Category: Environment
The following editorial on Nebraska's central role in coal rail transportation appeared in the Monday July 12 Omaha World-Herald. Signed by UNO Professor and Nebraska Report columnist Bruce Johansen, the op-ed was the creation of the newly formed "350.org -- Nebraska" coalition, of which Nebraskans for Peace is a charter member. The article is republished with permission by the Omaha World-Herald.
Bruce E. Johansen
The writer is a professor in the School of Communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is author of “The Encyclopedia of Global Warming Science and Technology.”
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NFP
TransCanada is one of North America’s largest providers of gas storage and pipeline services. It also owns, controls or is developing approximately 11,700 megawatts of power generation. TransCanada’s 30-inch Keystone Pipeline is presently under construction and will extend 2,151 miles to transport crude oil from the tar sand mines near Hardisty, Alberta to Cushing, OK and southern Illinois. It is shown as the solid line in the map below and crosses Nebraska from the crossing of the Missouri River near Crofton south to the Kansas border near Fairbury.
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OMAHA WORLD-HERALD
FRIDAY, JUNE 18, 2010
BY JOE RUFF
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
Approximately 50 people demonstrated at Union Pacific Corp’s headquarters at 14th and Douglas Streets on Thursday to spotlight coal’s role in global warming. Union Pacific gets more than 20 percent of its revenue from transporting coal to power plants on its trains.
Nebraskans for Peace and several other groups invited environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben to speak at the demonstration.
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Internationally renowned global warming activist and writer Bill McKibben (visit Democracy Now! for a recent interview) will lead a protest over the use of coal energy Thursday morning June 17 in downtown Omaha. The 11:00 a.m. protest will be held in front of the Union Pacific’s corporate headquarters at 14th and Douglas Streets to spotlight Nebraska’s leading role in the transport of this dirty and deadly energy.
Author of the first book to address the global warming threat, The End of Nature (1989), McKibben has been sounding the alarm about fossil fuels and carbon emissions for over two decades. He is the founder of 350.org, the worldwide campaign to cap carbon dioxide particles in the atmosphere at 350 parts per million. The 350.org website features a host of internationally acclaimed “350 Messengers” warning of the precarious spike in greenhouse gas emissions, including NASA climatologist James Hansen, U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chair Rajendra Pachauri (who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore) and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
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Well over half of the electricity generated by Nebraska’s public power system comes from coal. Although coal is far and away the dirtiest fossil fuel, the state’s public power generators have insisted on using coal transported by rail from Wyoming’s Powder Basin (rather than developing our own clean, native renewable resources) because the energy cost of coal was purportedly so cheap.
As the following article by UNL Economics Professor Hank van den Berg documents, however, those cheaper costs are illusory. Once the full costs associated with burning coal are calculated in, the price of this toxic fuel becomes economically prohibitive. Plus, coal produces exorbitant levels of greenhouse gases, which the Pentagon itself now openly states are contributing to global warming. The Pentagon’s 2010 “Quadrennial Defense Review” warns that climate change is already exacerbating international instability and conflict—and the more the climate warms, the more war there will be.
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