“I want to fight for my kid to be able to breathe, and Midwest Generation is making it more difficult for my kids to be able to breathe,” Wasserman told The American Independent. “We need to make sure that we are not paying a price for a company that’s making money.”
TimeOut Chicago Magazine:
The petition cites “asthma-causing soot” as one of its main concerns. “I’ve spoken to a lot of kids in the [Little Village] neighborhood, and they call the coal plant ‘the cloud maker,’ ” Orphan says. “And they don’t know that cloud is making them sick.”
If you haven’t seen adorable, frail six year-old Peter Wasserman clutching an inhaler, you will soon. In mid-September, environmental advocacy group Sierra Club launched a massive ad campaign to “raise public awareness about the health risks” of coal plants in the Chicago area. The group placed ads featuring Wasserman—one of many people who live next to the Crawford coal plant in Little Village—in newspapers like Hoy and the RedEye, and in 100 CTA trains.
Sierra Club, a national organization, found itself nancially able to paper the city with its Beyond Coal campaign
after receiving a $50 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies earlier this year. But Chicago’s two coal plants—which, according to the Sierra Club, sit in a three-mile radius of one in four Chicagoans—have other local enemies.
Chicago Clean Power Coalition, a group of about 50 organizations (including the Sierra Club), plans a rally and march in the shadow of Pilsen’s Fisk smokestack on Saturday 24. That day is dubbed International Day of Climate Action, and true to the day’s name, the group takes action by leading Roll Beyond Coal, an 11am bike ride from Daley Plaza to Dvorak Park (1119 W Cullerton St), where the rally commences.
The march aims to use a show of bodies to tell Midwest Generation— owner of both coal plants—“to clean up or retire the plant” and, taking it a step further, to transition workers to clean energy jobs. The Sierra Club’s ad campaign
intends to simply tell Chicagoans that the plants exist. “I don’t think a lot of Chicagoans are aware that we have
coal-operating plants within the city limits,” says Claire Orphan, Sierra Club’s associate press secretary.
“We’re the only major metropolitan area that has one. And we not only have one, we have two.” As of press time, Chicago Clean Power Coalition plans to deliver a petition to City Hall on September 20.
The petition cites “asthma-causing soot” as one of its main concerns. “I’ve spoken to a lot of kids in the [Little Village] neighborhood, and they call the coal plant ‘the cloud maker,’ ” Orphan says. “And they don’t know that cloud is making them sick.”
Little Village, Chicago-At 11:00am today, six activists with the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), Rising Tide North America, Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and the Backbone Campaign were arrested after climbing the fence to Midwest Generation’s controversial Crawford coal plant in Little Village. The activists unfurled a 7′ x 30′ banner atop a 20 foot tall sprawling coal pile that feeds the power plant, which reads: “Close Chicago’s Toxic Coal Plants.”
The groups are demanding the closure of the plant just one day before the much-anticipated Clean Power Ordinance hearing, which could force the plant to undergo major modifications to upgrade their pollution controls.
LVEJO, Rising Tide and RAN Chicago are calling for the closure of Chicago’s two toxic coal-fired power plants, the Crawford plant in Little Village and the Fisk plant in Pilsen, both owned by Midwest Generation. These two plants are Chicago’s largest sources of particulate air pollution. In the last three years alone, these plants combined have spewed over 45,000 tons of pollution into the air, compromising the health of all Chicagoans.
“As a physical education teacher I am alarmed at the high number of students with asthma due to these toxic coal plants. Every class I teach has four to seven students who suffer from horrifying respiratory illness. I can no longer sit back and watch my students and my community being sacrificed for dirty coal,” said Gloria Fallon, a Chicago public school teacher and life long south side resident who participated in today’s protest.
Pollution from these two coal-fired power plants costs neighboring communities $127 million per year in hidden health damages, according to a report released in October, 2010 by the Environmental Law and Policy Center. Particulate matter from the Fisk and Crawford coal-fired power plants impairs visibility and contributes to lung cancer, heart attacks, premature deaths, acute and chronic bronchitis, emergency room visits, asthma and other respiratory illnesses.
Those who live closest to these plants bear the heaviest brunt of these diseases. According to a September 2010 study conducted by the Clean Air Task Force, air pollution from Fisk and Crawford causes more than 40 deaths, 720 asthma attacks and 66 heart attacks annually.
“The struggle over these ancient coal plants, Fisk and Crawford, has gone on for too long. Politicians have stalled and delayed any attempt to clean up these dangerous and outdated plants while people are getting sick and dying,” said Ian Viteri, the clean power organizer with Little Village Environmental Justice Organization and a life long resident of Little
Village. “It’s time to stop playing nice with the politicians in city hall and start taking action in the street.”
The Midwest Generation plants have avoided anti-pollution regulations for years. Fisk started generating electricity in 1903 and was rebuilt in 1959; Crawford’s latest turbines were installed in 1958 and 1961. Tomorrow’s hearing on the Clean Power Ordinance is a significant step in determining the fate of these two relic plants. The ordinance, if passed, would force Midwest Generation to undergo major modifications to upgrade their pollution controls. Local groups, however, are calling for the plants to be shutdown immediately, finding the bill to be too little too late for plants that have already caused too much illness and death.
Fisk and Crawford are two of Chicago’s largest contributors to climate change. In 2007, they emitted nearly five million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) combined into the atmosphere. This is equivalent to the emission from 872,042 cars together. Nationally, coal-fired power plants are the leading cause of global warming pollution in the United States.
Our mission is to work with our families, coworkers, and neighbors to improve our environment and lives in Little Village and through out Chicago through democracy in action. We work for a real voice in building democracy, including if, how, when and where any development of our communities takes place, as the basis for environmental, economic and social justice. Our environment is where we live, work, study, play and pray. We work with, not against our Mother Earth and Nature to once again make our air healthy to breath, our water safe to drink, and to free our earth from poisons to grow healthy foods.
We believe democracy means giving time and space for every voice to be heard and counted in everyday matters, full participation in all types of decision-making that affects our lives, and determining the future of our neighborhood and city. We work to unite our community’s talents, assets, and power to build a society that treats all of us equally: no matter what race, culture, ethnicity, age, or gender we are. In Unity we have the strength to forge economic, environmental and social justice to overcome the barriers of poverty that surround us and build self-determination. We work for justice at home and abroad, connecting our local struggle for democracy with the global one and live by the principle that, as working and poor people of color, we have the right to control our lives and resources.
Transit Riders for Public Transportation (TRPT) is a new national campaign that aims to intervene in the reauthorization of the national surface transportation act. We are changing the terms of the debate by flipping the script. TRPT is asking for an 80% transportation and 20% highway and freeway funding split as a major step towards improving mass transit and stopping the catastrophic speed of global warming. Present federal transit funding has a “formula” of 80% for freeway and highway and only 20% to public transportation. The current act, reauthorized every six years is set to expire in September of this year, and the next act is being hailed as the next “six year stimulus,” worth $500 billion. TRPT is meeting with congressional representatives from Oregon, to New York, to Atlanta, to Los Angeles, and also leading grassroots district campaigns. Continue reading Quality Public Transit is important to everyone! Stand Up for Your Right to Social Justice.
The start of this week marks the commencement of conversations about solutions in all different venues and by different agents. Each of these spaces suitably reflects what it stands for through just glimpsing at their structure.
The UN COP16, a closed meeting area, where government officials and economic leaders are surrounded by federal cops at every access point and kilometers before even arriving.
The big NGO’s and Intellectuals from Mexico are having their panels and activities at “dialogo.” Small space but funded well by Greenpeace.
The activist from Europe have their space in a far location where many can’t access their radical conversations and on a resort.
The general average person who is not an “ecologist” by trade or an activist…but simple a person tired of the current path of the world and of being ignore finds a warm welcome at the Via Campesina space….read more
When the Fisk, Crawford, and State Line coal-fired power plants were built roughly a century ago, they were gleaming symbols of progress and modernization. Fisk made history when it opened in Pilsen in 1903: its five-megawatt vertical steam-driven turbine was the largest of its kind. Crawford went online in 1924, and in 1929 State Line opened on a peninsula jutting into Lake MichiganLake Calumet just over the Indiana border; one of its generating units was then the largest in the world. The three plants powered the striving metropolis, from its industry to its homes to the South Shore electric railroad that still runs right by the State Line plant.
Now the plants are relics, smaller and dirtier than modern coal plants. And Chicago gets its power from a grid that also draws electricity from other, larger coal-burning plants, nuclear plants, and wind farms in the region.
Under the 1977 Clean Air Act, the coal-fired plants were exempted from meeting the same requirements as new facilities because it was assumed they would soon close down anyway. But that day has yet to come, and a national report released by the nonprofit Clean Air Task Force in September says air pollution from the three is likely responsible for 66 premature deaths, 104 heart attacks, more than a thousand asthma attacks, and dozens of cases of chronic bronchitis in the Chicago area each year.
In 1999 ComEd sold Fisk and Crawford to the parent company of current owner Midwest Generation, and in 2002 Virginia-based Dominion Resources bought State Line. Since then, says Henry Henderson, midwest program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)and former Chicago environment commissioner, unexpected regulatory and market developments mean they’ve gone from lucrative investments that could have generated enough revenue for modernization to outdated, marginally profitable “zombie facilities.”
“Midwest Generation paid so much for an antiquated fleet, and then the economics changed drastically,” he says. “Now they’re trying to squeeze out a modicum of return on a bad investment, and the return is being subsidized by people’s health, by asthma attacks and premature death.”
Somebody needed to clear the air in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood.
For years, many residents grew tomatoes and cucumbers—but not in the ground because they suspected the soil in their yards wasn’t safe enough for the food they would put on the family table. “Homeowners who knew better grew produce in pots,” said Kim Wasserman, Little Village Environmental Justice Organization coordinator. “Renters or people who hadn’t been here that long didn’t know any better.”
And for years residents assumed an awful burning smell that permeated the air was annoying, yet safe to breathe. They adjusted uncomfortably to a film of dull gray ash that blanketed windows in the summertime. “People in the neighborhood would be like, ‘What’s that smell?’ ” said Rafael Hurtado, 18, a high school senior and group volunteer who has suffered from asthma since 4th grade. He reasoned, “If it was dangerous, they would have told us by now.” Continue reading We demand clean air, clean power, and the same social justice everyone deserves.
The City of Chicago has a history of privatizing public assets in order to get a quick influx of cash to fill budget holes (the Chicago Skyway and the city’s parking meters were both leased out to private companies, to name a couple examples). Chicago’s economic state is not getting any better, but rather than looking for creative, long-term solutions, the city is continuing with their short-sighted strategy of looking for publicly owned resources to sell off to the highest bidder. The next thing handed over to a for-profit corporation may be a resource so basic that no one can live without it – our public water system. Continue reading Don’t Privatize Our Water
DATE: Friday, February 25th, 2011
TIME: 7:00 PM-9:00pm
LOCATION:
Little Village Lawndale Social Justice High School - 3120 South Kostner
Avenue, Chicago, IL 60623
The Arizona ban on Mexican American Studies represents an attack on
immigrants, people of color, youth, teachers, community control of schools,
and critical pedagogy. Norma Gonzales and Jose Gonzales are two teachers
from the Tuscon Unified School District who are fighting back. They are part
of the newly incorporated group Save Ethnic Studies that is mobilizing
locally, statewide and nationally to resist this unjust law. Join us to
learn about their struggle, stand in solidarity with Tuscon teachers and
students, and build a movement uniting people of color and immigrant groups;
teachers, students and parents in demanding our rights to self-determination
and a quality education
The talk at Social Justice High School is part of a Midwest tour by Save
Ethnic Studies. The event is free and open to everyone. However, in an
effort to support this fight, we will be asking for donations at the door
and will have merchandise for sale. All proceeds will go to Save Ethnic
Studies.
Questions or concerns email: office@lvejo.org
Please RSVP: office@lvejo.org
This program is sponsored by The Little Village Environmental Justice
Organization, Anti Militarization Committee, Social Justice High School &
Teachers for Social Justice.
<http://visitor.r20.constantcontact.com/email.jsp?m=1102285884268>
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Our friends John Lyons and Jackie Rivet-River from Peace Productions just
finished a new PSA for the Clean Power Campaign. Jackie, Pam and I met with
Vi Daley a couple of months ago and Jackie came away so frustrated with
Alderman Daley's ambivalence to the health impacts on children that she set
about producing this piece. I think that you will like it.
Please feel free to circulate far and wide, giving credit to Peace
Productions. Jackie and John are Emmy award winning documentarians and have
done some other great pieces that are highlighted on their website
http://www.peaceproductions.org/. This was done gratis, so if you are
inclined to email a thank-you, I am sure that it would be appreciated.
Peace,
Lan
Eco-Justice Collaborative
1645 W. Jarvis Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60626
(773) 556-3417
www.ecojusticecollaborative.org
Peter is making quite the impact in the Chicago Beyond Coal ad campaign!
Your thoughts…