• Scientific Integrity
• Global Warming
• Clean Vehicles
• Clean Energy
• Nuclear Power
• Nuclear Weapons & Global Security
• Food and Agriculture

 Summer 2009

Newsroom

• Flawed Nuclear Programs Cut
• U.S. Autos to Get a Needed Tune-up
• Clean Energy = Green Jobs
•  A Victory for Public Health
• Nearing Our Goal
• Endangered Species Protected Again
• UCS Recognized for Responsible Approach to Energy
  

Flawed Nuclear Programs Cut
Action reflects our recommendations

Two Bush-era programs opposed by UCS—the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) and the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP)—have been laid to rest.

The RRW program would have replaced nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal with new, untested warheads intended to be more reliable—despite the fact that existing U.S. warheads will remain reliable for another 50 years at least. Our 2008 report Toward True Security recommended that the next president stop RRW and continue existing stockpile stewardship efforts, and the Obama administration omitted RRW from its 2009 budget request.

The GNEP program would have initiated the “reprocessing” of spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors, extracting plutonium for use in new fuel. As we stated in our 2007 report Nuclear Power in a Warming World, however, reprocessing also makes it easier for terrorists to obtain plutonium because the process separates it from dangerously radioactive spent fuel assemblies. In early 2009, UCS provided an expert critique of the proposal, and 11,000 UCS activists submitted comments to the Department of Energy. Congress subsequently denied funds for GNEP, and the Obama administration discontinued its domestic component.

U.S. Autos to Get a Needed Tune-up
Our experts helped shape clean car standard

On May 19, the White House announced a new program aimed at significantly curbing America’s oil dependence and the global warming emissions from our cars and trucks. The new clean car standard sets a goal equivalent to raising the U.S. fleet average fuel economy to approximately 35 miles per gallon (mpg) in 2016. This accelerates the 35 mpg by 2020 goal that Congress set in 2007, and is roughly equivalent to the standards already adopted by 14 states.

Members of our Clean Vehicles Program were invited to the White House for the announcement in recognition of their contributions to the new standard. Our analysis indicates that this standard—compared with current fuel economy levels—would reduce U.S. oil consumption by about 1.4 million barrels per day in 2020, cut heat-trapping emissions by 230 million metric tons, and save consumers at least $30 billion (based on a gas price of $2.25 per gallon). And as outlined in our September report Setting the Standard, we emphasized the fact that automakers can meet this standard using cost-effective, readily available technologies. We will work with the Obama administration to ensure the standard is properly implemented and that meaningful increases are planned for 2017 and beyond.

Clean Energy = Green Jobs
UCS sees economic boost in renewable energy

In March, UCS detailed the economic benefits that would be created by a national renewable electricity standard requiring utilities to increase their use of renewable electricity to 25 percent by 2025. We found that such a standard would support $263 billion of new investments in clean energy facilities, and create 297,000 U.S. jobs by 2025. Increasing use of renewable energy also diversifies the U.S. electricity mix reducing demand for fossil fuels. This not only protects against supply shortages and price spikes, but also lowers electricity and natural gas prices. Our research shows that homeowners, businesses, and industrial consumers in every state would save a total of $64 billion by 2025 as a result of the standard.

In preparation for congressional debate on proposed national renewable electricity standards, UCS staff distributed our analysis to all members of Congress, and conducted an in-person Senate briefing on the results. To learn more about the economic and environmental benefits of a 25 percent standard, see the Clean Energy, Green Jobs analysis.

A Victory for Public Health
UCS helps restore access to pollution data

UCS won a victory in March when the Obama administration rolled back Bush-era changes that significantly limited the information that companies are required to report about their release of toxic chemicals into the environment. We had been working on this problem since 2005, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) first announced its changes to the Toxics Release Inventory, which alerts communities to the presence of deadly chemicals like mercury, lead, and dioxin.

During the public comment period that followed, 31,265 UCS activists—representing more than one of every four comments received by the EPA—expressed their opposition to the changes. This campaign succeeded in undoing some of the Bush proposal’s damaging provisions, but others remained intact. We continued to voice our concern in transition meetings with the incoming Obama administration, which not only followed our recommendation to return to the old reporting requirements, but also went a step further by requiring companies to report chemical releases that occurred while the reporting requirements were relaxed.

Endangered Species Protected Again
But our work is not yet done

This past March, the secretaries of the Departments of the Interior and Commerce rescinded a Bush-era regulation that weakened the scientific foundation of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). President Obama had asked the secretaries to review the regulation, which exempted federal projects such as roads and dams from review by government biologists, regardless of the project’s potential impact on imperiled species. Another unfortunate Bush-era change to the ESA, which limits the types of information that scientists can consider in protecting polar bears (a species  whose habitat is vulnerable to the effects of global warming), remains in place.

UCS had urged President Obama to rescind these rules during his first 100 days in office, and we met with administration representatives to make the scientific case. In partnership with other nonprofits and scientific societies, UCS also organized a letter-signing campaign involving more than 1,300 scientists, who asked the administration to roll back the ESA changes and look for other ways to strengthen the act. Congress made it easier for the administration to act quickly by dispensing with the typically time-consuming rule-making process. UCS will continue to push the administration to improve the way that science is used to protect all imperiled species.