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Climate Action Now MA

04/14/21

Climate Action Now MA

The MA DEP just revoked the Palmer Renewable biomass plant’s permit to build because of the pollution it would cause in an environmental justice community. Why does MA DOER continue to push for rule changes that would give clean energy $$ to this highly polluting, inefficient energy? Tell @CharlieBakerMA and his administration: #BakerNoBiomass ... See MoreSee Less

The MA DEP just revoked the Palmer Renewable biomass plant’s permit to build because of the pollution it would cause in an environmental justice community. Why does MA DOER continue to push for rule changes that would give clean energy $$ to this highly polluting, inefficient energy? Tell @CharlieBakerMA and his administration: #BakerNoBiomass
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Climate Action Now MA

04/14/21

Climate Action Now MA

Bill McKibben: No More Halfsies on Climate
We’re reaching the endgame on the climate crisis, as news from both poles made clear this week. In the Antarctic, researchers reported first data from uncrewed submarine trips beneath the crucial Thwaites Glacier: “Our observations show warm water impinging from all sides on pinning points critical to ice-shelf stability, a scenario that may lead to unpinning and retreat.” (Thwaites was already known as the “doomsday glacier” because its collapse could raise global sea levels by as much as three feet.) Meanwhile, an analysis of satellite data suggests that, as Alaska and Siberia warm, summer lightning over the tundra could increase a hundred and fifty per cent by 2100, igniting fires in the vast peatlands. “Burning peat can release 2.5 to 3.5 kilograms (5.5 to 7.7 pounds) of carbon per square meter of ground,” a researcher told Inside Climate News. “That’s a lot, two or three times as much as from a fire in the savanna or the Mediterranean.” Translated from the scientific, these warnings mean that we’ve got no time left for half-measures. We’re in a desperate race against the destruction of the planet’s life-support systems. So nobody gets cut any slack.

Image may contain: Nature, Outdoors, Human, Person, Mountain, Ice, Snow, Vehicle, Transportation, Boat, Piste, and Sport
Source: Shell / YouTube
For instance, it was a blow last week when the Army Corps of Engineers said that it would not seek to close down the Dakota Access Pipeline while a large-scale environmental review of the project continues. Having done the right thing on the Keystone Pipeline on Day One, the Biden Administration punted here—and so far it’s been silent on a similar fight over the Line 3 pipeline, in Minnesota. The announcement was the first sign of a lack of conviction from the White House on energy issues. Such reluctance is understandable: there’s a lot of money behind these projects. But one imagines that the warm currents eroding the Thwaites Glacier from beneath are unimpressed.
What’s true of government—that we need a full commitment from it—is true of business, too. Take the public-relations industry, increasingly the target of campaigners from groups such as Clean Creatives. (I’ve worked with its two principal members over the years.) As these groups have pushed, some ad agencies have decided to cut their ties with the fossil-fuel industry—last month, Forsman and Bodenfors, a major firm with offices in Sweden and New York, said that it was done working for oil and gas. “It’s about raising awareness in the broader creative community,” an executive told “The Energy Mix,” a newsletter. “So it becomes a topic in the same way tobacco became a topic. And now I don’t know a single person who would work on a tobacco account.”
Contrast that with the work of Edelman, one of the world’s storied public-relations firms (and the largest by revenue). The firm advised the company behind the Keystone Pipeline on similar projects, but in 2015—after four executives quit over the climate issue—the company said that it would no longer “accept client assignments that aim to deny climate change.” As BuzzFeed News reported last month, however, tax filings show that, in recent years, Edelman has taken in at least twelve million dollars for its efforts on behalf of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, “a major U.S. oil trade organization that even Shell and BP had recently dumped for its aggressive opposition to popular climate solutions.” (A.F.P.M. poured money into a campaign against a Washington State carbon tax and has links to the front group Energy4US, which argued for Donald Trump’s environmental rollbacks.)
Then, there is the work that Edelman has done for oil companies—which, on its face, seems innocuous, even charming. In 2017, on behalf of Shell, Edelman set up the South Pole Energy Challenge and outfitted the polar explorer Robert Swan with “renewable bio fuel” so that he could make a low-carbon dash to the bottom of the world. In the course of the journey, Edelman reported that it had produced “44 individual items of content,” including “humorous incidents such as trying to wash in -40ºC.” The purpose of this work was clear. As the firm explained on its Web site, “the company tasked Edelman with the job of giving millennials a reason to connect emotionally with Shell’s commitment to a sustainable future. We needed them to forget their prejudices about ‘big oil’ and think differently about Shell.” And the campaign succeeded, reaching six hundred million people “through earned media,” with “422 stories, all favorable and 92% of them including a mention of Shell,” which left audience members “31% more likely to believe Shell is committed to cleaner fuels.” Positive attitudes toward the brand, Edelman reported, increased by twelve per cent.
The problem here is that’s not an accurate representation of Shell. True, in a statement, the company said that it is accelerating a “drive for net-zero emissions with a customer-first strategy,” but added that “it is important to note that as of February 11, 2021, Shell’s operating plans and budgets do not reflect its Net-Zero Emissions targets. Shell’s aim is that, in the future, its operating plans and budgets will change to reflect this movement towards its new Net-Zero Emissions target. However, these plans and budgets need to be in step with the movement towards a Net Zero Emissions economy within society and among Shell’s customers.” In fact, Shell’s actual “plans and budgets” call for it to expand its liquid-natural-gas production capacity “by another 7m tonnes a year by the middle of the decade.” (Even the Wall Street Journal pointed out that this strategy was risky, both financially and reputationally. Contrast it with, say, BP’s pledge to cut oil and gas production by forty per cent by 2030.)
In that light, Edelman’s work to get millennials to “forget their prejudices” about Big Oil seems less charming. Swan did reach the South Pole on renewable biofuel, but the South Pole is under increasing attack from Shell’s main products. Repeated requests for a response from Edelman have failed. But, in 2015, after the four executives quit, a then top executive of the company explained that “when you are trying in some way to obfuscate the truth or use misinformation and half-truths that is what we would consider getting into the work of greenwashing, and that is something we would never propose or work we would support our client doing.” Experience would indicate there’s really no way to do that except to cut ties with Big Oil and its trade groups.
Passing the Mic
Anne Butterfield is working with the group Our Power to persuade the residents of Maine to swap their investor-owned utilities (I.O.U.s) for a publicly owned company that would be called the Pine Tree Power Company; in other places, such efforts have sometimes allowed for a quicker transition to renewable energy. Some Maine towns already have such public utilities, but most people in the state get their electricity from two big commercial firms. Butterfield worked on a similar campaign in Boulder, Colorado, before moving near Portland, Maine, where her house boasts seventy-two solar panels. (Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
What’s the basic argument for a consumer-owned utility—how do you convince Mainers to go this route?
On average, Maine’s I.O.U.s charge consumers more than our state’s consumer-owned utilities (C.O.U.s). The I.O.U.s’ franchise is hurting Mainers with power outages, high rates, and confounding bills.
We see Mainers’ conviction about utilities through their reaction against the transmission corridor, slated to cut through our western forests, to profit out-of-state interests. The people of Maine are done with being a financial extraction zone and ready to oust big companies that hurt people and ship away loads of much-needed income.
Would the Pine Tree Power Company be more able to move quickly toward renewable electricity, or will the focus on price lead to inertia?
Maine policy already demands rapid expansion of renewables, to a hundred per cent of electricity supply by 2050. Progress to our ambitious clean-energy goals will surely go faster than by sticking with the I.O.U.s. But adding renewables isn’t the big news. What Our Power really brings is a future in which Mainers can trust in a more robust, affordable, and well-maintained grid, operated by people they elect. Trust, affordability, and reliability matter when you want people to confidently invest in E.V.s and erase up to fifty-four per cent of our state’s carbon emissions. [Maine’s emissions, like those of many rural states, are heavily transit-based, from cars and trucks.]
Mainers often pay well over five hundred dollars a month for their oil heat—which for many means energy poverty. Heat pumps in residential and commercial buildings could displace up to thirty per cent of our emissions. We need a better grid, plus a utility that helps Mainers with on-bill financing, which a C.O.U. can also offer.
Wind power has always been contentious in Maine, at least onshore. How would a C.O.U. allow easier progress?
Wind is already twenty-four per cent of Maine’s in-state generation. But there’s room for much more. The offshore potential is one of the best on the planet. Trust from communities is key to getting local permission to site transmission lines—and transmission is key to unlocking our offshore and northern onshore wind potential.
This may surprise you, but electric-power generation is the source of only about seven per cent of Maine’s emissions. The next big step is changing both supply and demand. E.V.s and heat pumps, for instance. The strengths of consumer ownership boil down to trust, reliability, and lower-cost financing. These are essential ingredients to any successful and equitable decarbonization.
Climate School
● Last week brought a powerful statement from a consortium of scholars in the field of genocide studies, arguing that we need to start thinking about the twenty-first-century climate crisis in some of the ways that we considered twentieth-century atrocities: “Until now, devastating man-made crises such as pandemics and environmental disasters were mostly left to the domain of the natural sciences. This is precisely what needs to change. . . . To that end, these issues must immediately move to the center of genocide studies entailing major revisions to university curricula, research priorities, and scholarly discourse.”
● Kenneth Pucker, once the chief operating officer at Timberland, has a deft essay in the Harvard Business Review, arguing that the mere reporting of environmental impacts by companies is not resulting in a “more sustainable form of capitalism.” Measurement, he writes, “is often nonstandard, incomplete, imprecise, and misleading. And headlines touting new milestones in disclosure and socially responsible investment are often just fanciful ‘greenwishing.’ ” In fact, he says, focussing on reporting can become “an obstacle to progress.” In the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Auden Schendler, the senior vice-president of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company, offers a complementary critique of companies’ efforts at reducing their ecological footprint: “What the corporate sustainability movement has truly succeeded at is ensuring that everyone works within a narrowly defined playing field that leaves the one thing we need to upend—the fossil-fuel-based economy—intact and unthreatened.” In slightly better news, a team at the investment firm Dimensional Fund Advisors reports that financial markets are doing a reasonable job of analyzing climate risk and pricing assets accordingly.
● I’ve written before about the important work of EcoEquity in figuring out the responsibility that different countries should bear for the climate crisis and how they should respond. Building on this work, a group of N.G.O.s last week called on the U.S. to cut emissions by a hundred and ninety-five per cent from 2005 levels by 2030. This can be achieved by cutting our own carbon output by seventy per cent, and providing technology and funding to developing countries to help them achieve the equivalent of the remaining hundred-and-twenty-five-per-cent reduction. Meanwhile, the Times reports that dozens of countries need debt relief because climate crises (and covid-19) are decimating their budgets. Increasingly, according to Somini Sengupta, lenders such as the International Monetary Fund are studying proposals under which “rich countries and private creditors offer debt relief, so countries can use those funds to transition away from fossil fuels, adapt to the effects of climate change, or obtain financial reward for the natural assets they already protect, like forests and wetlands.”
● Writing in Bloomberg Green, Leslie Kaufman and Akshat Rathi offer a darkly funny account of an entrepreneur’s efforts to suck carbon from the atmosphere.
Scoreboard
⬇️ Since most of us can regularly see forests, we pay attention to their disappearance. But seagrass meadows that fringe the shores of many continents, seem to sequester more carbon per acre than trees—and they seem to be retreating, according to a 2009 census, at a rate of about seven per cent annually.
⬇️ Molly Taft at Earther presents evidence that Big Meat is also funding climate denial: “ten of the country’s major meat producers—including big names like Tyson, Cargill, and Hormel—have supported efforts to fund climate denial, helped spread denier rhetoric, or donated to denier politicians or those who are against climate policy.”
⬇️ One of the first forecasts for this year’s hurricane season is in: a team at Colorado State University predicts a busier-than-usual year, with “a nearly 70-percent chance the Lower 48 will be struck by a major hurricane, up from a roughly 50/50 shot any given year.”
⬆️ Since the sun occasionally goes down and the wind occasionally drops, it’s a good thing that, as Cheryl Katz reports, storage batteries keep getting bigger, better, and cheaper. She describes two new batteries—one is three hundred megawatts, the other a hundred megawatts— in Moss Landing, California, that will be able to supply power to three hundred thousand homes for four hours.
⬇️ The Biden Administration is engaged in a “whole of government” effort to tackle climate change, but the biggest budget belongs to the Department of Health and Human Services (it’s twice the size of the Defense budget), and a group of health-care professionals notes that the agency has almost no one engaged in taking on climate change, even though the crisis is perhaps the greatest health threat that the planet faces. The group is asking for more.
⬇️ As Emily Atkin and Emily Holden point out in the Guardian, “three out of every four board members at seven major US banks (77%) have current or past ties to climate-conflicted companies or organizations—from oil and gas corporations to trade groups that lobby against reducing climate pollution.” That might explain why they’ve been slow to cut off lending to the fossil-fuel industry.
⬇️ Sea-level rise is killing coastal forests—a study reported in the North Carolina News and Observer finds that a forest in the state’s Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge has lost eleven per cent of its tree cover since 1985, as salt-water intrusion sucks “moisture from its seeds and stems, creating a graveyard of ‘wooden tombstones.’ ”
Warming Up
Sad news came last week of the death of LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, a key figure in the Sioux resistance at Standing Rock. I stood with her on her land, the site of the first pipeline-blockade encampment, on a bluff overlooking the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri rivers. It was a remarkably beautiful place and the foundation on which her considerable power as an activist rested. Here’s a tune from the Minnesotan folksinger Sara Thomsen, celebrating the “water protectors,” and here’s a “Democracy Now” interview that Allard did last summer which captures her spirit.
—Bill McKibben ... See MoreSee Less

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Climate Action Now MA

04/14/21

Climate Action Now MA

Share now: A succinct message about the dangers of the fossil fuel industry. ... See MoreSee Less

PlayEight Million Deaths
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Climate Action Now MA

04/07/21

Climate Action Now MA

Here is a share of the press conference held in Springfield today to celebrate the biomass win and focus on next steps. ... See MoreSee Less

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Climate Action Now MA

04/07/21

Climate Action Now MA

Bill McKibben in today's New Yorker: "The U.S. federal government is proposing to spend a sum of money that starts with a “T” on an infrastructure bill, and much of that money (two trillion dollars) is aimed at fighting the climate crisis. That is remarkable, and not just when you consider that we’re only seventy-five days out from an Administration that didn’t believe climate change was real. In my lifetime, we’ve spent sums like that mainly on highly dangerous infrastructure—aircraft carriers, fighter jets, nuclear weapons—and the wars in which they were used. To see a proposal to spend it on solar panels and trains is moving, and also just the slightest bit annoying: Why weren’t we doing this all along? Why weren’t we doing it in the nineteen-eighties, when scientists first told us that we were in a crisis? So it seems a fitting moment to really try to tally up the score: What are we doing as a nation now, is it enough, and how would we know if it were?

One of the best summaries of what’s in the Biden proposal comes from David Roberts in his Volts newsletter: he highlights the “coolest” features, from electrifying the postal-service delivery fleet (and a fifth of the nation’s school buses) to a national climate lab situated at a historically Black college and a major transmission grid for renewables that may follow existing rail rights of way. The energy systems engineer Jesse Jenkins, on Twitter, points out that the bill should spur the electric-car industry—the subsidy for buyers would make the cost difference with gasoline cars “disappear.” Julian Brave NoiseCat salutes provisions of the plan that would send forty per cent of the investments to disadvantaged communities, which is a sharp turn from the way big federal spending bills have worked for most of American history.
The criticism, at least from environmentalists, was of the “Yes and” variety. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that she thought we should be spending not two trillion dollars but ten trillion. Varshini Prakash, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, which has done as much as any organization to get us to this moment, pointed out that the bill incorporates much of what the Green New Deal advocates, including ten billion for a Civilian Climate Corps to put people to work building out the new energy infrastructure. But “we’re just orders of magnitude lower than where we need to be,” she said. “And I think that that fight over the scale and scope of what needs to happen in terms of employment and the creation of jobs, in terms of the scale of investment and the urgency, is going to be a terrain of struggle as this plan gets debated and discussed in Congress.” She’s surely right about that, and I fear there’s likely to be as much pressure to reduce the spending as to increase it.
The question of whether it’s “enough” is, of course, the right one—and the answer is no. Summer sea-ice coverage in the Arctic has declined by fifty per cent since the nineteen-eighties, and there were a record thirty named tropical storms last year, with one of them, off the New England coast, nudging up against smoke coming from the wildfires on the other side of the country, in California. We should be investing every penny we can in green projects, and even then we would still face an ongoing rise in temperature. That’s why movements need to keep pushing hard to build support for climate action.
But another test of whether this spending is sufficient will come in the next couple of months as we watch for decisions from Washington on big projects such as the Line 3 tar-sands pipeline, which stretches across Minnesota. One would hope that a two-trillion-dollar jobs program—with all kinds of promises about union contracts—would buy enough good will with organized labor for Biden to get away with killing these projects. Politicians like building things more than they like shutting things down, but dealing with the climate crisis requires doing both, and if this generous new proposal gives Biden the freedom to act aggressively, then we’d get a double return on the investment.
The Administration faces similar tensions on other fronts. John Kerry, the global climate czar, has been working Wall Street in recent weeks, trying to get the financial giants on board before a global climate summit that the Administration has called for April 22nd. The banks are happy to make proclamations about their net-zero plans for 2050, and they’re happy to pledge lots of lending into the suddenly trending renewables sector, but they’re not happy about stopping their lending to the fossil-fuel industry. Like the building trades, they’d be most thrilled about making money off both the old and the new. And, of course, that would be fine, except for physics.
There’s a lot of this ambivalence going around. (Reuters reported last week that a draft statement from the World Bank commits to “making financing decisions in line with efforts to limit global warming” but not to stopping lending for fossil-fuel projects.) That’s why, late last month, more than a hundred organizations sent Kerry a letter arguing that “no amount of new green finance commitments can credibly undo the damage that their fossil fuel financing is doing to the climate, to U.S. climate leadership, and to our chances of meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement.” (Full disclosure—the letter opens by citing an essay that I wrote for this magazine.) It would be smart of both the Administration and the banks to pay heed. If not, Robinson Meyer points out in The Atlantic, as the Administration’s commitment to dramatically cut carbon emissions by 2030 starts to become a reality, there will be a “fire sale” of fossil-fuel assets that could do real damage to the economy. It would be much better to prick this carbon-and-finance bubble now.
This is what the climate fight is going to look like for the foreseeable future: not a fight over whether we should be doing something but a tussle over how much we should do. And the cheapest parts of the fight—monetarily, if not politically—involve shutting down the dangerous things that the fossil-fuel industry does. We’re in a much better place politically than we were a few months ago, but in February we passed a scary landmark—there’s now fifty per cent more carbon dioxide in the air than there was when the Industrial Revolution began. In the end, measuring carbon in the atmosphere and the temperature rise it causes is how we’re going to actually keep score." ... See MoreSee Less

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Thanks for sharing this!

Climate Action Now MA shared a video from the playlist Defund Line 3/ Stop Line 3.

04/04/21

Climate Action Now MA

... See MoreSee Less

PlayBiden: Kill the Black Snake!
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Climate Action Now MA

04/03/21

Climate Action Now MA

Many thanks to Karen Foster, Northampton, MA Ward 2 City Councilor, Rachel Maiore, Northampton City Council Ward 7, and Alex Jarrett, City Council Ward 5, Northampton for sponsoring tonight's resolution that the City of Northampton declare a climate emergency! Thanks also to the many community members who spoke up in support of the resolution and the many important next steps toward climate action. The resolution passed unanimously! It will be discussed and voted on again on 4/15 - hope to see you there! ... See MoreSee Less

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Climate Action Now MA

04/02/21

Climate Action Now MA

🚨 BREAKING NEWS 🚨

The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources has revoked the permit for the proposed biomass facility in Springfield!

This is a major victory for our region. Huge thanks to Senator Edward J. Markey, Jesse L. Lederman, Arise for Social Justice, Climate Action Now MA, and everyone who worked to make it a little easier to breathe in the Valley. ... See MoreSee Less

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