Alcoa Chairman Gets Environmental Leadership Award - 11/17/2008 10:08:00 AM - Packaging Digest

Alcoa announced today that Alcoa Chairman Alain Belda was honored by the Asia Society this week for his environmental leadership, including Alcoa’s progress to reduce GHG emissions and address global warming.

In accepting the award, Mr. Belda said, “At Alcoa, we see global warming as the sustainability issue of our generation. To me, it is critical that it is part of our company culture and a core part of our business and corporate decision making.”

Climate Change, the Coal Business and Civil Disobedience - Green Inc. Blog - NYTimes.com

Many of the arrests at the Maasvlakte station were on trespassing charges, according to news reports. Others in the group attached themselves to equipment and buildings and had to be freed by the police, the reports said.

E.ON said in a statement earlier in the year that the new power station would meet roughly eight percent of Dutch electricity requirements and had been approved in line with national nature conservation laws there. The plant was “state of the art” and would produce almost 20 percent more electricity per ton of coal than the current power stations, the company said.

But that kind of technological progress seems to cut little ice with protesters, whose confidence has been given a boost from high-level support.

Earlier this fall, Al Gore, the former vice president and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for climate change awareness campaign, said he couldn’t “understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power stations.”