Grace Ross: Dirty Energy at Massachusetts’s Brayton Point

Tuesday, July 09, 2013

Grace Ross, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Ms. Pauline Rodrigues – a good, long-lived working-class life written across her face – got dragged into being an activist as often happens for regular people because of a problem in her backyard. They knew that folks in their community were getting sick at much higher than normal rates. The problem, Brayton Point Power Plant, Somerset, Massachusetts: their backyard.

Brayton Point is now the dirtiest energy plant in New England. Still burning coal to create energy and that harms all of us. While it was obvious to Somerset residents, dirty coal creates pollution and illness across New England. Now with the connection between green house gases, climate change and coal production, the impact on the health and longevity on all of our lives will end up being impacted by plants like Brayton Point.

A week ago, I sat in the Worcester State auditorium surrounded by an interesting mix of “350 climate change” activists. The new Massachusetts Chapter was celebrating its first year of existence and planning its next steps.

The name that came about was “350”, because of a network that has grown across the world of people who’ve been trying to stop the increase in carbon parts per million in our atmosphere from reaching the point of 350 ppms.

Now this isn’t the linear process – it goes up but fluctuates. In March of this year for the first time our atmosphere measured 400 carbon parts per million. That puts us way beyond what the climate change scientists worldwide had identified as the point at which we had created harm that we could not simply undo to our environment. That point, of course, being the fateful number 350 – give or take.

But is getting to clean energy, cleaning up Rodrigues’s backyard, stopping Brayton Point’s coal burning – mostly about energy or about politics?

Hats off to Rep Conroy who presented at the 350.MA gathering. He sometimes is frustrating to people because he tends to go what can seem as off on his own tangent. However, having done his research, he has filed a state carbon tax bill which for once takes into account the real economics of people’s lives. A realistic tax cannot simply tax the heating fuel and gasoline for our cars because of the amount of carbon that they put into the air; no tax is a socioeconomic neutral proposal.

What do I mean?

Some people live in an illusion. They think that people make choices about how they spend their money purely based on some individualistic, separate-from-everybody-else lifestyle preference. But most of us who work for a living spend money balancing real impacts on our lives, families and communities.

All of the evidence shows that the length of Massachusetts commute from home to work has continued to grow. Deeper research shows that the vast majority of that increase is because in recent decades housing that was more affordable kept getting farther from the job centers in our state. People therefore have to continue moving farther away from their work and spending more gas to get to work.

Conclusion: the vast majority of miles that people put on their car is to commute to work. Those are not optional miles.

So creating a carbon tax because its economic pressure will change people’s behavior magically misses the real demands of work. The cost will impact some use of gas for recreational purposes – for those with money for individualistic lifestyle choices but not so much money that the tax will have no impact. In the mind of most of the folks wealthy enough to be in top government these days, they miss the fact that for most of us we’re driving our car most of the time out necessity.

But the Conroy version of the bill – not the first of this type to be filed in Massachusetts – actually gives a tax dividend back who in terms of the personal exemption and to those who need it.

The problem is the bill has some complicated formula that I don’t understand all the details of. I, of course, couldn’t help pushing back and asking why we don’t do the things that would actually solve the amount of heating fuel that people are using: lets replace thousands of leaking heating fuel pipes to our homes and do deep-energy retrofits to our homes I have talk about before.

Taxing is a complicated system; it’s likely to make most people’s eyes glaze over and have an equation that’s so complicated that we’d need an economist to explain it to us. Why something like that? Legislation ideally is not only conceptually right on, but it’s procedurally understandable; we need to be able to test whether what they’re doing is what they say they’re doing or not.

The other side of complicated legislation that’s supposed to use market forces to fix something instead of just directly fixing it? We got promised a bunch of these sort of mega policies early in this Governor’s administration.

Cap and trade which allowed dirty energy producers to spend money on green energy to offset their pollution. Europe got this policy in first – the amount of carbon from energy production has simply continued to rise.

The Green Communities Act. While it’s had some impact on what specific cities and towns have signed up to do and gotten some financial support to do it, it included the $6 billion in authorization for borrowing money for green jobs. This administration signed it with great flourish and now has not actually borrowed the money to create.

This state was supposed to create a plan to get 50% reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. There were a bunch of hearings that I went to that were very exciting: great testimony from people about ways we could do that. The state had actually researched a large number of carbon producing activities to reduce. But they had chosen all the easy, inexpensive targets to begin with - thereby front loading the things they’d be able to call success; more opportunity for fanfare. The 350. Activists want to prioritize finding out what came of that commitment; they’ve heard nothing.

Coal plants seem to be getting closed by activism on the ground. And it’s lovely to come up with a complicated scheme around a carbon tax if it ever gets passed without getting gutted.

But maybe it’s not about complicated schemes. Wouldn’t it be nice for elected officials to do the stuff they’ve already promised to do, not just sign it into law and create great fanfare and do the upfront part of it?

We need real leaders who get in the weeds, slogging along, rolling up their sleeves for the long term hard work to implement programs. Large programs have no potential at all as long as they sit in the drawing board.

Maybe it’s as much about cleaning up what we consider elected leadership these days as it is cleaning up Brayton Point.

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Grace Ross: Dirty Energy at Massachusetts’s Brayton Point

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