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Clean energy battle in Kentucky: Tilting at windmills?
Posted on January 24, 2012 by James Bruggers
A Kentucky environmental organization has compiled a long list of the damaging impacts of coal on people and the environment, with the hope it might win over Kentucky lawmakers to pass a renewable energy portfolio standard.
But there are no “illusions, or delusions” that may happen anytime soon, acknowledged Mary Lou Marzian, the Louisville Democrat who has sponsored House Bill 167, also called the Clean Energy Opportunity Act, for the second year in a row.
“We are in the education stage with this piece of legislation,” she said today. “We understand … that this is a coal state. We want to be sensitive to those (coal) jobs.”
She acknowledged it may take several years for the bill to become law but is hopeful it will be discussed in a committee hearing this session as it was last year.
The report’s “primary finding is that there were negative health effects associated with the entire life cycle of coal,” from its mining to the handling of coal-burning wastes, said Deborah Payne, Kentucky Environmental Foundation Health Director and co-author of the report. |
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“We have the potential to generate much more from solar, wind and hydro,” said Elizabeth Crowe, executive director
of the environmental foundation. “These sources produce no health-damaging pollution.”
Kathy Little, a Louisville resident who has been fighting with her neighbors against the Cane Run power plant ash
landfill, also spoke at a telephone press conference.
“I live adjacent to the LG&E Cane Run power plant,” she said. “Anyone who says fly ash is not hazardous has not
lived in close proximity to a coal ash landfill. It’s a gritty substance. It smells and tastes of sulfur.”
The worst part is knowing she can not do all she wants to do to protect her young granddaughter from exposure, she
said.
Dr. Matthew Sleeth, a Kentucky resident and evangelical Christian author, said, “The first instruction that God gave
Adam was to protect the Garden,” referring to the Garden of Eden. The current way we get and burn coal hardly meets
that challenge, he said.
Late last year, I spoke with both Rocky Adkins, the House Majority Floor Leader, and Jim Gooch, who chairs the
House Natural Resources Committee. Gooch, whose family has a financial stake in the coal industry, said he’d
never go any sort of bill that would “mandate” the sources of the state’s electricity. Adkins, who also has deep roots
with the coal industry, had two years ago proposed something of an alternative energy standard that would have
been coal-friendly, while also helping to boost renewables. It didn’t go anywhere. Adkins said he didn’t think he’d
bring that back this year.
Recall, also, that Gov. Beshear, before he became famous for telling the EPA to “get off our backs” — meaning the
coal industry — had advocated some sort of renewable portfolio standard, too.
So who knows?
I’ve personally thought that the only way Kentucky would adopt such a law is if the federal government seriously
moved on global warming legislation and in essence forced the state to do so. That now seems dead for quite a
while.