via [ Post-trib ] “Indiana lagging on renewable energy plan - Illinois, Michigan standards help attract investment” By Gitte Laasby

When it comes to renewable energy, economic development officials in Michigan could be laughing all the way to the bank.

Michigan’s renewable energy policy has attracted billions of dollars in investments over the last two years while neighboring Indiana sat idly by. The developments are expected to create thousands of jobs in manufacturing — a blow to industrial areas like Northwest Indiana.

How Indiana compares

Here’s how Indiana’s renewable energy standards compare to other states. Standards generally require electric utilities to generate a certain amount of electricity from renewable or alternative energy sources by a given date.

Illinois: 25 percent of energy from renewables by 2025 (75 percent of that from wind.) Adopted in 2007.

Indiana: None.

Michigan: 10 percent renewable energy portfolio by 2015 (some may be from energy efficiency.) Adopted in 2008.

Ohio: 25 percent of all electricity sold in 2025 must come from alternative energy (12.5 percent from renewables, half of that must be produced in state. The alternative energy may be energy efficiency and clean coal.) Adopted in 2008.

Wisconsin: 10 percent by 2015. Adopted in 2006.

Source: Pew Climate Center on Global Climate Change, Oct. 2010

The strategy isn’t a secret, although Michigan officials aren’t keen on promoting something that would take away their competitive advantage: The boom started in 2008 when Michigan passed a law requiring utilities to get 10 percent of their energy from renewable sources and energy efficiency by 2015.

“Since the adoption of the renewable energy standard in Michigan, we have attracted more than $9 billion in new investment in new alternative energy manufacturing business,” said Michael Shore, spokesman for Michigan Economic Development Corp.

“That $9 billion is projected to create more than 9,000 jobs over the next 10 years. We’ve gotten significant new investments in solar energy manufacturing, wind energy, biofuels as well as advanced battery. Those are the green, sustainable energy sectors we’ve targeted.”

Indiana is one of 14 states nationwide without any kind of renewable energy standard, according to the Pew Center of Global Climate Change. The Indiana Legislature has considered one the past four sessions. Both houses passed separate bills last year, but couldn’t agree on a compromise because one senator wanted to include nuclear among renewables. Other lawmakers cited concerns that electricity rates will increase if utilities have to get a certain percentage of energy from renewables, which are more expensive than coal.

“Renewable standards have been criticized for their driving rates up, but environmental groups have said we’ll put a cost cap on renewable energy standards,” said Jesse Kharbanda, executive director of the Hoosier Environmental Council. “That standard was never set on something like (Duke’s) Edwardsport (power plant.) Now we’re dealing with a 17 percent rate increase. Renewable companies can meet that.

“It’s a valid concern for people in a bad economy to be worried about rate increases but we’re willing to put a cap on it. Rates would not increase more than, say, 5 percent compared to business as usual.”

Shore makes no bones about the fact that in terms of the renewable standard, Indiana’s loss may be Michigan’s gain.

“The renewable energy standard by itself is only a first step. It’s like a high school diploma or GED. You’re not ready to be a professional in any field, but you can’t realistically get there, or easily get there, without it,” he said.

In 2009, Michigan supplemented the standard with tax credits for renewable energy development. To get the credits, companies had to go through a review. That helped companies when the federal government later offered stimulus funding, securing Michigan $1.3 billion — a sizable portion of the $5.8 billion total investment in advanced battery technology.

Standard helps Illinois

In Illinois, renewable energy standards adopted in 2007 are also making an impact.

The percentage of electricity that utilities are required to purchase from renewable energy sources increases annually from 5 percent in 2010 to reach 25 percent by 2025. Of that total, 75 percent of the renewable energy must come from wind power.

Wind energy generated nearly 1,000 estimated jobs and over $18 million in revenue for the state and landowners. Interim benchmarks for renewables propelled Illinois’ wind market to seventh in the nation, according to Sierra Club Illinois Chapter.

Old-line Chicago manufacturers such as Finkl & Sons on the south side and Brad Foote Gear Works in Cicero are getting a lift from wind power by making components for the alternative-power industry.

According to the report “The Wind Energy Supply Chain in Illinois,” compiled by the Environmental Law and Policy Center, 104 companies in Illinois with more than 15,000 employees play a role in the solar-power industry, whether it’s making parts, mixing cement or providing legal, banking, engineering and accounting services for the industry.

ArcelorMittal is among the only manufacturers in Northwest Indiana involved in the renewable energy sector. The mill makes steel for wind mill towers.

“Illinois had all kinds of requirements, like the 25 percent (renewable electricity standard.) That gave them a real big boost. But we don’t have anything like that here,” said Bryant Mitol, a Valparaiso resident who works for Earth Solar Technologies of Indianapolis. “I think that’s really what has helped boost (development.) Because they’re serious about it.

“Here, the powers that be are still pushing for coal. In Ohio and Illinois, they’re making great strides, but here we are in Indiana. I think the coal lobby is just really, really strong here.”

Based on a survey and analysis, the Solar Foundation said Indiana ranks 10th in the nation for solar jobs with an estimated 3,400 solar jobs and 25 estimated solar firms. Indiana is one of only two states in the top 10 without a renewable energy standard.

Indiana has also attracted major wind projects, such as BP’s wind farm in Benton County. But that’s misleading, said Kharbanda from the HEC.

“The governor and other politicians will talk about the investment coming into our state without the renewable energy standard,” he said. “The problem with that argument is, the investments have been driven by the RES. They’ve either been driven by RES in other states, which Indiana wind is tapped to comply with, or they view it as an incremental tool. They’ll sort of lead legislators to inaccurately conclude there’s no need for a renewable energy standard.

“In the scheme of things, wind farms like BP are very impressive, but they only lead to 1 to 2 percent of our electricity use.”

A renewable energy standard is among the top priorities on environmentalists’ agenda for the upcoming legislative session.

Thomas Energy, Tar Sands

Thomas East Chicago, Environment

Should my community trust this company?
The power of this company determines our quality of life. They funded Congressmen Visclosky’s “Good Government Initiative.” They tell planners writing community and regional comprehensive planning initiatives what they will tolerate.

Thomas East Chicago, Economics, Energy, Environment

Via Yahoo News By PAUL FOY, Associated Press Writer – Mon Sep 13, 7:30 pm ET

Thomas Misc, Tar Sands

Thomas Environment, Tar Sands

The Other end of BP’s pipeline - From the Alberta TAR SANDS to BP’s Whiting Refinery.

via [ Democracy Now ] Indigenous Groups Lead Struggle Against Canada’s Tar Sands

Thomas Energy, Environment, Tar Sands

Thomas The Water I Drink

We all remember these ads from BP. You couldn’t miss them, they were all over the airwaves.

Thomas Energy, Environment

via [ Post Trib ] “Rainbow-Push Leader Leads BP Spill Protest” By Christin Nance Lazerus

Photo by Stephanie Dowell/Post-Tribune

As crews struggle to contain the largest oil spill in American history in the Gulf of Mexico, critics of BP are starting to turn up the heat.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson led a group of protesters on a march outside of BP’s Whiting refinery on Wednesday afternoon to focus attention on what he says is the lax environmental enforcement that allowed the Gulf oil spill to occur — and problems closer to home.

“We need the (Environmental Protection Agency) standards enforced,” Jackson said. “At this point, businesses look at EPA fines as the cost of doing business.

“This reckless behavior is a threat to us all,” the Rainbow-PUSH leader said.

About 20 pickets walked along the busy stretch of Indianapolis Boulevard, carrying signs emblazoned with “Spill Baby Spill?,” “We Want Clean Energy,” and “Don’t Pay the Bill for the Spill.”

Jackson and Sierra Club Illinois director Jack Darin criticized BP for its $3 billion expansion of the Whiting refinery, which could see an increase the pollution due to processing oil from tar sands.

“There is a tragedy occurring right here in our midst,” Jackson said. “We all deserve the right to breathe free.”

Many of the protesters belong to Greater First Church in East Chicago.

Bishop T. Lane Grant II criticized the air and wastewater permits approved for BP by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management.

“There’s no plan to ensure that BP wouldn’t continue violations,” Grant said.

East Chicago resident Tanya Moss said concern about the Gulf oil spill prompted her to act.

“We want to to make sure they take every safety precaution,” Moss said. “Taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for their ‘oops,’ since they wouldn’t pay for my ‘oops’.”

Darin said he hopes this critical time prompts political leaders to action on planning a cleaner energy future.

“We’re well positioned to act,” Darin said.

“We have a president who is pointing in that direction, and the House passed an energy bill. It’s one of big things on senate’s agenda this summer.

“We want a future free of oil spills.”

Thomas Environment, Tar Sands

• Pre-cautionary:

if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action.

• Post-cautionary:

Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, the lack of full scientific certainty shall be used as a reason for not implementing cost-effective measures until after the environmental degradation has actually occurred

Thomas Environment

H2oil animated sequences from Dale Hayward on Vimeo.

Thomas Energy, Environment

via [ Huffington Post ]

As BP’s Earth Day Disaster continues to spread beyond the Gulf more and more questions are being asked.

Thomas Energy, Environment

via [ WBEZ - Chicago Public Radio ] Worldview Segment “Will the Gulf Spill Affect BP Investment in Chicago Area? By Michael Puente.

Officials with the oil giant BP say it’s recovering about 3-thousand barrels of oil a day from that huge leak in the Gulf of Mexico. The company is spending millions to stop the leak and may have to shell out billions more in cleanup costs and economic losses to the region.

Closer to home, in Northwest Indiana, there’s concern that all this expense may affect BP’s multi-billion-dollar investment in its Whiting, Indiana refinery, just a few short miles from Chicago’s city limits.

The Gulf catastrophe also has emboldened BP’s local critics about the company’s environmental record here.

WBEZ’s Michael Puente brings us this report from our Northwest Indiana bureau in Chesterton

Michael’s Interview with me comes toward the end at the 6:10 minute point

Thomas Energy, Environment

Early this morning, Marian Byrnes, the longtime environmental activist of the Calumet Region passed away.

“Her incredible legacy will be remembered in all of our hearts, and future generations will hear stories about her strength, vision, wisdom, and compassion for nature. Without her endless pursuit of open space protection in the Calumet region, many acres of invaluable wetlands, prairies and forests would surely have been lost. A debt of gratitude is owed to her for her years of dedication and service to both people and nature. I am simply humbled by all she accomplished.”

- Nicole Kamins

Thomas Environment

via [ Post Trib ] “Anti-pollution plan subject of hearing - Grace Davison wants to install diffuser to reduce the toxicity of salt discharges” By Gitte Laasby

EAST CHICAGO — Enough people were concerned about Grace Davison’s proposal to put a diffuser in the Grand Calumet River to dilute pollution that the Indiana Department of Environmental Management has decided to hold a hearing on it.

As the Post-Tribune reported on March 26, the chemical manufacturer in East Chicago has been allowed for the past four years to discharge enough acid salt into the Grand Calumet River to kill at least 85 percent of certain small water critters. To make the salt less toxic, the company wants to put in a diffuser to dilute the pollution.

If you go

What: Public hearing on Grace Davison request to put a diffuser in the Grand Calumet River.

Where: Indiana University Northwest, library conference center room LC 105 abc, 3400 Broadway, Gary.

When: 6 p.m. Wednesday, May 26.

For more information: You can view the application and draft documents at the Lake County Health Department, the Gary Health Department, the main branch of the Gary Public Library and at IDEM’s regional office at 8380 Louisiana St. in Merrillville.

How to comment

Questions can be directed to

Ms. Nahir Bacardi, Office of Water Quality/NPDES permits branch, Indiana Department of Environmental Management, 100 N. Senate Ave. (mail code: 65-42), Indianapolis, IN 46204-2251. Phone: (317) 234-4222 or e-mail nbacardi@idem.in.gov. Comments must be postmarked by June 11.

IDEM didn’t initially plan a public hearing but decided to hold one after five Post-Tribune readers requested it.

“The public meeting… is being held to address the concerns of all interested parties prior to a final determination on the proposal,” IDEM said in a public notice.

The hearing will be held on May 26 and is supposed to provide information about the application and allow public participation. IDEM has also made the company’s application available for public review at various local places including IDEM’s Merrillville branch.

In 2006, IDEM permitted Grace Davison to discharge an average 39,000 pounds of sulfates (salt) per day into the Grand Calumet River just east of Kennedy Avenue.

As a condition, the company had to conduct monthly lab tests for six months on how toxic the discharge was to two kinds of water fleas and the fish fathead minnow.

The company’s 2007 lab tests showed that at least 85 percent of the critters died when exposed to undiluted wastewater.

The wastewater had well below the concentration of salt that IDEM allowed.

Thomas The Water I Drink

25-years-ago BP abandoned its professional training facilities in Robertsdale, donating the facilities to Calumet College, and moved to a 200-acre LEED certified campus in Naperville. They did so because they could no longer attract professionals to this location due to Quality of Life issues. Quality of Life issues they had a major hand in creating.

Today BP’s professional staff enjoy the healthy work environment of a green campus with ample buffering between office buildings and roadways, while residents adjacent to the BP’s refinery are not so fortunate. Today BP is constructing a whole new facility at their East Chicago / Whiting Refinery to refine the “No Good, Very Bad, Dirty” heavy sour crude from the Alberta Tars Sands and to do so they are constructing 6 cokers directly across the street from the Marktown Historic District where more than 120 children under the age of 18 live, play and sleep.

BP likes to refer to the project as a modernization or retooling project. This is an important distinction to them because to call it what is, a “new facility” or “new construction,” would trigger all sorts of regulatory reviews and permitting, including a new-source review requiring an environmental and health risk assessment. I am not certain if there has ever been a risk assessment done on the impacts the BP refinery has the neighboring communities. I don’t know if that is because they have been grandfathered in or what. I just know that new construction ought to trigger a new source review and that is not happening.

For labor purposes BP calls the project a “maintenance project.” Thus they bypass all sorts of labor rules in terms of pay, scheduling, and work conditions as would be the case for new construction. Let’s make this simple, if I tore down my house to construct a brand new home, I could not go to City Hall seeking a maintenance permit for the new construction. I would be required to seek the proper permits and follow requirements for new construction. This is just one way in which BP has been cutting corners here to save themselves costs. I can’t say what other cost cutting measures BP is making, but I do know they did not do this without the aid of regional leadership. I wonder what our regional leadership is thinking now as we learn more about the costs of BP practices to the gulf region.

This is a good environmental justice example of how benefits-without-risks are created and separated from risks-without-benefits in a free-market economy. Free-market corporations and present day land use policies have a very intentional consequent of accumulating wealth and benefits in one location while clustering risks and blight in another. All too often the geography of separation is as clear as the “Northshore” and “Southshore” designations.

It makes me wonder if anyone working in office complexes similar to the BP complex in Naperville feel any sense of culpability for the lives negatively impacted on the other side of their company’s production line. What about Kraft Foods? what about Grainger? what about Cargill? and U.S. Steel? and ArcelorMittal? Boeing? GATX? or Ryerson?

[ Wikipedia list of Corp HQ in the Chicago Met area ]

Compounding problems, BP extracted an additional $165 million in tax abatements from the mostly poor people of Marktown and East Chicago. They did this behind closed doors, and without a single public hearing, all while lecturing the region on “Good Government.” Despite efforts, residents, who pay the highest property taxes in the state at 7.4%, still do not know that they gave up $165 million to BP. BP accomplished this feat by spreading the wealth to voting districts outside the plume of negative externalities while taking advantage of their partnerships with corrupt local political enterprises under the plume. BP is well known for this form of philanthropic activity and I could go on about “to whom” and “how much” was given, but that will have to be for another post. Let these two examples suffice for now.

Three years ago a $25-million donation from BP capped Phase 1 of a three-part expansion and renovation campaign. Since 2002, BP had agreed to more than $125 million in state and regional legal settlements over pollution problems.

Art museums are often the beneficiaries of largess from corporations wishing to polish their sometimes less-than-gleaming image. (Cigarette, anyone?) Oops.

via [ LA Times ] BP Grand Entrance at LACMA looking not-quite-so-grand

In 2009 BP gave to Napperville for $1 an extremely expensive Hydrogen fueling station with multipliers of positive effects.

Thomas East Chicago Portrait Series, Energy, Environment, Tar Sands

This video reminds me a lot of how political and regulatory authorities in Northwest Indiana behaved when BP was seeking permits to retool their facilities to refine the Alberta Tar Sands in East Chicago

Thomas Energy, Environment

[ The Gulf Oil Slick ]

Thomas Environment

Like most fence line industrial communities Northwest Indiana’s political attitudes toward environmental issues are determined by local industrial interests.

Northwest Indiana is a Big Oil & Big Steel region.

When faced with the kinds of environmental devastration that I have illustrated on this blog elected officials have the all too familiar instinct to double-down on their love of these industries.

A simple thought - Solve the environmental problems for fence-line industrial communities and you solve the problem for middle-class America and the causes of global warming.

Thomas Environment, Northwest Indiana

Yeah, we do, and we need more information than just these photos.

Thomas Energy, Environment