ISTOCKPHOTO

Last month coal ash from a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) power plant flooded parts of eastern Tennessee. An official, Tom Kilgore, from the coal-burning power plant testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Thursday and admitted that the plant’s containment ponds had not been adequately repaired after previous leaks.

The inadequate repairs along with heavy rains may have lead to the dike-break on Dec. 22 at the Kingston Fossil Plant, which released 1.1 billion gallons of coal ash sludge. The sludge covered hundreds of acres in rural neighborhoods and contaminated the Emory River compromising the drinking water supply.

No one was injured but coal ash contains heavy metals such as, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead and mercury. In large amounts, these metals have been linked to cancers, respiratory diseases, nervous system disorders and reproductive damage.

Kilgore said TVA is willing to buy the affected properties from residents and possibly sell them back after the clean up. But some view this as a larger environmental issue.

The New York Times reported that Senate Committee Chairwoman, Barbara Boxer, of California, passed around a large Mason jar of sludge from the spill at the committee hearing. She said the spill showed the need for strict regulations of fly ash and closer oversight of the TVA.

“The federal government has the power to regulate these wastes, and inaction has allowed this enormous volume of toxic material to go largely unregulated,” Boxer said.

Boxer has pushed for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to declare coal ash a hazardous waste and create national standards for its storage.

Republican Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee agreed.

“TVA needs to do more, the state needs to do more and it may be that the federal government through the EPA needs to do more,” Alexander said.

According to the New York Times, more than 1,300 dumps in the United States contain billions of gallons of fly ash, leaving legislators worried about the possibility of another major spill.

BY BOJAN FATOR/ISTOCKPHOTO

I’d love to be able to say that my electricity comes from solar panels or a backyard wind turbine, but nope, I must admit, it comes from the grid. (My household does purchase green tags to offset our electricity use, but that’s another story.)

But here’s an interesting question: If your electricity comes from the grid, how can you find out what fuels it comes from? Different energy options have different costs and benefits. For example, is it possible that your utility gets some of its power from a wind farm? How about a nuclear power plant? How much of it comes from coal?

You can find out by using this nifty feature on the EPA web site. If you live in the United States, all you have to do is type in your ZIP code and identify your utility, and it gives you a couple of handy graphs and links that tell you which fuels the electricity comes from in your region, how that relates to pollution and how it compares to national averages.

When I typed in my ZIP Code, it showed that here in northeast Kansas our electricity comes predominantly from coal — which unfortunately is associated with a lot of greenhouse gas pollution. And you can see from the graph that our fuel mix does in fact produce more carbon dioxide pollution than the national average.

So if you’d like to find out where your electricity comes from, just try the link and find out. And if you haven’t already, now is a great time to learn more about green power options from your utility, or other renewable energy options for your home.

Climate change getting you down? If you've ever wondered if humanity can really do anything about greenhouse gas emissions, watching David Letterman's recent rant about climate change may help you get it all out of your system. (You can find it here on The Huffington Post. The quick summary: We are dead meat.)

But this week I’ve been feeling more optimistic, and for good reason. On Tuesday and Wednesday I attended the Kansas State Energy Conference to learn more about what’s happening locally and nationally on different energy issues. As part of that, I was lucky enough to get to hear the keynote address from one of the leading experts on climate science, Dr. James Hansen.

Don’t get me wrong, no one is likely to walk away from a lecture on climate change with a rosy view of the Earth’s future. It certainly wasn’t all good news. But at the same time, Hansen wasn’t saying that we’re dead meat or that it’s already too late. Instead, his message was that we still have time to act.

However, it’s a narrow window. We need to take serious action immediately, and it sounds like we’re talking about some pretty major steps — such as figuring out how to get off of coal completely unless we can figure out how to capture and store the carbon. There’s a great article from Hansen here on the Worldwatch Institute Web site with much more information on his views on climate.

Another bright spot: It was exciting to be at the conference and see how much is already happening in the world of wind power. There are a lot of new wind turbines being installed here on the Great Plains and in other windy spots around the world. Let’s keep them coming.

Photo by RUSTY DODSON/ISTOCKPHOTO

This week the U.S. presidential candidates have had a lot to say about energy. Barack Obama released his official energy plan on Monday. John McCain released many of the details of his position on energy back in June.

Both candidates are voicing strong support for improving energy efficiency, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, developing more renewable energy and moving toward energy independence. But the energy issues they’re focusing on and the details of their plans are very different. For instance, McCain is putting much more emphasis on developing nuclear energy, while Obama has set much higher goals for developing electricity from renewable sources.

If you’d like to read more about their plans, CNN has a good summary of the two candidates' positions on energy here.

You can also read the details of the plans on the candidates’ Web sites. You can find more about McCain’s energy plan at www.johnmccain.com, and Obama’s at www.barackobama.com.

If you're concerned about climate change, and want to reduce carbon emissions, you might be surprised how easy it is to figure out how much carbon dioxide is produced by, say, driving to work. Sure, there are a lot of carbon calculators out there where you can plug in all the numbers on how much you drive, and how much electricity you use. But it's also surprisingly easy to estimate yourself.

Here’s how you can do it. If you go to the EPA carbon calculator it gives you recognizable units, like gallons and pounds. (And slightly more confusing units like carbon dioxide equivalent.  Essentially, they’re adding the other greenhouse gases into the number for carbon dioxide. But there’s more about that on the calculator page.)

It’s very simple to use, so here are results I got from spending a few minutes with the EPA calculator and playing with the numbers.

* Every gallon of gas burned produces about 22 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent. (So for simplicity, let's round down to 20.)
* Every therm of natural gas burned produces about 11 pounds. (I think it’s fair to round down to 10.)
* Every kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity produces about 1.7 pounds.
(If rounding up to 2 seems too painful, consider where your electricity comes from. If it comes from coal, yep, round up to 2. For natural gas, you can figure 1 pound. There are some statistics that help justify those numbers here.)

So when you fill up your gas tank, you have a number in gallons. Take it times 20 and you're awfully close to knowing how much carbon dioxide burning that tank of gas will produce. Same thing goes for your electric bill. Take a look at the number of kilowatt hours. Double it (in most cases) and you’re looking at pounds of greenhouse gas emissions.

Want to think more about pounds of carbon emissions and how to lose them? Here are a few related articles:

Eight Projects for Instant Energy Savings, Mother Earth News 

On Carbon Calculators, Grist 

What Makes a Pound of Carbon Dioxide, The Green Guide