Despite a promising start (Congress allocated $80 billion of the 2009 Recovery Act funding for clean energy & efficiency programs), our country’s work on much-needed energy policy reform has barely begun. The list of pending energy policies is extensive, and the looming midterm elections mean that substantive work at the national level will not resume [...]
The Tennessee Valley is at a critical crossroads for its energy and economic development. Whether our future is one where efficiency and renewable energy drive a strong clean energy economy or one where the Valley continues to struggle with the environmental and economic consequences of traditional energy sources may be decided over the next couple [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 9th, the public [...]
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 day [...]
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 on [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
