San Francisco -- The holidays began with a grim reminder that today's coal industry is anything but clean. The massive (5.4 million cubic yards -- a billion gallons) spill of coal ash at the Kingston Power plant in Tennessee devastated homes, covered hundreds of acres, and threatens rivers, wildlife, and drinking-water sources. And there is plenty of responsibility to share -- a disaster like this doesn't happen without multiple parties behaving irresponsibly -- and they all should have received coal in their stockings. Here's a partial list:

1) The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). This federal government agency, created by Franklin Roosevelt to help the people of the Tennessee Valley, has became a major bad actor based on its careless handling of nuclear power plants (remember Brown's Ferry?) as well as its dirty, polluting, coal-fired power plants (the Sierra Club has repeatedly had to sue the TVA over air pollution) and now its reckless handling of ash and coal waste from those power plants. The waste at Kingston was piled as tall as a six-story building, covered99 acres, and secured in an unlined pond and behind a dike. The TVA knew there were problems and risks at the site but rejected effective measures to stabilize the waste,  apparently because taking remedial action at Kingston would have created pressure to do the same at other ash-storage sites.

2) The Environmental Protection Agency. Faced with widespread public concern that the coal ash might be contaminating rivers, particularly given the very high levels of heavy metals typically found in such waste, the agency promptly moved to sample the water and reassured that public that all was well. The EPA reported that its water-quality samples did find heavy metals in the rivers, but that they were "below concentrations" known to be harmful to humans." The one exception may be arsenic," the agency said in a letter to an affected community. "One sample of river water out of many taken indicated concentrations that are very high and further investigations are in progress."  What the EPA did not tell the public was that the water-quality samples were not taken in the immediate vicinity of the spill but were upstream from the major source and had no bearing whatever on what was happening to the river downstream!

It wasn't until January 1 that Appalachian Voices, an independent watchdog group, was able to release its own water-quality results from immediately downstream of the spill. These results were, unsurprisingly, far more alarming than those from the EPA and TVA. They showed that "concentrations of eight toxic chemicals range from twice to 300 times higher than drinking water limits." The EPA still hasn't released findings of water-quality sampling it must surely have done from locations closer to the actual spill.

So once again we have a cover-up from the federal agency charged with protecting our health.

3) The Clean Coal Carolers, aka the ad agencies that work for the coal industry. These agencies has been running a very well-heeled, and at times very sophisticated, campaign to persuade Americans that yes, indeed, coal is clean. But they seem to have taken leave of their senses this holidays, putting out a website called "The Clean Coal Carolers," which features such nifty lyrics as:

Their timing couldn't have been more ironic.

4) LS Power. A year ago LS Power teamed up with Dynegy to propose six new coal-fired plants. Dynegy watched what was happening to the market and to public attitudes towards coal and, over the holidays, paid LS Power $19 million to get out of the joint venture. Dynegy's stock promptly went UP h by 19 percent, the biggest rise among any of the S&P 500 stocks that day, a rise Bloomberg attributed directly to the company's ridding itself of the coal albatross around its neck. LS Power, apparently a slower learner, announced that it would try to bull its way ahead and build the six plants, even in the face of a massive Sierra Club-organized grassroots campaign against all six plants.

5) The National Mining Association. Faced with a catastrophe, the coal industry simply continued to deny that anything has changed. National Mining Association spokesman Luke Popovich, speaking about the spill, glossed over it: "We ought to be looking at how do we prevent such accidents in the future, but this is not an indictment of clean coal technology or coal utilization." Perhaps Mr. Popovich should read the clean coal carol above -- and I'll be glad to find him some very visible, easy-to-see pollutants near Kingston, Tennessee.

6) Lawyers for Duke Energy. A federal judge has reopened a lawsuit brought by environmentalists against Duke over its practice of modernizing power plants without cleaning up their emissions in violation of the Clean Air Act. The Judge ruled that Duke's lawyers had concealed the fact that a witness who testified on their behalf had secretly been paid $200 and hour, a fact that was not disclosed. In addition to reopening the case, the Court ordered Duke's lawyers to appear in court to explain why they should not have their licenses to practice in federal courts revoked.

So does anyone get sugarplums? Well, Dynegy should, for learning. And so should the people of Appalachia, particularly their citizen groups, like Appalachian Voices, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, and individual landowners, for taking on the coal industry and for bringing the lawsuits that may be necessary to return TVA to its original mission of restoring, not destroying, the environment of the Tennessee Valley.

Washington, D.C. -- The world just got a wonderful winter solstice present: the Energy Information Agency (EIA), the official U.S. government scorekeeper on where our energy sector is headed, has dramatically lowered its "business as usual" projections for how much CO2 the US will emit in 2030. As the Sierra Club has been saying for some time, America is already beginning to move to a lower carbon future.

EIA now estimates that, by comparison with its projections a year ago, we will reduce our 2030 emissions by 9.4%. EIA attributes most of this decline to the fact that they now believe that there will be 100 fewer coal-fired power plants in 2030 than they projected just a year ago -- more than half of the new coal plants they expected a year ago have been stopped already! The Sierra Club's Move Beyond Coal campaign, which has been leading the fight against these facilities, had scored only 85 plants as blocked, but we expect to block far more in 2009. So EIA's estimates here are, perhaps, a bit generous, but only by a few months.

"[This] reflects the behavior of investors and regulators who, in their investment evaluation process, are implicitly (or explicitly) adding a cost to many proposed power plants that employ GHG-intensive technologies. Additions of new coal-fired power plants are significantly reduced from earlier projections."

The remaining reductions in the 2030 projections come from lower emissions from cars (the higher fuel economy standards Congress has passed) and buildings (the energy efficiency provisions of the 2007 energy bill). Again, EIA did not score the savings that will result once the Obama Administration and the Courts allow California and 18 other states to proceed with emission limits on CO2 from vehicles, nor did EIA take into account the recently passed 18-20% improvement in building codes. So here they are. Significantly conservative.

What this shows is that even with George Bush in the White House, providing no leadership, citizen action and pressure at the state, local, and Congressional levels were able to begin moving America away from the catastrophic high carbon pathway it has been on. Just imagine what we ought to set as our goals now that we have a partner in Washington!

Happy holidays, everyone!

Washington, DC -- It's clear that we've got big problems. Economists are now routinely saying that this is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The military analysis of how things are going in Afghanistan is grim. Climate scientists warn that we're running out of time and need to change course radically. In 2008, in addition to the worst economic crisis in seventy years, we experienced the worst energy crisis in thirty, and the worst food crisis in fifty.

Big problems need big responses, and big solutions, and what's really exciting are the number of new, big-solution ideas cropping up. Here's a sampler of four big concepts to whet your appetite -- like any big ideas, these have flaws and inconsistencies, barriers and obstacles -- but we've got to start thinking at the scale of our problems.

I'm not sure which combination of the exciting ideas below will be acted on first -- but our leaders have no excuse for going small, and the President-elect, so far, shows no inclination to do so.

The 2030 Stimulus Plan

Ed Mazria at Architecture 2030 has creatively married a proposal to ease the mortgage crisis with the concept of retrofitting homes for high energy performance and efficiency. Basically, if homeowners invest in energy retrofitting to lower their utility bills, the government will also lower their mortgage interest rate. Lower mortgage payments and utility bills have an obvious immediate benefit to homeowners, and housing prices would rise because buildings would be worth more.

According to its advocates, the 2030 Stimulus Plan would

in just two years,

• create at least 8.445 million new jobs and
• create a new $1.6 trillion renovation market

and in just five years,

• save consumers $142.33 to 200.88 billion,
• reduce CO2 emissions by 481.13 Million Metric Tons,
• reduce energy consumption by 6.17 Quadrillion Btu,
• save 1.83 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and
• save 83.35 million barrels of oil.

Storing Carbon Through Regenerative Agriculture and Biochar

Then there is the idea put forth by the Rodale Institute's Tim LaSalle that if we paid farmers for the additional carbon stored by converting from conventional to regenerative, low-chemical agriculture (which his studies put at more than three tons of CO2/acre),  the agricultural sector could potentially sequester 25 percent of current U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. That would enable us to combine major progress on climate with huge reform of our agricultural sector.  This concept is now being tested in Pennsylvania by Governor Ed Rendell.

This level of sequestration would be greatly enhanced if the newly emerging science of biochar, which suggests that by heating agricultural wastes or other organic material without oxygen we can convert up to half of the short-term carbon created by photosynthesis into long-lived biochar, which when added to the soil dramatically improves water retention and productivity. This could be an enormous, scalable way to increase both incomes and agricultural productivity in the Third World.

REPI -- The Pickens Plan in a Recession

So T. Boone Pickens's plan won't save $700 billion at today's oil prices, and private capital markets right now won't fund his wind turbines. But a public-power-based initiative called REPI, for Renewable Electric Power Power Initiative, could take advantage of surplus transmission capacity in the federal power system and the free borrowing authority of the federal government in today's markets to start supplementing the hydro power from projects like Lake Mead and Fort Peck with essentially free renewables: REPI advocates believe that they could get 20,000 MW of solar and 20,000 MW of wind under construction within two years, putting 180,000 people to work and paying the Treasury back with power sales. And Boone's core point, that natural gas is cleaner and cheaper than gasoline for whatever needs we have in future vehicles, still holds true, even with the collapse in the price of oil.

Whipping Poverty While Solving Global Warming

And finally, take a look at Green for All's Clean Energy Core, which with new funding of only "$3 billion per year over 5 years would be leveraged to underwrite the financing for a $50 billion public revolving loan fund -- with tax exemption, credit guarantees, and the ability to package loans for sale to secondary markets -- to make investments and leverage private money in the national building retrofit effort. The fund would be replenished both by its proceeds from projects approved for direct investment and through its sale of packaged loans via private investors." And this approach would be directly tied to job training and service opportunities to engage the next generation in the clean energy economy.

The good news is that at a time when we are suffering from the economic downturn and job loss, there is no shortage of big solutions that could lift us out of the hole we're in -- and that we've elected a President who's willing to make the leap.