Black Enterprise Energy Forum: January 12, 2010

Update: AAEA Review of Forum

January 12th Black Enterprise gathers some of the most progressive minds on energy to discuss policy, employment and business opportunities.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has committed more than $80 billion in clean energy investments, one signal that President Barack Obama has placed a high priority on the importance of creating a new economic model around energy. The government hopes to invest $150 billion over the next ten years in new technologies and the Green Economy is now touted as one the strongest areas for expected job growth. What will these initiatives mean for African American professionals and business owners?

A CONVERSATION ON ENERGY
hosted by Shell
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
10:00 AM – 2:00 PM
The Liaison Capitol Hill
415 New Jersey Avenue, NW,
Washington, DC 20001

African American Unemployment Rate

October 2009

Unemployment rate............. 15.7%

Men, 20 years and over........ 17.1%

Women, 20 years and over....12.4%

Both sexes, 16 to 19 years.....41.3%

Bureau of Labor Statistics

The New York Times Jobless Rate Chart

New Book on Environmental Justice By Dorceta Taylor

A new book from a University of Michigan professor explores how the centuries-old connections between racism and the environment in American cities.

"The Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s-1900s: Disorder, Inequality, and Social Change" was written by Dorceta Taylor, left, a professor at the School of Natural Resources and Environment and director of an institute studying the issue of environmental justice its modern context. Duke University Press plans to release the book this month.

"The Environment and the People in American Cities" provides a sweeping and detailed examination of the evolution of American cities from Colonial New York and Boston to recent urban planning and labor reform efforts, outlining the rise of problems like overcrowding, pollution, poverty and epidemics and connecting them to systemic environmental racism and other forms of environmental inequities.

In its coverage of race, class and gender inequalities, the book includes a dimension missing from other academic books on environmental history. Professor Taylor adds to current research on the subject by exploring the emergence of elite reformers, the framing of environmental problems and the responses to perceived breakdowns in social order. By focusing specifically on cities, she offers important clues to understanding the evolution of American environmental activism.

Beyond the contribution to historical literature on the subject, Professor Taylor connects her findings to current issues in environmental policy. The book grew out of an undergraduate class on environmental politics Professor Taylor taught more than a decade ago. After finding no books or articles examining race, class or gender and the environment in a historical context, she decided to write her own. The project eventually grew into two books.

While all-male expeditions and solitary males who retreat to the woods for months or years at a time are idealized in many environmental history accounts, the urban activists receive no such acclaim or glory," she said, noting that female, working class and ethnic minorities were active in environmental activism and affairs. "In the city, the classes, races and genders interacted with each other to create a kind of environmentalism that was very fluid and dynamic.

Throughout her analysis, she connects social and environmental conflicts of the past to those of the present. She describes the displacement of people of color for the production of natural open space for the white and wealthy; the close proximity between garbage and communities of color in early America; the "cozy" relationship between middle-class environmentalists and the business community; and resistance to environmental inequalities from residents of marginal communities.

Congressional Black Caucus Exerting Its Authority

The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) is using its power to force the House Financial Services Committee to consider including more African American participation in Treasury and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation programs, such as the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Now if only the CBC would exert this same authority on the pending climate/energy bill, Blacks might actually gain access to energy infrastructure, products and services (besides caulking guns).

The CBC complained to commitee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass) that not only were their constituencies not getting sufficient participation in bailout programs, but that the administration was not doing enough to create jobs for low-income people or preserve minority-owned institutions such as radio stations, lending companies and jobs programs. There are 10 members of the Congressional Black Caucus on Chairman Frank's committee and they have the votes to hold up any legisation under its jurisdiction. They are using that power now to hold up revamping new rules for financial markets until their demands are met.

So far, CBC and Frank meetings with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel have been unsuccessful. The CBC appears to be committed to getting concessions or is ready to kill the administration's initiative to overhaul financial-market rules. Now if the CBC would dig in on energy and climate legislation, African Americans might get a foothold into the energy markets (oil, gas, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, efficiency and conservation). (WSJ, 11/20/09)

Majority Black Uniontown Gets Tennessee Toxic Fly Ash

Ruby Hollmes, left, lives across the street from the 1,000-acre Arrowhead Landfill near Uniontown in southern Perry County. The landfill is just off U.S. Highway 80 in Alabama and on many days, 85 to 110 rail cars bring in coal ash from Kingston, Tennessee each carrying 105 tons of moist ash sealed in thick plastic material that Tennessee Valley Authority officials call "burrito wraps." The ash is from the huge spill in Kingston, Tennessee in December 2008.

Uniontown, with fewer than 2,000 residents, is a majority-black town in a majority-black county that is one of Alabama's poorest with nearly half of Uniontown's families listed as living below the federal poverty level. In Perry County as a whole, 2008 census figures show a population of fewer than 11,000, with 33 percent below the poverty level. Ninety-five percent of the county's nearly 1,900 public-school students receive free lunches. The September unemployment rate, nearly 20 percent, was among the state's highest.

So far, based on a $1.05-a-ton fee on material shipped into the landfill, the Perry County Commission has received more than $500,000. Most of the money comes from shipments of the coal ash spilled when an earthen dam collapsed last December at the TVA's Kingston Fossil Fuel Plant in Roane County, Tennessee. Based on what it anticipates receiving during the current fiscal year, the commission has pledged $400,000 each to its two municipalities, Marion and Uniontown, and $550,000 to the county school board. This fiscal year alone, the county should take in $3.5 million from the landfill, mostly because of the ash shipments. That sum nearly equals the county's budget, minus what it gets from the ash fees.

Phill-Con Services, a Knoxville civil construction and operation services company, runs Arrowhead for a group of Atlanta-area investors. Under its permit from the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, the landfill operates as a solid-waste disposal facility.

Before the first coal ash shipment arrived July 3, Arrowhead was taking in between 100 and 1,500 tons of municipal, commercial and other nonhazardous waste a day. Since the coal ash began coming in, the daily dump ranges from 8,000 to 11,000 tons. Depending on the volume shipped, the landfill should be receiving coal ash from TVA for the next 12 to 18 months. According to an EPA fact sheet, the facility is taking about 3 million of the 5.4 million cubic yards of ash spilled at the Kingston site.

Some landfill proponents want to get the rest of the spilled ash, for which officials are trying to work out a disposal plan. They would like to get what the Kingston plant is producing now until the landfill runs out of space, as well as coal ash produced elsewhere in the state because no disposal site has the environmental safeguards that Arrowhead does.

Coal ash is a byproduct of burning coal to produce energy. The gray, powdery substance contains such materials as silica, unburned carbon and metals such as arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel and zinc. Coal ash also contains radium, a radioactive substance that occurs naturally in coal. (The Birmingham News, 11/15/09, Ruby Holmes photo courtesy Tom Gordon)

Announcing the Winner of the Health Reform Video Challenge

Stupid in America

Let's raise the bar America. It starts at home.