from the Texas mine sight. The plant is the largest coal fired electricity plant in Central America. They are not fitted with
anti-pollution scrubbers. According to the Bravo Study of 2004,
Carbon 1 and Carbon 2, are the primary source of air pollution in the
Big Bend region. National Parks Service stated that air quality in
the BBNP is consistently the worst of all national parks.
