On Sunday, activists sang the gospel of stewardship to Chase Bank, which finances 80 percent of mountain-top removal mining in Appalachia. Reverend Billy and the Church of Life After Shopping (formerly the Church of Stop Shopping) brought the “murdered mud” of West Virginia’s Coal River Mountain to a Manhattan branch of Chase, asking Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to stop funding Massey Energy’s “obscene” removal of mountains from this planet:

On March 21st we built a mountain in the lobby of a Chase branch on 2nd Avenue & 10th Street in Manhattan made from the murdered mud of Coal River Mountain in West Virginia. Perched on top we left a letter for the CEO of Chase Jamie Dimon. His bank currently finances 80% of the Mountain-top Removal mining that is killing Appalachia.

Watch the choir sing:

Back in Appalachia, the activists of Coal River Mountain Watch, United Mountain Defense, and Appalachian Voices keep fighting to save their heritage and convince Congress to pass the Clean Water Protection Act, H.R. 1310. Yesterday, Reverend Billy offered some more thoughts:

I forgot to say that here in our city Chase finances empty buildings at a time of such homelessness. I wanted to show that urban poverty and rural poverty should not be separated, not if the same bank “warehouses” our city buildings and also finances strip-mining over valleys of small towns of defenseless citizens. But none of this is on the market, and its invisibility attacks activists as much anyone else.

We remembered to ask people to boycott Chase, although we don’t have a good rhyming rhythmic chant for it yet. We forgot to honor the decades of victims and heroes who live in the valleys below the leveled mountains, although we remembered to tell passersby that the little mountain of dirt and rocks and roots that we built in the Chase lobby was from Coal River Mountain in West Virginia. Did we describe the majesty of those peaks, now pulverized by Massey Energy?

(H/T EarthFireCrossroads)

A new study has lowered the carbon pollution threshold or “tipping point” for collapse of the Greenland ice sheet to 400 to 560 ppm.  We’re currently at about 390 parts per million atmospheric concentrations of CO2, rising about 2 ppm a year (and yes, total collapse would take a while).
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In a letter to the authors of the Senate energy and climate bill, some of the most powerful companies and organizations in U.S. agriculture and forestry joined with environmentalists and industry to insist on inclusion of strong incentives for forests and farms in any climate legislation.  Guest blogger Glenn Hurowitz, Washington Director of Avoided Deforestation Partners, has the story along with a good video on deforestation.

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Representing a diverse group of States and regions, we believe the United States should consider bipartisan and comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation this year with a renewed focus on jobs and reduced dependence on foreign oil.

So opens a letter sent yesterday from Tom Udall (D-NM) and 21 other moderate and progressive Democrats to Majority Leader Reid yesterday (full text reprinted at the end). The votes of these Dems are considered essential for passage of climate and clean energy legislation through the Senate this year:

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Wind Energy Investment of $65 Billion May Curb Carbon

China WindPower Group Ltd., Iberdrola SA and Duke Energy Corp. will lead development of an estimated $65 billion of wind-power plants this year that let utilities reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.

The estimate from Bloomberg New Energy Finance assumes a 9 percent annual increase in global installations of wind turbines, adding as much as 41 gigawatts of generation capacity. That’s the equivalent of 34 new nuclear power stations.

Utilities that built natural gas-fired generators during the last decade are increasingly erecting turbines and buying wind power from competitors, tapping a renewable-energy source as governments consider ways to penalize carbon-based fuels.

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The Office of Management and Budget is proposing to skew the formula used to weigh pending government regulations, reducing the value assigned to potential benefits

The result would be to give industry a strengthened weapon to fight standards with huge claims of anticipated costs, while the anticipated benefits are greatly discounted.  This puts the wide sweep of President Obama’s energy and environment policies in jeopardy, guest bloggers Dan Becker and James Gerstenzang explain.  Becker is director of the Safe Climate Campaign, which advocates for strong policies to fight global warming.  Gerstenzang is editorial director of the Campaign.

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New England, Mid-Atlantic states show how pollution pricing works

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative’s seventh successful auction of carbon dioxide permits proves market-based pricing of carbon pollution can work in the United States, says Sean Pool, Special Assistant for Energy Policy at CAP in this repost.  Pool also looks at how RGGI can be improved.

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