The North Side Greens have previously warned that the Obama administration was pushing coal, a principal source of greenhouse emissions.
The Northside Greens have always opposed reliance on fossil fuels. They have campaigned especially hard against an environmentally disastrous mining practice known as mountain top removal.
Greens have never been convinced that either John McCain or Barrack Obama intended to end mountain top removal. They were aware of Obama's (August, 2007) Lexington statement that "We're tearing up the Appalachian Mountains because of our dependence on fossil fuels." Greens were not persuaded: No actual promise to ban mountain top removal had followed, even though the delighted crowd at Lexington clearly thought they had heard one.
The Greens went ahead and slated a candidate of their own. Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney's Congressional voting record was unequivocal on environmental issues. McKinney campaigned on a "Zero Carbon" platform. Her campaign was itself zero carbon, with offsets, avoidance of commercial air, reliance on community resources, etc., demonstrating her commitment to the environment. This was in marked contrast to the corporate funded Obama and McCain campaigns. The Greens were kept off the ballot in numerous states, and as a result, McKinney went down to a lopsided defeat.
Nonetheless, the initial actions of the new administration seemed hopeful. The EPA ordered a halt on new projects. Environmentalists were delighted.
Then came the May 18 announcement. The Obama administration would okay 42 mountain top removal projects.
According to the Sierra Club, there may be as many as 100 such projects in the works. The new coal will constitute a mammoth escalation of US greenhouse emissions.
