Why TXU’s plan to raise 11 coal-burning power plants is a bad idea. Here’s its fact sheet about the new plan:
But how much is 78 million tons? Building these dirty-coal plants would be like:
- Adding an entirely new state — 78 million tons is more than 21 other states produce today. It’s also more than many countries, including Sweden, Denmark and Portugal.
- Putting 10 million Cadillac Escalades on the road — that’s four Escalades for each one of TXU’s 2.4 million customers!
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Cutting and burning all the trees in a section of the Amazon rainforest the size of 9,360,000 football fields — an area slightly larger than California.
Or put another way, these plants would severely undermine gains made by initiatives around the country. Their pollution would be:
- 2.6 times more than the gains from California’s bold greenhouse gas reduction program for cars and trucks.
- 8 times larger than the benefits in 2018 resulting from the Northeastern States Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to cap power plant emissions.
For more on global warming, science writer Chris Mooney reports on John Kerry’s grilling of a Bush official about global warming. I highly recommend going to the Real Media video–I expect it will go on youtube soon. (Luke O’Brien provides another account of the same event).
Here’s Chris Mooney on how the Bush administration is rewriting history about its acknowledgement of global warming.
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