NEWSRENEWABLE ENERGY

More than 3,000 people have joined a campaign on Change.org calling on the University of Michigan to commit to using solar energy in its football stadium.

The campaign, created by the Ann Arbor-based Ecology Center, follows a growing NFL trend of renewable energy-powered national sports stadiums, including the homes of the Philadelphia Eagles, Arizona Cardinals, New England Patriots, and Washington Redskins. Activists hope the petition on Change.org will lead the University of Michigan, home to the Big 10 Wolverines and the largest-capacity stadium in North America, to become the first big-name college football school to join in.

“The UM stadium has the potential to be the largest athletic venue in North America with solar panels, which is fitting with the University’s claim to be ‘the leaders and the best’,” said Monica Patel, policy specialist at the Ecology Center. “Even though the electricity generated won’t solve the climate crisis, it will go a long way in terms of solar energy education — just think of the awareness raised among the 100,000+ fans there on Game Day, and millions of others who tune in. The move would also give real support to Michigan's growing solar energy industry."

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI -- pronounced Reggie) is something I care a lot about. It was the first cap-and-trade initiative in the United States and has been highly successful. Of course, anything that's successful at encouraging clean energy and energy efficiency, and thus slowing catastrophic climate change, is heftily attacked by the Tea Party and it's number one funder, Koch Industries. And RGGI is no exception.

If you're not familiar with the Koch brothers, they are two of the richest people in the world (tied for 5th-richest in the United States) and have made most of their money off of oil and gas. They are strongly opposed to government regulations on polluters (or anything) and fund the some of the largest Tea Party and far-right-wing groups in the nation. The idea that the Tea Party is a grassroots movement is a joke -- it is a Koch Industries movement geared at making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Greenpeace exposed the Koch brothers and their anti-environmental efforts last year and, since that time, I think nearly every major media outlet has picked up on the story. But the Koch Brothers and their front groups (most notably, Americans for Prosperity) haven't slowed in their efforts to undermine clean energy, energy efficiency, and climate action.

Some people (and companies) are really slow to learn. Facebook had the perfect setup -- over half a million cheerleaders, the help of clean energy experts at Greenpeace, and even the Executive Director of Greenpeace ready to help it go green and ween itself off coal. Supporters of the "Unfriend Coal" campaign creamed the world record for comments on a Facebook post in a 24-hour time frame with over 80,000 comments, showing that Facebook users want the internet giant to cut the coal.

But Facebook dropped the ball. Instead of making big announcements about how it would be cleaning up its own act, it focused on everyone else, with the announcement of a “Billion Acts of Green" Facebook app. Great app! Great project! But no word on switching from coal to clean, renewable energy, and that's what's really needed from Facebook. Facebook also announced its Open Compute Project, which could help other server and data centers to cut their energy use significantly, but with fast-growing energy demands, no amount of energy efficiency is going to make up for the IT industry's or Facebook's addiction to coal.

As I quickly mentioned last week when covering the continued pressure Greenpeace is putting on Facebook to "unfriend coal," Greenpeace recently came up with a plan to go after a Facebook World Record today. Early this morning, it started gathering comments on a post on the "Unfriend Coal" Facebook page with the intention of setting the record for most comments on a Facebook post within 24 hours. Guinness World Records told Greenpeace that it needed to hit at least 50,000 comments to set the record.

I was going to write this post encouraging you all to join in the effort, and it would still be great if you did, but the record has actually already been set!

In just 32 minutes in the early morning, 1,500 comments were already made. And as I'm writing this, there are 55,210 comments on the post. Greenpeace has increased its target in response to the tremendous response and is now aiming to hit 100,000 comments. Help out by adding yours now.

Some political traditions are hard to take issue with. A few examples might include the State of the Union Address (most of the time) or the presidential turkey pardoning. Of course there are many, many others that most of us would probably rather see scrapped. In the Maryland General Assembly one such highly dispensable tradition is the tendency to take at least two years to pass vital, transformative clean-energy legislation like Governor Martin O’Malley’s Maryland Offshore Wind Energy Act of 2011.

That bill, which would have initiated a process to construct a 400 – 600MW wind farm about ten miles off of the coast of Ocean City, stalled in the General Assembly late last week after months of productive debate and relentless pressure for passage from citizens across the state. Advocates for the bill had done their homework for those debates, and came armed with numerous studies on Maryland offshore wind energy and detailed answers for essentially any major question or concern legislators could raise. Still, that apparently just wasn’t thorough enough for some lawmakers who decided to shelve the measure for reconsideration next year, citing the need for “further study”.

It’s unclear what additional evidence legislators could need regarding the bill’s potential benefits to Maryland. After all advocates had supplied very convincing data to show that the bill would create thousands of manufacturing jobs for Maryland workers, cut global warming and other air pollution, and provide stable, reliable energy prices for over two decades. And as if that wasn’t sufficient, the bill included an escape clause which would have allowed state officials to throw out any proposals from wind developers that could not reasonably ensure such benefits to Marylanders.

You certainly have to give Greenpeace a lot of credit for persistence and constantly finding new ways to push for big campaigns to help the world. We've been covering Greenpeace's campaign to get Facebook to "unfriend coal" for several months now and it seems that it just keeps getting better and better (of course, not counting the fact that Facebook has still hardly responded).

From a funny video (that probably rubbed Mark Zuckerberg the wrong way but was still ingenious and catchy and has accumulated nearly half a million views) to what seemed like a positive conversation between Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo and Facebook Marketing Director Randi Zuckerberg, Mark's sister, at the World Economic Forum in Davos to a push to get Facebook to "unfriend coal" by Earth Day, Greenpeace is keeping the pressure on and engaging Facebook's top personnel.

It's been a few months since I first covered RGGI here on Change. If you don't remember or didn't read that post, RGGI (pronounced Reggie) is a regional cap and trade program in the Northeast that includes 10 states and has generated over $700 million in revenue since it was launched approximately 2 years ago. Over 50 percent of that revenue has gone into energy efficiency programs that help to cut people's Editenergy bills and 11 percent has gone into renewable energy investments. Another 14 percent has helped offset electricity bills for low-income families. Some of it has even been inappropriately used to help balance suffering state budgets.

The threat that I wrote about previously was that Tea Partiers who had gained a bit of control in New York and New Jersey were looking to withdraw their states from the regional program (counterproductive to say the least).

Since that time, it has actually been New Hampshire that has made the biggest move in that direction. The New Hampshire House of Representatives voted to exit RGGI about one month ago. The State Senate, which is largely Republican, will probably vote the same way soon. Unfortunately, the Democratic Governor won't even be able to veto this decision due to the large percentage of Representatives who voted to exit.

One of the great ironies of the national clean energy debate is that the current lack of a robust green-jobs sector is now often used as an excuse to block policies needed to grow it.

It’s a little bit like complaining that we shouldn’t waste water on a dry garden because the seeds haven’t sprouted yet.

Nevertheless, green jobs skepticism is now en vogue among some politicians, as has become clear in the debate over the Maryland Offshore Wind Energy Act of 2011. More than one member of the two General Assembly committees that may vote on the bill this week have expressed concerns that the thousands of promised offshore wind energy jobs could go to neighboring states, even as they suggested waiting and letting other states take the lead on developing the Mid-Atlantic offshore wind energy industry.

In other words, they're worried about entering the race for fear we might lose. How’s that for political leadership?

Through donations, volunteerism and activism, U.S. residents have already shown an outpouring of support for Japan.

Greenpeace, next Monday, March 28th, is organizing one more important opportunity. That day supporters will host of "Have Courage Japan" vigils across the U.S. in a show of solidarity, even as Japan continues to struggle in controlling the hobbled Fukushima reactors.  (Click here to organize a vigil, and click here to find out where to attend a vigil near you).

In Hong Kong, hundreds attended a similar Greenpeace vigil held over the weekend where residents expressed their concerns over a proposed nuclear expansion in the region.

In the U.S., March 28th is a symbolic day: Thirty-two years ago was the Three Mile Island disaster.

Fear and money, as these past few years of recession have made abundantly clear, are two very powerful political forces especially when combined. And as we’re seeing right now in places like Wisconsin, powerful political and corporate players are hard at work exploiting fears over money to advance their political agendas. It’s the worst form of cynical political ploys – a stratagem that attacks vital public services in the name of public service, and that ultimately only serves private moneyed interests.

And it’s a stratagem that was on full display by critics and opponents of Governor Martin O’Malley’s Maryland Offshore Wind Energy Act at the bill’s first hearing in the the state's General Assembly this past Thursday.

Undoubtedly stoked by somewhat misleading media reportage about the costs of the legislation for Maryland electric rate payers, certain members of the House Economic Matters Committee set the tone for the hearing by showering the Governor and his administration officials with questions about how the bill would affect their constituents’ pocketbooks.