TVA Announces Old Coal Retirements

Last Friday the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced a new vision for its energy portfolio at their August Board meeting. (We will be blogging on this in more detail soon.)
TVA CEO Tom Kilgore expressed the hope that TVA will become “one of the nation’s leading providers of low-cost and cleaner energy by 2020″. One of [...]

Dysfunctional politics continues to stall confirmation of TVA Board nominees

Nearly a year after President Obama nominated four people to fill vacant seats on TVA’s Board of Directors, and 6 months after the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works unanimously approved the nominations, it seems backdoor politics and partisan bickering are keeping the Board nominees from final confirmation by the Senate.
We see no reason [...]

Gulf Gusher Tentatively Plugged, Residents Left With Oily Sludge and Distrust

BP and government officials state that the “static kill” procedure used to stop oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico for over 3 months is a tentative success as of Friday, August 6th.  On Aug. 5th, crews pumped cement down into the blown-out well in hopes of securing a permanent seal.  This seal, however, is [...]

Clean Energy Gulf Challenge FINALIST Webinar Series begins today July 6th - 8th

The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy’s (SACE) “Clean Energy Gulf Challenge” Finalist Webinar Series begins today.  SACE, along with a panel of expert reviewers, have chosen three Clean Energy Gulf Challenge finalists to present their ideas to the public via lunchtime webinars on July 6th, 7th and 8th.   Beginning on July [...]

The Saddest Thing: First-hand Encounter of Oil on Florida and Alabama Beaches

On Monday, June 28, I walked the once pristine beaches of Perdido Key, Florida and was sickened by what I saw. Until recently, these beaches were arguably the whitest sugar-sand beaches in the world. I’ve spent time in this area during nearly every year of my life and never thought I would see this [...]

Join Hands Across the Sand this Saturday

On summer weekends visitors and residents alike head to beaches across our region to surf, fish, swim and play. One hard reality of the still-ongoing Gulf oil disaster is that at least 100 miles of Gulf coastline cannot welcome people or animals due to the oil and tar balls that continue to wash up [...]

Field Update from the Front Lines of the Oil Disaster

Guest blog by Linda Young, Director of the Clean Water Network of Florida
As I sit here typing, wave after wave of oil is washing ashore in Orange Beach, AL and there is not one skimmer boat in sight. Senator Bill Nelson (FL) has said that the Coast Guard command and control operations are not [...]

The Gulf Oil Disaster, Vulnerable Communities and Energy Policy

This post was co-authored by Seandra Rawls and Marcus Strong, Clean Energy Policy intern for the summer of 2010.
The sinking of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the uncontrollable oil leak that resulted is already being called the nation’s worst environmental disaster. For a region already battling poverty and still recovering  from Hurricane Katrina, [...]

Turning Anger Into Action - Personal Actions In Response to Gulf Disaster

Last week, Jen Rennicks offered a blog for our readers about taking political actions to stop future offshore oil drilling as a response to our nation’s largest, most horrific environmental disaster of all time.  But let’s take this a little further - where it can really hit home - to you - to me, to [...]

Deja vu all over again - 31 years later

“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” - Edmund Burke (1729-1797), statesmen, writer and philosopher
In the past month, commentators and especially offshore-drilling proponents have used the word ‘unprecedented’ when trying to do damage control for the still-unfolding tragedy in the wake of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. How soon we [...]