Fossil Fool’s Day 2008 Puts Spotlight on Florida Power & LightFor Immediate Release

March 30, 2008Contacts:
Ana Rodriguez (EEF!), 561-856-5502
Russell McSpadden (LWBC), 870-834-7582

Fossil Fool’s Day 2008 Puts Spotlight on FPL

Palm Beach County, FL - On April 1st 2008 a group of local activists with Everglades Earth First! and the Lake Worth Bike Coop will celebrate Fossil Fool’s Day, an international day of action against the root causes of climate change with a sunrise ‘Foolies’ award ceremony honoring FPL President Armando Olivera as the biggest Fossil Fool of South Florida. The award will be delivered by a group of bicycling clowns to Olivera at home-in the Water Glades Condos on Singer Island, 5510 N Ocean Dr., Unit 0154-at 7 am, before he begins his work day, so he can show-off to all his underlings at the Juno office what an infamous fool they work for! From 8-9 am, the cyclists will rally at the Riviera Beach FPL plant, which is on Florida’s Dirty Dozen list of worst polluting fossil fuel power plants.

The celebrants will follow up the early morning award ceremony with a bike parade from the FPL power plant in Rivera Beach to City Place in West Palm Beach and then onto Lake Worth, visiting gas station, car dealerships, the DEP headquarters and other culprits of fossil fuelish crimes against planet and people. Dressed as clowns, egrets, and alligators, they will pass out flyers and speak with onlookers along the way.

Fossil Fool’s Day “celebrations” will take place around the world, from Sydney to New York, demonstrating a rising strategy of global grassroots mobilization against corporate climate criminals.

About the Foolies Awards

Locally, Everglades Earth First! and the Lake Worth Bike Coop presented Armando Olivera with Foolies award–the 2008 South Florida Fossil Fool of the Year Award–for FPL’s role in fossil fuel related pollution, especially in building a 3,800 megawatt gas/diesel power plant, know as the West County Energy Center, one-thousand feet from the northernmost point of the Everglades, the Arthur R. Marshal Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. The plant will emit 12.3 million tons of CO2.

Olivera is also a National nominee for the 2008 Greenwashing Fossil Fool Award for FPL’s marketing attempts to fool the public into believing that the company is actually benefiting the environment through their services. According to the Energy Action Coalition’s Foolies nominations, Olivera has been “portraying himself as a leader in environmentally sustainable power generation while simultaneously pursuing thousands of megawatts of new dirty coal, natural gas and nuclear power generation.” (quote taken from http://energyactioncoalition.org/foolies/)

Other National nominees for Fossil Fools of the Year included:

Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors, for keeping America addicted to oil by mass producing vehicles more inefficient than the Model T, and for suing the state of California for attempting to reduce vehicle greenhouse gas emissions;

Ken Lewis, CEO of Bank of America, for the bank’s massive financial support of the coal power and mountaintop removal coal mining industries;

Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, for neglecting to use his company’s record-breaking profits to develop cleaner, more secure energy alternatives.

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