Sandra Steingraber gave an excellent comment for my new piece about Chicago's energy aggregation contract.
I grew up Illinois coal country, just downwind from a massive, coal-burning power plant that sent all its power north to Chicago. When I was in high school, in the 1970s, that plant was the biggest polluter in the state, and everyone in my home town of Pekin all suffered from breathing its emissions. My 84-year-old mom, a life-long non-smoker, has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and emphysema. And because that coal, when it burned, sent mercury raining down on our river, the local fish became too poisoned to eat.It's impossible to take Rahm seriously as an environmental leader after he sold fracking as clean energy. Read the rest at HuffingtonPost.
Unfortunately, Chicago residents have been sold a bill of goods by officials who misrepresented a switch from coal to natural gas as 'clean' energy. Natural gas, predominately extracted by fracking, is anything but clean, and once again, people far from Chicagoland will suffer so that Chicagoans can turn on the lights. This time, it's Pennsylvania children living in the shale fields, rather than downstate Illinois kids living by the strip mines, whose health will be sacrificed. So, how is that progress?
For the climate, extraction by fracking results in tremendous leakage of methane, a greenhouse gas 86 times more damaging for the climate than carbon dioxide over 20 years. For people, those living near fracking suffer a range of health ailments including respiratory illnesses, birth defects, and the threat of contaminated water and earthquakes. Chicagoans deserve better than false representations of natural gas as a clean power source; they need true leadership that boldly moves to renewable energy.