Sen. Reid Calls for Global Coal Plant Moratorium
Sen. Reid, Senate Majority Leader from Nevada, detailed his position on America’s energy and global warming policy. He called for a moratorium on coal-fired plants and a restructuring of tax policy away from gas and oil and toward renewable energy.
At a community meeting he said:
Let us spend a few billion developing what we have a lot of. We have a lot of sun, we have a lot of wind and we are the Saudi Arabia of geothermal energy. The sooner we move toward the sun, the wind, geothermal, biomass, the better off we’ll be, and we will never do it until we have a tax policy that gives people an incentive to invest in these industries because the big oil companies have controlled America.
More at Grist, It’s Getting Hot in Here, and I Think Mining.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the threat of global warming should preclude the construction of new coal-fired power plants anywhere in the world.The Nevada Democrat last month came out against three proposed major coal-fired plants in his home state, but on Saturday extended that opposition to any such new plants worldwide.
He said each coal-fired plant burns 7 million tons of coal every year, spewing out pollutants that contribute to global warming.
“There’s not a coal-fired plant in America that’s clean. They’re all dirty,” Reid told reporters after speaking at a conference on renewable energy. “Unless we do something quickly about global warming, we’re in trouble.”