COMMENT SESSION WITH EPA IN MISSOURI

On Monday November 4, the EPA is holding a comment session in Lenexa, Kansas, for EPA Region 7. You can also submit a comment in writing if not able to make it to the live session. Be sure to click the link about how to comment. Here is the comment that I just submitted to them myself.

COMMENT TO THE EPA

One third of our carbon pollution in the USA is coming from energy production. Ameren Missouri is the largest corporate provider of home, government and industry electrical power in Missouri, especially in the two largest metro areas, St. Louis and Kansas City. Our state is also largely rural, so there are many individual electrical cooperatives in the countryside as well. Although I lived more years of my life in St. Louis than any other place, I am now a resident of Mexico, Missouri, and have also lived in four other small Missouri towns at various times. Here we have both electrical power and natural gas provided by Ameren Missouri, a company that is probably one of the wealthiest corporations in the State. Over eighty percent of Missouri's electrical power is produced from coal. Coal is definitely a global warming producing fuel, and known to affect children and adults with respiratory and heart disease.

Meanwhile, we have Calloway County Nuclear Plant still working, and it has had an occasional issue that required at least partial shutdowns. With the risks of how to dispose of nuclear waste, as is also still in existence in North St. Louis County, related to previous weapon related waste, no one I have ever known personally is in favor of nuclear power.

In recent past years we had a ballot initiative passed that sought to increase the amount of energy obtained from renewable resources such as wind, solar, geothermal and water power. In fact, however, the State Legislators have sought to override this kind of citizen driven upgrade by adding in the already existing hydroelectric plants at the Bagnell Dam, where construction was completed in 1931 by crews that included my uncle Fred. So my personal perspective has been that our officials are not as friendly to increasing renewable energy as the citizenry is. We definitely need more solar, wind and geothermal power here. The grid has been upgraded, I have heard, to allow for shared overages from home solar. But we need to move away from fossil fuels altogether. Home solar alone cannot accomplish that.

On the other hand large installations of solar are plausible on large box stores, on some rooftops of large industries and wind power in North East Missouri is quite feasible and in use-- perhaps expandable. More wind could readily be installed in our State or imported from Kansas and points west. As a child I saw windmills of the old metal sort all over the State when we traveled to visit relatives in the countryside.

Ameren may have a solar installation somewhere in St. Louis County too. But we are still burning over eighty percent of energy from coal! It is time for Missouri to move into new territory with decreasing the use of any sort of fossil fuel. I am not in favor of substituting so-called clean natural gas for coal.

As a member of the Sierra Club and a citizen environmentalist I hope we can move in a direction that will stall global warming trends for the future of our next generations. I believe this is still possible. The organization is seeking to upgrade or shut down coal plants across the USA; and in this State we need to focus first on the oldest plant, the Meramec Plant, and then on the Labadie Plant.

One of the oldest operating plants is the Meramec Plant, and it can barely be upgraded, so it is perhaps needing to be scrapped. Then we can work to upgrade or change the Labadie Plant, which affects more people with air pollution-- that causes human illness, by impairments and early death-- than any other plant in the State. The Ameren solutions offered, such as lower energy use light bulbs, are well and good. But I hope that the Environmental Protection Agency, working with Missourians, can establish regulations to change the quantity of global warming emissions that we produce in our State.

Thank you so much for considering my comments and meeting with Missourians.