Mary Anne Hitt will join the staff of Energy Innovation in May after more than a decade at the Sierra Club; she is also a public voices fellow of the OpEd Project and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Rev Lennox Yearwood Jr. is the president and founder of Hip Hop Caucus, a minister, community activist, and U.S. Air Force veteran.
Drive two hours east of Dallas, or about an hour west from Shreveport, Louisiana, and you’ll find yourself on the doorstep of one of the biggest polluters in America. The Martin Lake coal plant, owned by Vistra, ranks No. 1 for toxic mercury emissions and No. 3 for deadly sulfur dioxide pollution among all U.S. power plants. Year after year, it continues to pollute while also pumping millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to the climate crisis.
The plant was built in the late 1970s and chugs along four decades later without scrubbers, a baghouse, or selective catalytic reduction technology — modern technologies that mitigate pollution — and continues to violate EPA public health standards. Mercury from smokestacks rains down and into waterways and ca... Read more