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Environmental group prepares to get up and running
The Advocate
The Students for Environmental Justice Club met Wednesday and heard speakers from the Sierra Club make a presentation about the negative impacts of burning coal for energy in Oregon.
Tyler Bristow, a second-year student at MHCC, organized the club after spending the summer with Greenpeace learning about grassroots organizing. “Over the summer I took a three-month training program with Greenpeace where I learned about grassroots organizing, traveled up and down the East Coast,” said Bristow. “It was all about getting grassroots training.”
When Bristow got back to MHCC, he put his new skills to work organizing the Students For Environmental Justice club. “When I came back to campus I started a club to utilize the training and spread the word about global warming and all the other increasingly drastic environmental changes that are going on,” said Bristow. “I don’t know the exact time I got interested in (the environment), but it goes back a long time. It was really this summer when I started becoming an activist and acting on some of the things I was thinking about instead of just sitting on my butt.”
Robin Everett, associate regional representative for the Sierra Club - Oregon Chapter, made a powerpoint presentation and lectured about the negative impacts of burning coal for energy in Oregon.
“Something that a lot of people don’t know is that Oregon is heavily reliant on coal for its electricity use. We get 41 percent of our energy from coal. Most people that I talk to say: ‘Aha! I thought it was all water. Don’t we get everything from water here?’ And that’s just not the case,” said Everett.
Everett went on to say that most of the energy Oregon gets from coal comes from the Boardman coal plant in Eastern Oregon, the only coal-fired power plant in Oregon.
“It releases five million tons of carbon dioxide every single year. Its our largest stationary source of C02 in the state” said Everett. “Oregon has a lot of C02 goals – it could meet most of them just by shutting down that one plant.”
According to Everett, PGE has plans to keep running the Boardman coal plant until 2040. “We think that is highly, highly bad, for lack of a better term,” said Everett.
C02 emissions are not the only impact that coal burning has on the environment. “A lot of people say that: ‘Coal is cheap. We’ve got to keep burning coal ‘because coal is cheap.’ But there are a lot of costs that come along with coal that don’t get factored into our utility rates,” said Everett. “And one of them is mining.”
Oregon gets most of its coal via a form of surface mining called “strip-mining,” a process that involves removing massive swaths of land to get at coal deposits located just beneath the surface of the Earth.
The practice includes using explosives and earth-moving machines to remove long strips of overlying rock and soil and then extracting and refining the coal for use at power plants. Oregon’s coal comes from strip-mines in Wyoming and Montana, according to Everett. “Mining is highly destructive to the environment,” said Everett.
“We’ve also heard a lot in recent months about mountain-top removal mining – which is horrible – they (coal companies) are just blowing off the tops of mountains and dumping them into the streams,” said Everett.
Everett went on to speak about the myth of “clean” coal.
“Its simply not true,” said Everett. “We don’t have the technology to sequester carbon. There’s not a single plant that’s operating right now with carbon sequestration. PGE, and their latest 20-year plan – they don’t even have it – in 20 years, they don’t even expect it to be around. While the (coal) industry is promoting this falsehood, we’re not doing anything. We are wasting time.”
Students For Environmental Justice will be holding a screening of “The Age Of Stupid” Oct. 22, though an exact time and place has not yet been set.
For more information on Students For Environmental Justice, contact Tyler Bristow at tylerbristow@hotmail.com or by calling 503-729-1863.
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