Just in time for the holidays, residents of the rural town of Muncy, PA just had their local borough council pass into law a set-back distance ordinance we wrote. It prohibits any new facilities requiring a state air pollution or waste permit from locating within 900 feet of an occupied dwelling, school, park, or playground.

This effectively blocks Delta Thermo Energy, a company we've been fighting for several years, having stopped them in 2014 from locating in the City of Allentown, PA. They planned to take 100-200 tons per day of trash and sewage sludge, turn it into "fuel pellets" through a "hydrothermal decomposition" process, then incinerate these waste pellets on-site. Of course, their magical process exploits an EPA loophole, allowing this waste not to be considered a waste anymore, so they can be regulated less strictly -- as a boiler or power plant, not as an incinerator.

They came to Muncy, PA in the summer of 2016, proposing the same, but after facing resistance, the proposal soon became one to just make the pellets, and market them to be burned in coal power plants in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. EPA's Clean Power Plan, and their Non-Hazardous Secondary Materials ("waste = fuel") rule incentivize this. While the Clean Power Plan is dead for now, the other incentives may continue, and could encourage coal plants to stay open longer than they otherwise would, and become dirtier by starting to burn waste without additional pollution controls.

Delta Thermo Energy has been unusually tenacious. Most companies give up after one or a few times being rejected. We expect to have to beat them again soon, as rumor has it that they may be looking at more sites near Muncy. They brag about having 22 local governments interested between Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and we know of several that have already rejected them. Keep an eye out, and be in touch with us if they (or any other polluters) are coming your way!

Don't try this at home... without our help.

We'd love to work with other communities to get protective local ordinances passed to stop proposed or potential polluters, or to even set stricter requirements for existing facilities where possible. Please be in touch if you'd like to work together on this approach in your community. Do not simply copy ordinances we've had passed elsewhere. While most of the Muncy ordinance is as we proposed, some good things were removed or kept out, and it could have been stronger in some regards. Every community is different, so feel free to check out the resources we have on stopping polluters with local ordinances, but contact us to help develop a strategy that makes sense for your situation. Thanks!

Want to know where U.S. energy currently comes from? Check out this new series of charts we just updated, based on data through August 2016, with projections for all of 2016. Find all of them here: www.energyjustice.net/energysources

Here are some of the highlights:

• Overall energy demand peaked in 2007. Energy demand is broken down into electricity, transportation and heating sectors. Electricity and transportation sector energy use also both peaked in 2007. Heating sector peaked in 1970.
• Oil, gas, then coal are still our top three energy sources, followed by nuclear in 4th place.
• Coal use is falling dramatically, while gas use is rising dramatically. In 2012, gas overtook nuclear as the second largest electricity source after coal. Gas will soon overtake coal as well.
• As we predicted, the largest sector of natural gas use is now for electricity (overtaking the industrial heating sector), as we're in the middle of a second wave of construction of gas-fired power plants, with at least 300-some proposed in recent years, many of which are now online. We still import more LNG than we export, so the gas market is largely feeding electric power plants, not exports.
• Despite several nuclear reactors closing in recent years, nuclear energy use is steady and slightly increasing (existing plants are being run harder).
• Wind and solar are growing fast, but are still small.
• Bioenergy is still the largest form of "renewable" energy, even though it's dirty, and worse for the climate than coal. Thankfully, it's stagnating since 2014 and stopped its rapid increase.
• Heating fuel use is down a lot since 2014, probably due to global warming and record high temperatures, since it's mostly residential and commercial heating. Industrial heating (the largest part of it) hasn't fallen much in that time.
• Biomass incineration peaked in 2014 and is now falling, thanks in large part to our activist network fighting off so many proposed facilities. Wood for home heating is falling fast, which is also good.

See more at www.energyjustice.net/energysources

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"548","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"287","style":"width: 333px; height: 199px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: Inhabitat.com","width":"480"}}]]Since 2011, Maryland has been notorious for being the only state to classify trash as equivalent to wind power in a renewable energy mandate. Over half of the "renewable" energy used to meet the mandate still comes from smokestacks at paper mills, landfills, trash, and biomass incinerators in 12 states spanning New Jersey to Wisconsin to Tennessee.

For the past few years, we've been warning that expanding a dirty renewable energy mandate without first cleaning it up would mean trouble. In recent years, Maryland has faced plans for two large new incinerators, which were closer to reality than any in the nation. These fully permitted incinerator proposals both fell to defeat after five and eight year grassroots efforts. Destiny Watford, a Baltimore resident who got involved while attending the high school within a mile of the proposed Energy Answers incinerator, just received the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for her leadership in that battle.



Despite these high profile incinerator battles, the Maryland Climate Coalition (a coalition of mainstream environmental groups, led largely by Chesapeake Climate Action Network) chose to keep pushing to expand the state's Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) while declining to support the parallel effort to first remove smokestack technologies from the mandate. The bill we drafted to clean up Maryland's RPS was introduced with strong support from the Maryland Chapter of Sierra Club, and many of us testified at hearings on the bill, which was aggressively opposed by the incinerator and paper mill industries.

While our legislation was handily shot down, we did a lot to educate legislators and build momentum for next year. As the RPS expansion bill passed, an amendment to strip trash incineration out of the law came within one vote of passing! This is a good sign for next year, especially as both major trash incinerator proposals in Maryland are now dead, and the smallest of three existing incinerators just closed for good in March.



The data for 2015 just came out, showing that wind power declined for a second year in a row, while dirty "renewable" energy increased again, with biomass use nearly doubling while black liquor burning at paper mills also increased, though use of trash incineration thankfully fell.



Victory: Stopped a bad bill!

In related legislative efforts, the Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority was the subject of a battle we won. The Authority has been the driver behind existing and proposed waste incinerators in Maryland. In 2015, we worked with Caroline Eader and Frederick, Maryland residents (who fought off the Authority's incinerator proposal in an 8-year battle) to pass a bill redefining the Authority's mission to be about zero waste. The Authority objected and we came within one vote of passing the bill. In 2016's legislative session (that ends in early April each year), the Authority pushed a bill to expand their powers, pretending they were about "resource recovery parks," but seeking to be able to bond a wide range of waste and energy facilities, including many dirty technologies, while bypassing state utility approval processes.



Energy Justice staff, Dante Swinton and Mike Ewall, were the only ones to testify at the hearing before the Maryland Senate Environmental Committee. The Authority testified that "waste-to-energy" (incineration) is not politically or economically viable in Maryland, and insisted that they're a service organization to their member counties and that they'd follow the lead of the legislature if they prescribe a zero waste hierarchy.



The Senate committee then took the zero waste hierarchy straight from our testimony and amended that language into the Authority's bill. Within a day, the Authority interfered and replaced our zero waste hierarchy with EPA's waste hierarchy that includes incineration and puts it above landfilling, yet still branded it a "zero" waste hierarchy. This dreadful bill passed the Senate unanimously.



With help from Sierra Club and other allies, we beat back the bill in the House, with spectacular skepticism expressed by Maryland Delegates at the hearing where we all denounced the bill. In the course of all of this, we developed some good momentum to beat back incineration and push for true zero waste in the 2017 session.

See more at http://www.energyjustice.net/md