Green coal baron?

NYT Magazine's fawning piece on Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers

Posted by Frank O'Donnell (Guest Contributor) at 12:02 AM on 22 Jun 2008

There's no doubt about it: Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers is the most adept figure in corporate America at making himself look better than he is.

He's proven it again in an extremely flattering profile in The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

The piece refers to Rogers as "one of the electricity industry's most vocal environmentalists." Indeed, the piece reports that many "prominent environmentalists" are his "friends" and quotes in particular Eileen Claussen, head of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, saying, "It's fair to say that we wouldn't be where we are in Congress if it weren't for him," and that "he helped put carbon legislation on the map."

That legislation, the Lieberman-Warner bill, sputtered apart when the Senate took it up. (Even though we're told Barbara Boxer staged a post-failure victory celebration. Never underestimate the power of self delusion in Washington.) And one reason for its demise was the active opposition of Rogers, who mobilized numerous businesses to complain about the costs.

Rogers' angle was pretty obvious. Even though the flawed legislation would have given his company $1 billion dollars in free carbon permits, it wasn't enough. He wanted much more. In effect, he demanded ransom. All the while he cheerfully chats about "decarbonizing" his coal-burning company. Right.

Of course, that is not the only Duke double-speak when it comes to the environment. You may recall that Duke led an effort to gut EPA requirements designed to require cleanup of existing electric power plants when they make major modifications (so-called "new source review"). The case went all the way to the Supreme Court before Rogers lost. And one of his company's arguments was that it would be preferable to use a "cap and trade" approach to reduce emissions.

Yet Rogers is also fighting in court against the Bush cap-and-trade strategy for reducing power plant emissions of deadly sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. (The Clean Air Interstate Rule, a compromise plan backed by most environmentalists.)

If Rogers wins that case -- and a decision is imminent from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit -- more than 10,000 Americans will die prematurely each year from the extra pollution.

Rogers really does have a hell of a PR machine.

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In a world of double-speak and delusion.......

..... PR machines win, don't they Jim?

The family of humanity is only now starting to learn unexpectedly and painfully about certain human-induced global threats that could soon be presented to the human community by the seemingly endless growth of per human consumption and unbridled production activities increasing exponentially and overspreading the surface of Earth in our time.

Let us the consider the way many too many economists, politicians and their super-rich benefactors who primarily govern the workings of the news media, report to us that Earth can indefinitely sustain people conspicuously consuming its limited resources the way millions of fortunate people worldwide are doing; but I fear these intelligent `dreamers' have lost their reality-orientation with regard to human biological limits and the limitations of the bounded physical world we inhabit. The Earth is relatively small, evidently finite and noticeably frangible; it is neither an eternal provider like a mother's teat nor is it an endlessly overflowing cornucopia. Unlimited expansion of the global economy without regard to limits to its growth that are inevitably imposed by a finite world is an end-all strategy, I suppose.

A planet with the limitations and the make-up of Earth cannot realistically be expected to much longer maintain profligate over-consumption and adamantine hoarding of limited resources as well as seemingly endless expansion of production capabilities by millions of people, mostly in the overdeveloped world, that we see occurring as a result of actions by a tiny minority of selfish people who possess the wealth and power needed to behave in this ostentatious way.

Obscene displays of consumption by self-seeking people with great wealth could be directly undermining the biophysical integrity of Earth as well as precipitating deleterious effects upon its environs. Please consider how scarce resources are being recklessly dissipated and global ecosystems relentlessly degraded at a much faster rate than the Earth can restore its resources and ecological services for human benefit. Unintended, pernicious challenges resulting from the unrestrained increase of per capita over-consumption of Earth's finite resources and the unbridled growth of economic globalization appear to be threatening to ravage our planetary home.

Perhaps the current scale as well the anticipated growth of per human over-consumption and the global economy could become unsustainable well before the year 2050.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php

by stevenearlsalmony at 5:42 AM on 22 Jun 2008

With allies

Like this, who needs opposition? Evidently that is the philosophy behind NRDC and other main stream environmental lobbying groups and eco-minded main stream media.

Allying themselves with the CEOs of the worst polluters and at the same time making greenwash talk to members who donate. That's the strategy.

That's what is behind "clean" coal CCS. Fuel farming and nukes too. We all know these are very bad dead ends for our climate, and yet they spew propaganda like this times' piece.

Murdoch doesn't need to buy the NYT and other media outlets. By firing all opposition to his radical right wing politics at the WSJ, he has scared the rest of the media into submission.

Except GE/NBC? Immelt does seem to be turning into an actual ally of the environmental movement. He sure takes a lot of chances. and what about Buffet? He is boosting wind and dissing coal too.

We do have allies in boardrooms, but this coal burner is not one of them.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

by amazingdrx at 9:02 AM on 22 Jun 2008

ADVERTISING POLICY

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