Strange Bedfellows: Activists and Labor Opposing Credits for Waste-to-Energy

Date: May 4, 2009

Source: News Room

A coalition of environmental and civil rights groups is lobbying Congress to reject proposals that would credit landfill methane or waste-to-energy projects as clean-energy sources or emission offsets under potential federal renewable energy or climate change programs. These groups argue that recycling rather than burning the waste as fuel would generate significantly more green jobs and that methane credits encourage landfills. The grassroots organizations including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, California Communities Against Toxics, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) and International Rivers are apparently coordinating their efforts with major labor unions under the umbrella of the Change to Win coalition, a group of unions formed in 2005 as an alternative to the AFL-CIO, in an effort to collaborate on the waste-to-energy issue. Their position is in marked contrast to the stance of major national groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural ResourcesDefense Council, which endorse some kind of a role for offsets in climate legislation for reasons that include bolstering political support and achieving a market for forest protection in developing nations. Proponents of burning landfill methane and wastes as fuel say the procedures avoid the greenhouse gas effects of producing traditional fuels, such as oil and coal. Behind the effort is the theory that recycling plants employ far more workers than do waste-to-energy plants and that raising costs to landfill will encourage more labor-intensive (job creating) recycling with less impact to the environment.

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