My Letter to Spirit Airlines
Posted On Wednesday, August 06, 2008 at at 9:05 AM by Dan
Dear Madam or Sir:
You may have noticed that I used the past tense throughout the above paragraph. That's because I want to cancel my email subscription and inform you I will not be buying a ticket on Spirit ever...no matter what. The reason is because your support of offshore oil drilling, along with your alleged support of "other plans," offends me. It didn't help that when I went to your website the ad looked like a parody of a National Lampoon movie. Seriously, what does a beautiful woman's ass have to do with national energy policy?
The arguments against offshore oil drilling are pretty well known. The oil won't be processed for something like a decade, the amount of oil in the Gulf of Mexico is enough for only 3 days use, the spills (and count on the fact there will be spills) will have a negative impact on the environment and tourism, etc. As an airline I'm sure you can see how oil-soaked beaches could convince people on planning a mountain vacation. If you want to see what a lack of wetlands can do to a city after a hurricane, check out New Orleans. As an airline that flies to Florida, which has a lot of tourist beaches and hurricanes, you might want to call a meeting and connect some dots.
What was offensive to me about your email was your claim that it will "help keep fares low". That's a bald-faced lie. You have to know that's a lie. Of course, it's totally possible you knew it was a lie and said it anyway. McCain flipped and Obama caved on the issue and both have to know there's no chance gas prices will be affected by their oil company giveaway. On the outside chance that maybe the management of your airline isn't lying and is instead just stupid, check out this pdf by the Sierra Club. It should bring you up to speed.
You have to see I'm faced with a bad set of options now. As I see it, your airline sent out an email with an obvious lie, a clumsy attempt to pander to all sides of the issue, and then topped it off with an Howard Stern-esque ad in the vain hope a cute booty would distract from it all. Or your airline sent out out a claim without doing even basic research, made a clumsy attempt to pander to all sides, and then...yada, yada, yada. Either way I'm not filled with confidence in your ability to take me to 20,000+ feet and back down again on time and in one piece. I'm going to hedge my bets and cut off all ties now. Please cancel my email subscription.
Sincerely,
Dan
Georgia Coal Plant Blocked by Courts
Posted On Tuesday, August 05, 2008 at at 2:09 PM by Dan
Coal War: Georgia Court Halts Construction of New Coal-Fired Plant First-ever thumbs-down by a court based on greenhouse gas as a pollutant
By David Biello Scientific American July 3, 2008
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-war&sc=PR_20080731
A Georgia court this week halted construction of a new 1,200-megawatt coal-fired power plant on the Chattahoochee River, dubbed Longleaf, because backers failed to provide a plan to limit climate change-causing carbon dioxide emissions from it.
"The plant as permitted [by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources] would annually emit large amounts of air pollutants, including eight [million] to nine million tons of carbon dioxide," Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore wrote in her decision. "There was no effort to identify, evaluate or apply available technologies that would control CO2 emissions and the permit contains no CO2 emission limits.. Since CO2 is 'otherwise subject to regulation under the [Clean Air] Act,' a PSD [prevention of significant deterioration] permit cannot issue for Longleaf without CO2 emission limitations."
The decision marks the first time that potential greenhouse gas pollution has been cited as a factor in denying permission to build a new coal-fired power plant; it is also the first that hinges on a Supreme Court ruling issued last year that found the Clean Air Act gives the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the power to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.
Environmentalists applauded the decision, noting that it is another in a recent string of victories in efforts to prevent and even reverse global warming. In the past such plans have been challenged for their emissions of other pollutants, such as acid rain-causing sulfur dioxide or smog-forming nitrogen oxides. But this time, the judge also considered the impact on climate change, says Bruce Nilles of the Sierra Club, which was among green groups that sued to stop construction of the Longleaf coal plant.
"She looked at the argument that we don't have to consider CO2 and called it 'untenable,'" Nilles says.
"There are a whole range of other places where industry is trying to rush to build coal plants," including Indiana, Nevada, South Dakota and Wisconsin, among others.
Dan Riedinger, a spokesman for industry group Edison Electric Institute, says he expects Dynegy-the power company that proposed Longleaf-to appeal the decision.
He notes that the industry does not disagree that greenhouse gas emissions should be regulated but believes this court decision was premature, because there currently are no such regulations on the books.
According to Riedinger, the U.S. needs coal-fired generation because alternatives cannot meet the country's energy demands. "Wind is growing phenomenally but still it's 1 percent of the pie and it's an intermittent source.... New nuclear will not be online for a decade at least and that leaves us with coal and natural gas," he says." [Natural gas] pipeline capacity is already being pushed and it's not like new wells are going to come online tomorrow with the concerns about drilling. There just aren't that many options, so coal has to be a big piece of [electricity generation]."
Coal currently provides roughly 50 percent of U.S.
electricity, but the ruling is part of a larger trend toward rejecting any new coal-fired generators in the U.S., such as similar plants proposed in Kansas and Texas. Environmentalists have successfully argued that coal-fired power plants should not be constructed without greenhouse gas emission safeguards and that the EPA must regulate such emissions.
"It's part of an ongoing series of cases and challenges that are trying to get at whether the EPA not only has authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions but whether" it is obligated to use that authority, says attorney Kyle Danish, director of the climate change practice at the Washington, D.C., law firm Van Ness Feldman. Environmentalists believe that the agency is obligated to use it, but the Bush administration, which has repeatedly clashed with them, disagrees.
"There is a stark contrast between Superior Court in Georgia versus the backflips EPA has done to avoid doing their job," Nilles says. "Today, wind is cheaper than coal and solar is getting closer. You don't need to build any coal right now."
