ACTION ALERT! U.S.,China Sign Death Warrant for Earth, Humanity: 800 Coal Plants To Be Built ASAP!

[Dems Will Win]

If anything ever deserved an ACTION ALERT! it is this new issue. If we try, I know we can stop them. If we don't try, I can guarantee we won't stop them --

from signing the Death Warrant for Planet Earth and the Human Race.

800 Coal Plants to be built immediately! 150 in the US and 650 in China. This tremendous amount of energy and effort could instead be put into conservation and renewable energy (NO NUKES!).

January 17, 2007 · The nation's demand for electricity is growing, and utilities want to build new power plants to satisfy that appetite. Most of those plants — perhaps as many as 150 — would burn coal.

Coal is abundant, but it also produces more carbon dioxide than other fuels. That's the main greenhouse gas that warms the planet. So coal's critics are trying to stop these new plants.

Many of the new coal plants are slated for the Midwest, for utilities such as Westar Energy, which serves about half-a-million customers in Kansas. Westar Vice President Jim Ludwig says the company planned to pick a site for its new coal plant this month, but has postponed the decision.

"When we started the process, an 800 megawatt coal plant cost approximately $1 billion," Ludwig said.

Today, he says, the cost is closer to $1.4 billion, adding "that's a very rapid run-up in the cost of building a new coal plant."

In fact, it's a 40-percent in 18 months. One reason is that everybody — not just in the U.S. but in China and India, too — seems to want a coal plant.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6881347

In the summer of 2006, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission recognized the increasing importance of factoring CO2 regulatory risks in resource decisions, warning that “it is widely believed that the growing need to control carbon emissions . . . will make very expensive in the future” and ordered the state’s largest utility, Xcel Energy, to work with UCS and other environmental advocates in devising an expanded and improved global warming emissions risk analysis. Xcel has already begun examining cleaner alternatives to coal plants by proposing to meet future energy needs with a mix of wind energy and existing hydroelectric dams.

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/fossil_fuels/carbon_risk.html#gambling_with_coal

Here is a link for the Chinese Coal Rush: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/china-rush-coal-power-causes/story.aspx?guid=%7B9B454B92-DFDF-4325-A6C8-18A131271B7E%7D

And this:

A great coal rush is under way across China on a scale not seen anywhere since the 19th century.

Its consequences have been detected half a world away in toxic clouds so big that they can seen from space, drifting across the Pacific to California laden with microscopic particles of chemicals that cause cancer and diseases of the heart and lung.


Nonetheless, the Chinese plan to build no fewer than 500 new coal-fired power stations, adding to some 2,000, most of them unmodernized, that spew smoke, carbon dioxide and sulphur diocide into the atmosphere.


It is the political fallout of that decision that is likely to challenge the foundations on which Britain and other developed nations have built their climate change policy - even as there are signs that ordinary Chinese citizens are at last rebelling against lives spent in poisonous conditions.

Cloaked in swirling mists of soot particles and smoke, cities such as China's "coal capital" of Datong are entering the coldest period of winter in which demand for power and heating produces the worst pollution. It is often darkness at noon in Datong, just 160 miles west of Beijing, where vehicles drive in daytime with their headlights on to grope through the miasma.

One of the four filthiest towns in China, it stands at the heart of the nation's coal belt in Shanxi province, a region that mines more coal every year than Britain, Russia and Germany combined.

Cancer rates are soaring, child health is a time bomb and the population, many of whom are heavy cigarette smokers, are paying the price for China's breakneck rush to riches and industrialization - an estimated 400,000 premature deaths nationwide because of pollution every year.

Now, for the first time, the Chinese media have reported a revolt among the choking citizens of Shanxi. More than 90% of people surveyed by the provincial bureau for environmental protection said economic growth cannot go on at such an appalling cost.

That puts them on a collision course with their rulers - the same survey, reported by the China Youth Daily, found that 90% of mayors and local cadres opposed any moves to protect the environment that might slow the economy.

It is not hard to find the reason why. One mine boss in Shanxi named Zhang owns three Rolls-Royces of different colors plus a fleet of other luxury cars for his extended family, according to the Chongqing Morning Post, a daily newspaper.

"While normal people die of polluted air and water, officials use mineral water to wash their vegetables and even their feet," said Yue Jianguo, an analyst, commenting on the Shanxi survey.

"People can't tolerate the pollution any longer but officials only care about their political achievements of hitting targets for growth. If this policy isn't stopped, China will become a land where there are only graves, no people."

In the provinces of northern China's coal belt, where perpetual fires burn in abandoned coal seams and entire villages occasionally subside into collapsed mineshafts, a clean future seems a distant dream - and the smoky deposits of soot mean that the Rolls-Royces have to be washed every day.

http://freeinternetpress.com/story.php?sid=9853

If you want to help stop the insanity, donate here and JOIN the UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS who are fighting it. Time is short...

http://www.ucsusa.org/ucs/join/

And call your Congressperson and especially Barack Obama's office, as he has wrongly come out for coal to liquid fuel as an energy independence alternative! Fight them on the blogs, fight them in the Capitol building, fight them on the Letters to the Editor page, fight them on the talk shows, FIGHT THEM! 800 Coal Plants MUST not come to pass. Sequestration and clean-burn technology is not even being considered for these coffin nails.

Skinner -- we need something special beyond another group for this, those tend to become preaching to the choir, we need to take action.

Add 800 coal plants to the 400,000 diesel generators due to be sold over the next 25 years to villages in the Third World, and brothers and sisters (and transgender) we are well and truly fucked. BOYCOTT anything with the label MADE IN CHINA to start with. Let's start a google-bomb, flash-mob the Chinese Embassy and Consulate in NY, let's have a massive protest in NYC outside the Chinese Embassy and UN Building. Let's DO SOMETHING NOW. If we could turn a fraction of the political energy on DU into defeating this COAL RUSH, we could have a big impact.

This has been an ACTION ALERT! We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming...

PLEASE REMEMBER TO RECOMMEND. THANKS

[Jim Warren]

1. Link to 650 Chinese coal burning power plant info? nt

[Dems Will Win]

5. Put it in the OP, thanks

[n2doc]

2. Oh, its not a death warrant for everyone

Bacteria will do just fine on the new warm earth, as will roaches, crows and rats. And the human vermin who have the $$$ to move up to the polar regons to live.
It is just a death warrant for billions of poor people, billions of Animals and plants, and the Earth as we know it.

[Dems Will Win]

4. That's true, during the Permian Extinction only 95% of all species

were wiped out. That climate destruction was likely slower than our own, as the methane hydrates on the bottom of the ocean took millennia to melt. Today we may get to melting the methane peat bogs in the north and then the ocean hydrates in centuries -- or maybe even decades.

[lonestarnot]

6. Collision course with China up an coming with space arms race now this.

Rough times ahead.

[Dems Will Win]

9. We need to threaten a huge boycott of China or just start one

Maybe a demonstration at the COnsulate in NYC

[lonestarnot]

12. kick

[crispini]

3. K&R

[cally]

7. K & R

[Dems Will Win]

8. thx

[Dems Will Win]

10. kick

[al bupp]

11. Thanks for the alert DWW /eom