Our track record
Promoting Global Warming Solutions
ELPC’s seven years of advocacy for clean energy produced a huge global warming solutions success story in 2007, when Illinois enacted the most advanced Renewable Energy Standard and Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standard in the nation. Illinois utilities are now required to purchase clean renewable energy,
ramping up to 25% of electricity supply by 2025. And, they must implement robust energy efficiency programs and investments sufficient to achieve a 2% net annual reduction in overall electricity demand by 2015. The result: less reliance on coal plants and less global warming pollution.
ELPC led the public advocacy, policy analysis and coalition-building to achieve this victory.
These new clean energy policies are landmark, but ELPC isn’t stopping there because we know solving our global warming problems will require a diverse set of policies. ELPC Executive Director Howard Learner served as one of the four chairs of the Illinois Climate Change Advisory Council, which recommended 24 energy, transportation, industrial and agricultural policies aimed at reducing Illinois’ global warming pollution to 1990 levels by 2020 and then by 60% below 1990 levels by 2050. Following extensive research and deliberations by business, environmental and governmental members, the Council recommended these global warming solutions to both improve the environment and create economic growth. ELPC is also leading the national campaign to improve and expand the innovative clean energy development programs in the 2007 Farm Bill. The incentives for wind power, biomass energy and energy efficiency projects for family farmers and rural small business are a win-win-win-win. They produce a new source of income for farmers, enhance rural economic development, improve national energy security and provide environmental quality benefits.
Developing Midwest High-Speed Rail and Cleaner Cars
ELPC is leading the charge to develop a Midwest high-speed
rail network connecting the region’s major and mid-sized cities with modern, fast, comfortable and convenient train service. ELPC-advocated
improvements in rail service resulted in Illinois almost doubling ridership in 2007. In Michigan, when a short-line railroad bought track along the Detroit-Chicago rail line, ELPC stepped up to generate public and legal pressure, and high-speed passenger rail was protected. Now, we’re working to get cleaner cars on the road in Illinois.
Protecting the Great Lakes & Wisconsin’s Northwoods
When BP was granted a permit to discharge more ammonia and other pollutants into Lake Michigan due to its oil refinery expansion in Northwest Indiana, the public was outraged – and ELPC sprung into action. 
We worked behind the scenes with Illinois Senator Dick Durbin and other public officials, environmental group colleagues and technical experts to force BP to reverse course. BP has now committed to no net increases in water pollution. ELPC is now leveraging this success to raise environmental standards and require state-of-the-art pollution control technology for the wave of proposed oil refinery expansions in the Midwest. Meanwhile, ELPC’s team of public interest attorneys and scientists achieved major breakthroughs in our work to protect clean water, wildlife habitat, biodiversity and other important natural resource values in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in Northern Wisconsin. We reached settlements with the U.S. Forest Service on two timber sales that will preserve many acres of old hardwood and aspen forestlands, protect threatened red-shouldered hawks and northern goshawks, and avoid degradation of clean streams. ELPC maintained injunctions against five other timber sales, which we are challenging in federal courts. This is a key battleground in achieving a better balance of logging versus natural resources preservation.
