Border Clean Energy Advocates Grab for Power

New from the IRC's Americas Program:

Citizen Action Profile
Border Clean Energy Advocates Grab for Power
By TalliNauman

In the sister cities all along the U.S.-Mexico border, smog is causing mercury
poisoning, asthma symptoms, cardiac problems and premature death. The cities
cannot comply with air quality standards. Meanwhile, visibility in treasured
rural landscapes has declined dramatically. Airborne pollutants are damaging
telescopic instruments, blocking scientific progress. The pollution is contributing
to global climate change and erosion of quality of life. Emissions from cars,
trucks, factories and other sources are only partly to blame. The haze is largely
due to electricity production.

Alert border watchers warn that failure to act on the problem of power plant
pollution will have consequences as far reaching as the Inuit territories of
the North Pole. Members of organizations, ranging from the California-based
Border Power Plant Working Group (BPPWG) to the Texas-based Big Bend Sierra
Club to the international Environmental Defense, reason that conversion to
clean energy could improve health, create jobs and strengthen the border economy.
Their efforts bring together environmentalists and experts border-wide to limit
power plants emissions, to promote energy conservation, and to push a switch
to non-polluting generating methods. Citizen action accounts for the fact that
practical measures to ensure energy efficiency, best practices, and renewable
fuel sources are now higher on the border geo-political agenda than ever before.

TalliNauman is the InterhemisphericResourceCenter's (online at http://www.irc-online.org)
editor at large and Americas Program associate. She recently attended the 2004
conference of the Indigenous Environmental Network in South Dakota, her home
state.

See full article online at:
http://www.americaspolicy.org/citizen-action/series/15-energy.html

With printer-friendly PDF version at:
http://www.americaspolicy.org/pdf/series/15.energy.pdf

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Produced and distributed by the IRC's Americas Program ~ A New World of Ideas,
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