Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
State Capitol Building
Sacramento, CA 95814

RE: Promote renewable energy and stop promoting dirty power

Dear Governor Schwarzenegger,

I strongly urge you to immediately stop California from moving to secure more electric power from dirty and dangerous coal-fired power plants and instead act to ensure that California’s new electric energy sources come from safe and sustainable renewable energy.

Current California law requires one-fifth of California’s electric energy to come from renewable sources in just 12 years, and you have said you want to achieve this goal even sooner. However, with a real opportunity to receive renewable wind and geothermal energy from Nevada, you have continued to propose major new imports of dirty coal power from Wyoming and Nevada. Although you claim that this new energy will actually be “renewable,” in reality nearly all of it is polluting coal-produced energy, with only a small fraction based on wind power.

When Californians turn on a light switch using dirty coal-produced energy, people in other states suffer the negative health effects of air pollution, and the entire world suffers from global warming. Perhaps most disturbingly, coal plants spew hundreds of thousands of lethal mercury each year. Mercury is a powerful neurotoxin already so widespread that it threatens one in six women of child-bearing age.

Sempra Generation has plans to build a coal-fired power plant in Northern Nevada and sell the electricity to California. The plant would pollute the region, pour more deadly mercury into the environment, increase global warming, and kill development of Nevada’s renewable resources by taking the remaining available capacity on existing transmission lines that could otherwise be used to carry renewable energy to market.

Please tell Sempra that California will NOT buy electricity from a new coal-fired plant, and instead demand that they develop sources of truly renewable, non-polluting energy that will rapidly allow America’s most populous and influential state to meet and exceed the required goal of one-fifth of electric energy sources coming from safe and sustainable renewable energy within a decade.