Dear
It sounds like the beginning of a horror movie, but it’s all very real. In too many of our waterways around the country, billions of fish are getting chopped up and spit back each year.1 No river, stream or ocean is safe -- if there is dirty coal-fired power plant nearby.
These plants generate so much heat that they cumulatively suck up 200 billion gallons of water each day to stay cool -- and there’s no serious system in place to prevent fish from getting sucked in too!2
Of course, there is a much better way – a technology that would reduce water intake by 95%. It’s just that Big Coal doesn’t want to pay for it -- they would much rather kill our fish and waste our water the way they always have.
Tell the EPA to step up to the plate and save our fish and water now!
It’s the EPA’s job to protect our streams, rivers and oceans from pollution. But under intense pressure from King Coal’s lobbyists, the EPA has proposed letting power plants continue with their wasteful ways in a recent proposed standard they rolled out. Instead, the EPA proposed a standard that offers little-to-no improvement in the technologies required to protect our waterways and our wildlife, leaving technology decisions to state agencies that have proven incapable of taking on this responsiblity after nearly 40 years of state inaction on this very issue.
The EPA cannot pass the buck. If we want to prevent our waterways from getting used up as nothing more than fish-chopping cooling water for dirty coal-fired powerplants, we’re going to have to push back.
Call on the EPA to strengthen its proposed standard by adopting the best standards that protect our waterways from destruction.
Thank you for all you do.
Sincerely,
Sarah Hodgdon
Conservation Director
Sierra Club
P.S. -- After you take action, click here to check out "Chopper," the new Sierra Club animation about how power plants waste water and chop billions of fish with their antiquated cooling systems. Special thanks to Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore for his amazing skills.
[1] "Total Water Use in the United States, 2005," USGS: April, 2011.
[2] "The Quick and the Dead: Fish Entrainment, Entrapment, and the Implementation and Application of Section 316(b) of the Clean Water Act," James May and Maya Van Rossum: 1995.