West's Largest Coal-Fired Power Plant Confirms Shutdown Plan, Miners Fight to Save Jobs

Coal miners and supporters, many of them members of the Navajo and Hopi tribes, rallied in Phoenix Tuesday to protest the impending shutdown of the West's largest coal-fired power plant.
While Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke expressed his continued support for keeping the Navajo Generating Station open in a brief statement Tuesday, owners of the plant say they still are planning to take it offline in 2019 due to price pressures from natural gas.
The future of the plant, which provides more than 800 jobs to primarily Navajo and Hopi workers as well as tribal royalties, has proved a flash point for national and regional energy policy and raised larger questions on how Native communities will handle ties to fossil fuel industries as the economy changes. "I understand, we understand, you understand the challenges," Navajo Nation Council Speaker LoRenzo Bates said in a speech at the rally. "There's your jobs, the revenue, the economy, the water, but it goes beyond that. If NGS does shut down ... those jobs are going to be very hard to replace."
As reported by the Arizona Republic:
"The plant is owned by SRP, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Arizona Public Service Co., NV Energy and Tucson Electric Power.
So far there are no publicly identified potential buyers for the coal plant. SRP officials say that without a buyer, they are beginning the shutdown, which will force Kayenta Mine to close as well.
'It's closing,' SRP President David Rousseau said. 'Absent a unicorn energy company dropping in ... '
Some of the speakers Tuesday said that President Donald Trump and Department of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke could help prevent the coal plant's closure.
But so far, the government has presented no plan to do so.
'We haven't gotten any indication the government is going to fund that kind of infrastructure investment,' SRP's Rousseau said.
Coal Will Not Bring Appalachia Back to Life, But Tech and Government Jobs Could https://t.co/AWOiLggEDU @BeyondCoal @dirtyenergy— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1507151411.0
For a deeper dive:
Protest: Arizona Republic, AP, Greenwire, KJZZ. Zinke: Washington Examiner
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By Katherine Kornei
Clear-cutting a forest is relatively easy—just pick a tree and start chopping. But there are benefits to more sophisticated forest management. One technique—which involves repeatedly harvesting smaller trees every 30 or so years but leaving an upper story of larger trees for longer periods (60, 90, or 120 years)—ensures a steady supply of both firewood and construction timber.
A Pattern in the Rings
<p>The <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/coppice-standards-0" target="_blank">coppice-with-standards</a> management practice produces a two-story forest, said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Muigg" target="_blank">Bernhard Muigg</a>, a dendrochronologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "You have an upper story of single trees that are allowed to grow for several understory generations."</p><p>That arrangement imprints a characteristic tree ring pattern in a forest's upper story trees (the "standards"): thick rings indicative of heavy growth, which show up at regular intervals as the surrounding smaller trees are cut down. "The trees are growing faster," said Muigg. "You can really see it with your naked eye."</p><p>Muigg and his collaborators characterized that <a href="https://ltrr.arizona.edu/about/treerings" target="_blank">dendrochronological pattern</a> in 161 oak trees growing in central Germany, one of the few remaining sites in Europe with actively managed coppice-with-standards forests. They found up to nine cycles of heavy growth in the trees, the oldest of which was planted in 1761. The researchers then turned to a historical data set — more than 2,000 oak <a href="https://eos.org/articles/podcast-discovering-europes-history-through-its-timbers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">timbers from buildings and archaeological sites</a> in Germany and France dating from between 300 and 2015 — to look for a similar pattern.</p>A Gap of 500 Years
<p>The team found wood with the characteristic coppice-with-standards tree ring pattern dating to as early as the 6th century. That was a surprise, Muigg and his colleagues concluded, because the first mention of this forest management practice in historical documents occurred only roughly 500 years later, in the 13th century.</p><p>It's probable that forest management practices were not well documented prior to the High Middle Ages (1000–1250), the researchers suggested. "Forests are mainly mentioned in the context of royal hunting interests or donations," said Muigg. Dendrochronological studies are particularly important because they can reveal information not captured by a sparse historical record, he added.</p><p>These results were <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78933-8" target="_blank">published in December in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a>.</p><p>"It's nice to see the longevity and the history of coppice-with-standards," said <a href="https://www.teagasc.ie/contact/staff-directory/s/ian-short/" target="_blank">Ian Short</a>, a forestry researcher at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, not involved in the research. This technique is valuable because it promotes conservation and habitat biodiversity, Short said. "In the next 10 or 20 years, I think we'll see more coppice-with-standards coming back into production."</p><p>In the future, Muigg and his collaborators hope to analyze a larger sample of historic timbers to trace how the coppice-with-standards practice spread throughout Europe. It will be interesting to understand where this technique originated and how it propagated, said Muigg, and there are plenty of old pieces of wood waiting to be analyzed. "There [are] tons of dendrochronological data."</p><p><em><a href="mailto:katherine.kornei@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Katherine Kornei</a> is a freelance science journalist covering Earth and space science. Her bylines frequently appear in Eos, Science, and The New York Times. Katherine holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.</em></p><p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://eos.org/articles/tree-rings-reveal-how-ancient-forests-were-managed" target="_blank">Eos</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>Earth's ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows.
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