Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign

Description

California has a dirty secret: Every day cities across California use coal-fired power plants to produce dirty energy while outsourcing their pollution to other states!

Far from the southern California beaches, the movie studios of Hollywood, and the Golden Gate Bridge, a fleet of coal plants in distant western states churn out power for the California market. These coal plants discharge vast quantities of air pollution, consume huge amounts of water and emit destructive global warming gases.

Some of the largest mining operations in the United States tear up the land in the Southwest to provide the coal they burn.

Every Day, Californians power from these coal plants is transmitted thousands of miles to customers in California... while the pollution and environmental disturbances stay behind, sending a cascade of human health and environmental impacts across the American West and the globe.

• Each year, California's share of dirty coal plants releases a staggering 67 million tons of global-warming carbon dioxide

• The Four Corners Power Plant and the San Juan Generating Station, which is partly owned by the Southern California Public Power Authority, the city of Anaheim, the Imperial Irrigation District and the MSR Public Power Agency, have the unfortunate distinction of being the top two
  mercury-emitting power plants in the American West.

• The Navajo Generating Station and the Four Corners Power Plant eachconsume more than 8 billion gallons of water every year.