On 1/28/04 11:21 AM, "Dyna Sluyter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I didn't see many of the "Clean Energy Now" signs in the working class > neighborhoods on the Northside or elsewhere. I saw plenty of them in > the more affluent neighborhoods. Why?
How hard did you look? I saw a number of them in Holland and Windom Park. Several of them I put up. Also, while there may not have been a lot of them on your Northside, I do know that one of the primary community-based organizations that supported MERP was EJAM - Environmental Justice Advocates of Minnesota, which was started by a state representative from Northside, Keith Ellison and has many Northsiders among its membership. Windom Park Citizen in Action was among the 65 neighborhood organizations that supported MERP. I doubt many would consider our neighborhood to be "affluent" rather than working-class. > The affluent can afford to spend money to purchase a perceived better > quality of life- the things like organic food, hybrid cars, and > expensive energy. Perhaps. Yet I know a number of less-than-affluent folks who supported MERP and who supported the Eastside Food Coop's opening in NE Minneapolis. I also know that getting a 90% reduction in emissions from Riverside is well worth the couple extra bucks a month I'll pay for my electric bill. By the way, for folks who are really worried about those couple bucks, I've got two words for you: conservation works. My electric bill for my 97-year old two-story house runs about $30-35 a month because I make an effort to turn off what I'm not using. I've gotten such good results through simple conservation that I signed up for Xcel's WindSource program because I could afford to and my electric bill is still less than what I paid before I started taking conservation seriously. > Here on the Northside our furnaces are going full blast tonight. The > electric heaters are running too, as we try to keep the pipes from > freezing and bursting (again). there's not much we can do about it- the > NRP grants for tighter windows and insulation are gone, and some of us > are renters anyhow. When your spending a couple hundred a month for gas > and electricity cheap energy from coal is a good thing... and we curse > the NIMBYs from the wealthier neighborhoods who are forcing their > overpriced boutique fuels on us. At least we can still shop at Cub > instead of the organic food store, for now. Cheap coal is not a good thing when you factor in the money that poor families have to spend on asthma medicine for their kids, the pay they miss when they have to go pick up their kid from school or stay home with their kid who had a particularly bad attack. If I were a parent who had to choose between cheap energy or a healthy kid, it's a pretty damn easy choice. > Give the NIMBYs and "environmentalists" another decade and they'll > force us to eat their overpriced "organic" food too. It's mandates like > the natural gas conversions that give environmentalists a bad name, and > will doom their movement if given the chance. Horsepucky. The dedicated folks who worked for 8-10 years to get Eastside Food Coop up and running did it to increase choice, not limit it. Now we have a local option for folks in the northern part of the city and suburbs like St. Anthony or Columbia Heights, who want healthier foods or to support local farmers without having to go down to south Minneapolis or over to St. Paul. Nobody's holding a gun to anyone's head to force them to shop at a co-op. As for mandates destroying the environmental movement, that's been the Chicken Little story since the movement started 50 or so years ago. The Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act were going to destroy the movement because they were going to kill all the manufacturing industries and there would be a jobs vs. environment backlash. The Toxic Release Inventory was going to destroy the movement because communities were actually going to have a chance to learn what was coming out of those factory smokestacks and they'd shut them down. Now MERP is supposedly going to destroy the movement because people will pay an extra $3 a month on their electric bill. Ha! People can go buy a few compact fluorescent bulbs to upgrade the lights they use most often around their homes and cut their electric bill back to pre-MERP levels. For folks who haven't really seen just what comes out of Riverside, here's a little comparison: comparison of 2002 emissions in tons per year http://www.pca.state.mn.us/air/emissions/emissearch.cfm Hennepin Energy Resource Co LP (Facility 05300400) # Carbon Monoxide 65.22 # Nitrogen Oxides 431.07 # Lead 0.01 # Particulate Matter 16.91 # PM-10 (fine particles) 16.79 # Sulfur Dioxide 13.77 # Volatile Organic Compounds 2.56 Xcel Energy - Riverside Generating Plant (Facility 05300015) # Carbon Monoxide 355.38 # Nitrogen Oxides 13,272.45 # Lead 0.68 # Particulate Matter 572.96 # PM-10 (fine particles) 83.57 # Sulfur Dioxide 12,903.79 # Volatile Organic Compounds 61.08 Lots of folks like to complain about emissions from HERC. I'm not a huge HERC fan, either, but compared to Riverside, HERC's emissions are practically nothing! And thanks to MERP, Riverside's emissions will decline by 90% while actually increasing generating capacity. Why? Because steam turbines using natural gas are more efficient than coal. Here's how widespread the support for MERP was: The governor supported it. Even the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce supported it at the end after Xcel agreed to take a smaller return on their investment. I'd love to see someone try and make a case for the Chamber being filled with a bunch of tree-huggers. That would just make my year! By the time the state Public Utilities Commission finally got around to approving MERP, the only people who still opposed it were the ones who either weren't paying enough attention to realize what it would actually accomplish relative to its' costs or who were too wedded to their preconceived notions to be capable of acknowledging what an incredible accomplishment it is. Mark Snyder Windom Park REMINDERS: 1. Think a member has violated the rules? Email the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 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