Since a meeting in Washington last summer, the partners in the anti-coal crusade have been focusing more squarely on carbon dioxide emissions in their local skirmishes, hoping to create precedents for dealing with a pollutant that is not federally regulated.
Their first high-profile victory came in Kansas last October, when state regulators denied a request by Sunflower Electric Co. for an air-quality permit for two 700-megawatt generators that would run on coal in the town of Holcomb.
The Sierra Club petitioned the state's health and environment secretary, Roderick L. Bremby, to deny the air-quality permit on grounds of carbon dioxide emissions.
"I believe it would be irresponsible to ignore emerging information about the contribution of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to climate change and the potential harm to our environment and health if we do nothing," Bremby said at the time.
Ever since, the state courts and Legislature have been haggling over coal and carbon dioxide in Kansas, and Sunflower has been unable to proceed.
Nick Persampieri, a Denver-based attorney for the environmental law firm Earthjustice, represents the Sierra Club in opposition to the Sunflower plant. He works closely with the Sierra Club's Kansas chapter. "You could argue that power plants harm everyone all over the country, but we always have somebody local to help us get standing" in court, he said.
Bookbinder is the Sierra Club's point man against a proposed power plant on tribal land in Utah, a case that shows the scope of the anti-coal push.
Usually he focuses on big-picture, national litigation from his Capitol Hill office. Bookbinder was one of the original petitioners in last spring's landmark Supreme Court decision that the EPA has authority to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. But when he found himself with a block of free time last fall, he told Sierra Club headquarters in San Francisco, "I'll take a coal plant."
He received this mission: Halt a project by six electric cooperatives that run the Bonanza generator on the Uintah and Ouray Indian reservation. The co-ops, operating as Deseret Power, want to add a new unit with the capacity to manufacture 110 megawatts of electricity, about a fifth the capacity of the average power plant.
Bookbinder spied a big opportunity in the small project. Because the Bonanza plant is on property held in trust for Indians by the U.S. government, it was the Environmental Protection Agency, not a state, that issued the permit allowing the co-ops to proceed.
