Your Social Justice or Your Air Conditioning
Tucker, William
Your Social Justice or Your Air Conditioning The Big Apple ponders power plant racism BY WILLIAM TUCKER A A couple of years ago. during a doormen's strike. the Nev) Y'Ork'f'inies ran a...
...We believe the peaking problem can be solved by exercising price controls...
...Amazingly, the Sierra Club is also pushing a natural gas pipeline at Prudhoe Bay to bring out more gas...
...Because they require access to both high-voltage lines and natural gas pipelines, the new generators must be located near existing electrical substations or heavily wired industrial sites...
...One, the Down Payment Assistance Initiative, will spend a billion dollars over five years to subsidize downpayments for poor people to buy homes...
...the Nev) Y'Ork'f'inies ran a front-page headline, "Some Apartment Residents Say It's Almost Fun.- East Side matrons who had never encountered a garbage disposal were carrying out their own trash...
...We've been supporting the new ndrew Cuomo, Clinton's second HUD secretary, boasted about securing hefty budget increases, stretched agency power in every direction, and left a trail of waste that nearly overwhelmed both the General Accounting Office and the HUD Inspector General...
...The Sierra Club-now coping with rotating blackouts in San Francisco-has taken a similar tack...
...Utilities such as Con Edison have gotten out of the business of building and terra problems when he led the closing of Long Island Lighting Company's Shoreham Nuclear Facility before it ever opened...
...Martinez is already publicly positioning himself as a champion of his agency-as opposed to American taxpayers...
...Stuck with a $3 billion loss, LI LC 0 eventually went bankrupt and was taken over by the state...
...That was enough to pull the New York Times into their corner...
...combined-cycle gas generators since the early 1990s," says Carl Pope, national executive director...
...Sobered by the California experience, some older environmental groups are taking a new approach...
...The Cuomo Doctrine Lives Vacant houses, bad loans: Bush's urban policy threatens the working poor BY JAMES BOVARD THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR May 2001 19...
...As usually happens when private enterprise is politically thwarted, the ball was handed to the state...
...In a time "when a lot of departments have seen cuts in their budget," Martinez bragged in March, "the HUD budget will be increased by over $2 billion and, in fact, it will be a real growth in the budget of 6 to 7 percent...
...The new power plants are twice as efficient as the old ones...
...Businessmen were running the elevators or manning the lobby desk...
...Not wanting...
...It is difficult to image a more ominous start for an appointee in a conservative administration...
...The club is supporting Calpine's proposed 600-megawatt generator in San Jose-against the opposition of both the City of San Jose and Cisco Systems...
...the Power Authority has delicately limited each new site to producing 79.9 megawatts The first objections came from Silvercup Studios, producers of "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City:" which was planning a new soundstage on the East River...
...Unfortunately, Mel Martinez, the multi-millionaire former personal injury lawyer whom Bush named as HUD secretary, is taking up where Cuomo left off...
...The goal for a national organization like this can't be to stop everything," says Gupta...
...The first objection, of course, is air pollution...
...Basically they are jet engines run on natural gas...
...gas turbines are not the prettiest way to produce electricity...
...We love solar and wind but we also recognize that some new gas plants are going to be necessary...
...Transmission lines into the city are already overloaded and can't reliably meet emergency or peak demands during air-conditioning season...
...to play tootsie with regulators For a couple of years...
...A flood That was enough to pull the New York Times into their corner...
...We also tried to find at least an acre of land to buffer the surrounding communities...
...Despite the pending electricity crisis, the generators were soon being opposed in court...
...We had a long talk with Governor Pataki and he convinced us not to oppose it," said Ashok Gupta, senior economist at the Natural Resources Defense Council...
...Silvcrcup complained that noise from the turbines would ruin filming and threatened to move back to Hollywood- (Apparently no one told them there were problems back there as ,vell...
...This will, in many cases, treat the dependent poor better than the working-class poor who struggle to save for their own downpayments...
...People who live near power plants or industrial areas are often poor or working-class...
...It couldn't possibly be-could it?--that New Yorkers still don't understand that you can't have electricity without building power plants...
...New York needs a few more generatorti Just as in California, however, nobody wants to live near one...
...New York State hasn't added one since 1994...
...Yet even as activist lawyers pose as energy experts, the old-line environmental groups are quietly standing apart...
...Admittedly...
...The alternative was to start digging up the streets," says Leary...
...Maybe it's a are content to sit hack and watch the independent energy companies face public wrath...
...As summer approaches, New Yorkers are facing a shortage of 400 megawatts-the output of one small generating station, enough to power about -00),{)0{} homes...
...After just a few weeks in office, Martinez and the Bush administration have proposed several more programs...
...Environmentalists from Yonkers to Albany are opposmg new generators to prevent what they call the "reindustrial1Zatlon of the Hudson...
...says Joe Leary, spokesman for the Power Authority- "You need access to both high-voltage lines and natural gas outlets...
...So maybe that's it...
...These facilities have been exclusively sited in neighborhoods that are disproportionately disadvantaged and disproportionately made up of low-income people and people of color," said Matt Stanislaus, vice president of the Environmental Justice Alliance...
...Power plants are racist...
...They're cheaper and cleaner...
...In a city where 60 percent of the population is black or Hispanic, it isn't at all surprising that some of these generators ended up near "people of color...
...Their complaint...
...The New York Power Authority is trying to site eleven gas-turbine generators somewhere in the city to prevent shortages this summer...
...We do care about the environment but we like to stick to the facts...
...Every time you build one of these clean new plants, you can back out two old ones...
...It comes on top of all the other federal programs and mandates to subsidize low-income home buyers...
...Accommodating 11 generators might seine a small price for keeping the air conditioner running, but hypersensitive New Yorkers are reluctant...
...What's going to get us there is the technology...
...The Power Authority [should] return to the neighborhoods, reopen discussion on where to put the turbines and begin building broader public support ...ensur[ing] that the generators do not disproportionately affect poorer neighborhoods...
...18 TIIE AMERICAN SPECTATOR M11av 2001 But the main actors became the predictable lawyers' groups-the Naderite New York Public Interest Research Group, the foundationsponsored New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, and the 25-year-old New York Environmental Justice Alliance...
...I never realized how these things worked;' gushed one socialite...
...And so, despite the pending electricity crisis, the generators were soon being opposed in court...
...Our criteria was very simple...
...Robinson Crusoe-like curiosity to see what life would be like n4tl+out electricity that's leading New York dowel the path already charted by California...
...Natural gas is the cleanest fuel, producing only- small amounts of nitrous oxide...
...New York City hasn't built a new power plant since 1959...
...Somebody better tell Hillary before she wastes billions of federal dollars trying to revive the area-) Governor Mario Cuomo left long Maybe it's a Robinson Crusoe-like curiosity to see what life would be like without electricity that's leading New York down the path charted by California...
...We've got a situation where you're pumping clean fuel back into the ground so you can bring out something dirtier-oil...
...But state law requires all facilties generating more than 80 1 megawatts to undergo environmental review...
...Since no steam is generated, however, they can be put on--line quickly- In November, the Power Authority announced it had selected seven sites in the Five Boroughs and Long Island...
Vol. 34 • May 2001 • No. 4
