Comments on: Chicago shocker: Tries to meet 20% renewables commitment with 20-year-old rip-offsets

By: barryjo

barryjo — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:35:59 +0000

CCX. Isn’t that the outfit Obama was associated with a while back? Sounds like good old Chicago politics to me.

By: ids

ids — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:38:42 +0000

I did not think Joe’s quote in the article was particularly valid. Daley has no interest in doing anything real or using his clout to upset the status quo, it’s all PR for him.

For instance, from Scientific American
http://www.sciam.com/ article.cfm?id=chicagos-plans-to-go-green
The half-century-old Crawford and Fisk coal plants, located within city limits, spew 4.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year—that’s one third of the desired reduction right there. Chicago could ensure the plants’ closure by approving an ordinance that orders them to install costly scrubbers for nitrogen and sulfur oxides emissions, effectively putting them out of business. But some question the legality of such an order. The plan only suggests the plants could improve—likely because tangling with Midwest Generation, which owns the plants, would be difficult.

From another article in a local paper
http://www.chitowndailynews.org/ Chicago_news/ A_green_city_skeptic,23953
“I think it’s like BP. It’s total public relations fraud.” is more appropriate.

It’s also ironic that in the paper it describes biomass credites as the least effective, and recently Joe is blogging on how great is biomass.

Now, I wonder if this post will get deleted like some others. . .

By: Al

Al — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 04:32:23 +0000

Yeah, but like a lot of the east coast cities, that mass transportation infrastructure was put in place before WWII and took relatively small amount of resources to expand and maintain. And the nuclear was just building them before the cost for quality construction needed in those plants got out of hand. If the Tribune is to believed, that place now seems like “Bush/Cheney world ” democrat style. And when its too expensive to own and park a car, it helps lower the footprint (are the suburbs included in that estimate).

By: Wes Rolley

Wes Rolley — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 04:11:44 +0000

I don’t understand why you think this is a “shocker”. In every case where there is an opportunity to game the system, people will game the system. We have seen this in the carbon trading scheme in Europe. We will see it here again and again.

There were not enough watchdogs in the federal government0 to keep credit default swaps under control. The SEC investigated Madooff multiple times and found nothing. Why do we express shock that Chicago, the city that gave us Dan Rostenkowski and Ex-Governonr Blog-joke-avic, is using the system to their advantage even without any public benefit.

Wes Rolley
CoChair, EcoAction Committee, Green Party US

By: Bob Wright

Bob Wright — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 02:16:16 +0000

With its many apartment and row home dwellers, extensive mass transit, and almost 50% of its electricity from nuclear, greater Chicago has the 15th lowest per capita footprint in the US (out of 100 metropolitan areas reported). Even with those long windy 0 degree winter spells, and 105 degree heat waves.

So Chicago is doing something right.