Statewide

Kudos to Jeanne Brooks of the Greenville News for pointing out how important clean energy is for our state:

[Santee Cooper] says renewable energy, energy efficiency and conservation efforts can't help enough.

But South Carolina consumed the fourth highest amount of electricity per person in the nation in 2003.

We used more than Texas (No. 15), North Carolina (No. 16) and Georgia (No. 18). We used more than Florida (No. 27)!

We used so much electricity that although we pay one of the cheaper rates, the monthly bill for an average homeowner here was seventh highest in the country.

Conservation can't help? We haven't really tried.

...and connecting the dots between the Upstate and Santee Cooper's proposed Pee Dee Plant.

[The] Southern Environmental Law Center points out the coal-fired power plant that Santee Cooper wants to build on the Great Pee Dee River will release into the air each year thousands of tons of smog ingredients and the tiny sooty particles that, breathed in, can set off wheezing and heart attacks.

Bill Chameides, dean of Duke University's Nicholas School of Environment and Earth Sciences, says there'll be -- not usually but sometimes -- days those smog ingredients and particles will reach the Upstate.

The plant will also release annually more than 300 pounds of mercury, a neurotoxin.

The state Department of Health and Environmental Control already has mercury contamination advisories -- warnings -- against eating certain fish from 62 bodies of water in South Carolina and the Atlantic Ocean along our coastline.

Still another of the proposed power plant's future gifts: 8.7 million tons of carbon dioxide each year for the next 50 or so years.

This is everybody's problem.