Last Sunday, the New York Times Magazine ran a gushing profile of Jim Rogers, the CEO of Duke Energy in Charlotte, N.C. Penned by staff writer Clive Thompson, who found his subject "charming and natty," the article repeated the oft-heard praise that because he acknowledges the threat of greenhouse gas pollution and the need for his company -- the nation's third-largest carbon emitter -- to do something about it, Rogers is an "environmentalist." Why, he even talks to scientists:
For years, he has opened his doors to the kinds of green activists who would give palpitations to most energy C.E.O.’s. In March, he had breakfast with James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia theory, which regards the earth as a single, living organism, to discuss whether species can adapt to a warmer earth. In April, James Hansen, a climatologist at NASA and one of the first scientists to publicly warn about global warming, wrote an open letter urging Rogers to stop burning coal -- so Rogers took him out for a three-hour dinner in Manhattan. "I would dare say that no one in the industry would talk to Lovelock and Hansen," Rogers told me.
It's true that Rogers, a former reporter, has cultivated a green media image. Of course, he's had some help with that from Duke Energy's formidable in-house public relations department, and private P.R. firms including California-based Marston+Marston and Grossman Strategies of New York. Then there's Duke's army of lobbyists in state capitals, and its Washington-based political action committee, which so far in the 2008 federal election cycle has spent about $900,000 on various politicians, according to OpenSecrets.org.
But is Rogers really the green dreamboat the Times makes him out to be? Let's examine some of the claims in the magazine's mash note:
QUESTIONABLE CLAIM #1: Duke's coal-fired plants "produce clean air."Thompson visited the company's massive Cliffside coal-fired power plant in Rutherford County, N.C. to check out its pollution control equipment. Speaking to him afterwards, Rogers said, "Sometimes I tell people that Duke is really just a company that processes chemicals to produce clean air, and we get electricity as a byproduct." Thompson didn't examine this claim further.
So how clean is the air produced by Duke's facilities?
According to Cliffside's toxics release inventory, the plant emitted more than 4.2 million pounds of toxic air pollution in 2006 alone -- including some 3.7 million pounds of hydrochloric acid, 265 pounds of lead, and 174 pounds of mercury. And that's the pollution from just one of the company's coal-fired power plants.
In 2006, Duke's 14 coal plants across the Carolinas, Indiana and Kentucky emitted more than 61 million pounds of pollution -- including more than 48 million pounds of hydrochloric acid, 8,000 pounds of lead, and 2,700 pounds of mercury. This year, researchers at the University of Massachusetts identified Duke as the nation's 13th-largest corporate polluter, having more than doubled its total emissions of toxic chemicals since 2002 to 80 million pounds per year.
Meanwhile, Duke has fought requirements to clean up its emissions. Last year, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower court decision and ruled that Duke violated the Clean Air Act when it modernized its coal plants without buying required pollution control equipment.
----------
Full article
