Progress Illinois

This morning, environmental advocates in Chicago kicked off a 24-hour vigil outside of 25th Ward Ald. Danny Solis' neighborhood office. The protesters are pressuring the city councilman into co-sponsoring legislation -- called the Chicago Clean Power Ordinance -- that would require Midwest Generation's Fisk and Crawford coal-fired power plants to cut the amount of climate change-causing carbon dioxide they spew by 50 percent and particulate matter by 90 percent over four years. 

Securing Solis as a co-sponsor would mark an important symbolic milestone in the fight for this bill: Solis' ward includes the Fisk plant and the alderman has a deep relationship with Midwest Generation, which opposes the proposed ordinance. According to research compiled by the Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization (PERRO), Solis has accepted 19 donations from the company worth $48,900 since 1999, making them his third most generous contributor over that time period. Midwest Generation spokesman Charley Parnell, himself a member of a Solis political fundraising committee, said the company's executives often get involved in areas where the firm operates and argued the donations have had no outsized impact on Solis. He pointing out that Ald. Rick Munoz (22nd Ward) has thrown his support behind the Clean Power bill and accepted donations from the firm. "Their argument is fundamentally flawed," he said. 

Solis himself was unavailable this morning when PERRO began its vigil and delivered a 1,541-signature petition in support of the bill to his office. But the hand-off did lead to a debate about the Clean Power Ordinance's merits between PERRO member Jerry Mead-Lucero and Maya Solis, a spokesperson for the alderman. Solis insisted that the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency was better suited to regulate emissions and noted the federal government may regulate carbon emissions. Mead-Lucero and other advocates pushed back against her policy take.

Ald. Solis supported a failed 2002 bill offered by Ald. Ed Burke (14th Ward) that would have regulated some emissions coming out of Fisk and Crawford. Environmental campaigners and 25th Ward residents say they plan to keep the pressure on Solis (who's getting pressed on other neighborhood issues as well) until he backs the new ordinance, too. It'll be a stiff battle. The environmentalists will get another chance to make the case to Solis; his spokeswoman promised a meeting today after what Mead-Lucero said was six months of silence from the alderman on the issue.

While scientists have not yet made a definitive link between extreme weather and climate change, former New York Times' environmental reporter Andrew Revkin argues that today's brutal storms, heat waves, snow storms, and droughts "give us the feel, sweat and all, of what’s to come if emissions are not reined in." Environment Illinois (EI) agrees. Surveying the latest in science research, the environment group released a new report this morning documenting how global warming -- left unaddressed -- could make costly and dangerous extreme weather events, like the Midwestern flood of 2008, more common in the future:

Already this year, the U.S. Senate has punted on a comprehensive climate change bill. Thankfully, they voted down a "resolution of disapproval" authored by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) that would have would effectively stripped the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of its authority to regulate carbon under the Clean Air Act. EI is asking for a commitment from Illinois' two sitting senators to vote against legislation introduced this spring that would impose a two-year moratorium on any carbon regulations targeted at power plants by the EPA. During the upcoming U.S. Senate campaign, U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk should also be asked whether he would block EPA efforts to limit carbon emissions. Given his new interest in dirty energy campaign contributions, we'd be curious to hear his answer.

Even the folks who might have benefited economically from the FutureGen plant -- residents of Mattoon -- want out of a new deal proposed for the site by the U.S. Department of Energy. After the government decided only to use the site as an underground storage unit for carbon, thereby scrapping plans to build the nation's first commercial-scale coal plant equipped with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology, town leaders have decided to drop out of the project altogether.

This could serve as a death-blow to FutureGen 2.0, a plan Will Reynolds equated with "someone in the 1920's researching the most advance horse and buggy technology to compete with the new-fangled automobile." Unfortunately, the state legislature can't take back the cash it spent lobbying for the experimental project and eventually supporting (PDF) its early development. It can, however, spend our money on wise energy investments moving forward.