U.S. Chamber of Commerce attacks environmentalists

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has charged that green interests are preventing the construction of a variety of energy projects, including clean energy developments. The Chamber has announced plans to push Congress for legislation to “fast track” the construction of energy projects, ranging from power lines and wind to “renewable” energy to coal- and nuclear-powered electric plants.

With rising concerns about global warming and dependence on foreign there is an understandable sense of urgency about energy development, but environmentalists have long understood that it must be done cautiously and with consideration for a host of other environmental problems. ALL construction has an environmental impact, even a green energy facility. After all, environmental requirements were put in place because of damage to wildlife habitat and human health that can be caused by any type of construction. Even green energy cannot safely be exempted from environmental concerns raised by our growing body of environmental knowledge. For example, although a wind farm is a source of clean energy, its siting and transmission lines might cause problems, as would a huge solar plant in a fragile desert environment.

Bill Kovacs, the US Chamber’s vice president of environment, technology and regulatory affairs admits that some Chamber-backed projects would even be in forests that have been off-limits to logging. Although its campaign is tailored to make the US Chamber look like a defender of green energy, its list of construction stalled by environmentalists includes 170 coal plants and 17 nuclear facilities.

In targeting environmentalists for being opposed to green energy projects, the Chamber calls environmental resistance to construction “Project No Project,” the name of the Chamber’s new attack site. The U.S. Chamber has even invented some witty acronymns for environmental opponents of unbridled construction, calling them NOPEs –”Not on the Planet”; CAVEs–”Citizens Against Virtually Everything,” and BANANAs –Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.”

“If you really look, you find a concerted attempt across the United States to limit the use of green energy just as you would for other types of energy,” Bill Kovacs, the organizations vice president of environment, technology and regulatory affairs.

It is also important to remember that simply calling energy green doesn’t make it so. The U.S. Chamber is defending the construction of ethanol plants, even though these are seen by many environmentalists to have already resulted in environmental damage through increased use of fertilizers and pesticides and expansion of cornfields into marginal land that had been in the federal Conservation Reserve Program.

“We need as much energy as we can get anywhere,” the chamber’s director of transportation and infrastructure told the Times. This attitude of unlimited need ignores energy conservation and efficiency, which are the cheapest and fastest ways to decrease global warming emissions, as the American Association for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) has long advocated. This organization is backing cap-and-trade legislation that it calculates could reduce the growth in the total electrical load by two-thirds, with little or no increase in costs.