04/15/21
“The council argues that the initial 2011 building permit expired because construction never began. Building Commissioner Steven Desilets has defended the validity of the permit, saying some work has taken place. The company, through its law firm, also said that construction had begun and that the building permit was still valid.
“Opponents of the biomass proposal say it will worsen air pollution and harm public health. The company said the plant would be state of the art and not be harmful to air quality or public health.
“Public comments are being accepted in advance of and for 24 hours after the first Zoning Board hearing.
“Comments can be mailed to the Springfield Zoning Board of Appeals, 70 Tapley St., Springfield, MA 01104 or emailed to mjachym@springfieldcityhall.com. They can also be made by voice mail at 413-787-7807. Messages received will be sent to all board members.” ... See MoreSee Less

Springfield Zoning Board set to hear dispute over biomass project following state permit revocation
www.masslive.com
While Palmer Renewable Energy has appealed the revocation of its state permit for a biomass project in East Springfield, it also faces a hearing before the Springfield Zoning Board regarding a City Council challenge of its decade-old city building permit.- Likes: 0
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04/14/21
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
04/14/21
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
04/14/21
Opinion piece about our situation since the DEP revoked the air permit for the Springfield biomass plant. ... See MoreSee Less

A victory against Springfield Biomass project, but work remains to be done (Guest viewpoint)
www.masslive.com
Palmer has appealed DEP’s decision and asked for an emergency stay of the revocation of the permit.04/14/21
Share now: A succinct message about the dangers of the fossil fuel industry. ... See MoreSee Less
04/14/21
Please read, be inspired and share this very important study on the fossil fuel industry as a purveyor of environmental racism. ... See MoreSee Less

Fossil Fuel Racism | Greenpeace USA
www.greenpeace.org
The fossil fuel industry contributes to public health harms that kill hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. each year—disproportionately endangering Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities.04/14/21
Though the DEP ruling is a major victory, we have not yet won the war! Call Charlie Baker and his Department of Energy Resources (DOER) and demand that they not change the present renewable energy standards to give biomass your electric ratepayer money! ... See MoreSee Less

Biomass facility to appeal state revocation of permit
www.thereminder.com
SPRINGFIELD – Sen. Edward Markey joined with local elected officials on April 7 to celebrate the decision by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to revoke the permitting for Palmer Renewable Energy (PRE) and its planned biomass facility.04/13/21
Thanks to Tina Ingmann: “Given the circumstances, Scientific American has agreed with major news outlets worldwide to start using the term “climate emergency” in its coverage of climate change. An official statement about this decision, and the impact we hope it can have throughout the media landscape, is below.” ... See MoreSee Less

We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We’re Going to Say So
www.scientificamerican.com
It’s time to use a term that more than 13,000 scientists agree is needed04/12/21
Please sign & share. ... See MoreSee Less

Where politicians fail, the people are taking action.
act.350.org
Add your name to demand climate justice ahead of President Biden's global climate summit.04/09/21
Thanks to Craig Altemose and Cathy Kristofferson. ... See MoreSee Less
This content isn't available right now
When this happens, it's usually because the owner only shared it with a small group of people, changed who can see it or it's been deleted.04/09/21
Very important analysis by Ecowatch. ... See MoreSee Less

Cycling Is More Important Than Electric Cars for Achieving Net-Zero Cities
www.ecowatch.com
Globally, only one in 50 new cars were fully electric in 2020, and one in 14 in the UK. Sounds impressive, but even if all new cars were electric now, it would still take 15-20 years to replace the world's fossil fuel car fleet.04/09/21
Follow the money. ... See MoreSee Less

'Wall Street Is a Primary Villain' in Climate Crisis, Report Concludes
www.ecowatch.com
A new DeSmog analysis of the boards of 39 banks, including seven based in the U.S., found that 65% of directors have a total of 940 past or current ties to "climate-conflicted" industries. Across all banks studied, 16% of board members had ties to companies involved in extracting coal, gas, and oil.04/09/21
Have you checked out the programming for the Global Just Recovery Gathering? You will find a rich buffet of sessions with something for every climate activist. Panels, workshops, and "movement stories" with activists, scholars, analysist and more from around the globe. Fri, Sat, Sun. ... See MoreSee Less

Programme: Global Just Recovery Gathering
justrecoverygathering.org
Check out the line up of incredible panels, workshops and other sessions for the Global Just Recovery Gathering04/09/21
Politics around fossil fuel subsidies ... See MoreSee Less

Biden's tax plan goes after direct fossil fuel subsidies, which matter less than you'd think
www.volts.wtf
Repealing direct fossil fuel subsidies will amount to 1.4% of the revenue in the plan. It's the indirect subsidies that would really yield some revenue. (If you don't like reading, you can listen!)04/09/21
Today, and the next 2 days: Join this world-wide summit of climate+ activism, the Global Just Recovery Gathering.
You sign up and then you can access the sessions. ... See MoreSee Less
This content isn't available right now
When this happens, it's usually because the owner only shared it with a small group of people, changed who can see it or it's been deleted.04/08/21
From forest climate champion Bill Moomaw. ... See MoreSee Less

Curb climate change the easy way: Don't cut down big trees
phys.org
Protecting forests is an essential strategy in the fight against climate change that has not received the attention it deserves. Trees capture and store massive amounts of carbon. And unlike some strategies for cooling the climate, they don't require costly and complicated technology.Climate Action Now MA updated their status.
04/07/21
... See MoreSee Less
This content isn't available right now
When this happens, it's usually because the owner only shared it with a small group of people, changed who can see it or it's been deleted.04/07/21
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
04/07/21
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
Thanks for sharing this!
04/06/21
We must organize and act now! ... See MoreSee Less

'We Have to Act': Atmospheric CO2 Passes 420 PPM for First Time Ever
www.commondreams.org
"It is truly groundbreaking," Greta Thunberg said of the growing concentration of the heat-trapping gas. "And I don't mean that in a good way."04/06/21
https://bostonglobe.com/2021/04/…
After passing a landmark climate law, Mass. officials now face the hard part: how to wean the state off fossil fuels
Abel, David.Boston Globe (Online); Boston [Boston]06 Apr 2021.
Over the coming decades, the state's largest utilities have plans to spend billions of dollars upgrading a vast network of aging pipes and mains that distribute natural gas, after billions they've already spent in recent years.
But much of those plans clash with a landmark bill that Governor Charlie Baker signed last month that requires the state to effectively eliminate its carbon emissions by 2050.
Some environmental advocates and lawmakers fear that continued investments in gas infrastructure could hinder the transition to renewable energy and leave ratepayers covering the costs of an obsolete energy system for decades. They support repairing leaky pipes and those that pose a danger to the public, but they're pressing the utilities to spend far more on zero-emissions technologies.
“It's just fiscally irresponsible, and it sets up a classic utility death spiral,” said Zeyneb Pervane Magavi, co-executive director of HEET, a Cambridge nonprofit that specializes in energy efficiency. “As people move off the gas system, you have fewer people paying for it, meaning they will be shouldering more of the costs. It's a disaster.”
Officials at the largest gas companies have issued mixed messages, saying in public they fully support the state's efforts to drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels. But in private meetings with industry colleagues they have suggested they would resist efforts to curtail the use of gas, which has been a cash cow for utilities.
It's now up to state officials to decide how and when to compel utilities to phase out their reliance on gas, which they long touted as a “bridge fuel” to an emissions-free era, as it releases less carbon than oil and coal. Gas now heats more than half of all homes in Massachusetts.
“This is something we know we have to work on, going forward,” said Kathleen Theoharides, the state's secretary of energy and environmental affairs.
Getting to net zero emissions will require some 3 million homes and 5 million vehicles to eliminate their use of fossil fuels. How that will be accomplished remains unclear, as does the costs for residents, who already pay electricity rates nearly double the national average.
“At this point, we don't have a message,” Theoharides said.
But state officials will need one soon, as the climate law requires they cut emissions by as much as 50 percent below 1990 levels by the end of the decade. To reach that goal, the law also establishes a number of deadlines in the coming months. By this summer, for example, officials must set emissions-reduction targets for programs sponsored by Mass Save, the state's home energy efficiency program.
By next summer, they will have to adopt specific emissions limits for 2025. And by the end of next year, they must issue a new building code that will encourage construction of homes that don't rely on fossil fuels or emit carbon.
As a first step toward reducing emissions in homes and other buildings — perhaps the most daunting challenges of achieving the goals of the new law — Theoharides said she plans to convene a commission this spring to come up with a plan.
“We have to understand how to do this in an orderly way,” she said.
Some state lawmakers and environmental advocates have questioned whether utilities are serious about their public commitments to reduce emissions, after officials at Eversource, the region's largest energy provider, delivered a controversial presentation last month at an industry meeting.
The presentation suggested natural gas was in for the “fight of its life.” Slides urged that “everyone needs to contact legislators in favor of” the fossil fuel and warned “Anti-Gas Pressure Continues to Grow.” Another slide suggested the industry should “take advantage of power outage fear.”
The slide that most concerned them was one that said Eversource supported a “consortium to combat electrification,” suggesting the company and others in the industry sought to blunt the move toward renewable energy.
“This is a smoking gun for someone like me,” said state Senator Michael Barrett, a Lexington Democrat and one of the climate bill's lead negotiators. “This is distressing, explosive stuff. I worry this represents the real sentiments of Eversource.”
Bill Akley, president of gas operations at Eversource, called the presentation “unfortunate.” In response, the company withdrew from the consortium, rescinded $10,000 it had pledged in support of the group, and admonished employees who were involved in preparing the presentation, he said.
“We need to disconnect from any connotation that this is what we're about,” Akley said. “Folks may believe that's where we're at behind closed doors, but that's not an accurate picture.”
Eversource understands the risks of climate change and is adapting to a world that no longer relies on fossil fuels, he said. As evidence, he cited the company's investments in renewable energy.
“You can see it in every bit of our action,” Akley said. “If we're not part of the solution, we're not going to be here.”
Since 2015, the company has spent about $72 million a year to replace about 500 miles of older gas mains across the state. By 2035, it expects to repair or replace nearly all of its leak-prone pipes.
Akley said Eversource is seeking to “find a balance” between maintaining the gas distribution system and preparing for a future when it's no longer needed.
“The answers are complicated,” he said, suggesting the system could be used to distribute hydrogen, biogas, and other forms of energy. “We're exploring all decarbonization pathways.”
Officials at National Grid, which supplies gas to nearly 1 million customers in Massachusetts, released a plan last year to achieve “net zero” emissions from operations and sales by 2050. In addition to energy efficiency and reducing gas leaks, they also suggested the state look at other energy that could use their supply network.
“Though we do not have all the answers, we believe our electric and gas networks, which play a vital role in the lives of our customers, can be useful in achieving net zero emissions,” said Robert Kievra, a company spokesman.
The Baker administration has set a goal of retrofitting 1 million homes to use electricity for heating by 2030. Left unsaid is how to accomplish that, and what should come of utilities' plans to upgrade their gas infrastructure. Those plans would cost ratepayers about $16 billion, according to an estimate by the Applied Economics Clinic, a nonprofit research group in Arlington.
Environmental advocates have said they worry utilities are trying to steer the state toward solutions that would allow them to continue to retain control of the market. They questioned, for example, utilities' suggestions that they could repurpose their system to distribute hydrogen, which is highly combustible, expensive, and far more likely to leak.
They're also pressing ISO New England, which operates the regional power grid, to change its rules to make it easier for renewable energy sources, especially offshore wind, to compete with gas, which has been a favored source of energy because of its relatively low cost and reliability.
Without changes to the rules, it's unlikely the state will meet its emissions obligations under the new climate law, they said.
“If offshore wind is given a chance to compete, it will save ratepayers billions of dollars,” said Deborah Donovan, a senior policy advocate at the Acadia Center in Boston. “We need the ISO to help us achieve the state's goals.”
After months of pressing Baker to sign the climate bill, Barrett said he's now focusing on ensuring his administration implements it.
He has threatened legal action if the administration seeks to “evade legislative intent and substitute the weaker preferences of the executive branch.”
“It's going to be a tough slog,” he said. “There's no silver bullet here.” ... See MoreSee Less
04/05/21
More coverage of the historic biomass victory in Springfield! ... See MoreSee Less

State revokes permit for proposed Springfield biomass plant
www.gazettenet.com
SPRINGFIELD — A proposed biomass power plant, long the subject of controversy and opposition, had its air quality permit revoked by the state Department of Environmental Protection on Friday.The proposed wood-burning plant is being developed by Palmer...04/04/21
Climate emergency declared in Northampton, city council calls for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 ... See MoreSee Less

Climate emergency declared in Northampton, city council calls for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050
www.masslive.com
Climate change is a human-caused emergency, the Northampton City Council declared Thursday night as it called on local government, civic groups, businesses and citizens to bring city-wide carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.04/04/21
https://bostonglobe.com/2021/04/…
THE BOSTON GLOBE
State has hopefully struck a fatal blow to Springfield power plant
By Yvonne Abraham Globe Columnist
Updated April 3, 2021, 4:50 p.m.
Here is a good-news story I hadn’t expected to write.
For years, residents and activists have been fighting to stop a wood-burning power plant from being built in East Springfield. The company hoping to build the facility argued that, because it would be burning waste wood as fuel, the plant would be a cleaner way to generate power, using a renewable energy source: 1,200 tons of sawdust, tree-trimming offcuts, and other wood waste per day.
And it looked like the state was going to agree with them, suggesting the plant might qualify for millions of dollars in renewable energy subsidies each year, subsidies that would help make the wood-burning plant profitable.
I had been following this march to the seemingly inevitable, my concern evolving toward fury. So this was going to be a column about why allowing this thing would have been a terrible idea. It was going to point out how messed up it is that the people of East Springfield — who have already suffered enough at the intersection of several major highways, contaminated sites, and industrial facilities — have to fight yet another polluting plant that would help cement their status as the nation’s asthma capital.
I’d spoken to experts who explained how burning wood to generate electricity isn’t really any cleaner than burning gas, especially when you factor in the trucks rumbling through the neighborhood carrying 1,200 tons of wood a day from who knows how far away. How burning wood sends smoke and harmful pollutants and particulate matter into the air and into people’s lungs, worsening respiratory ailments. How they were skeptical of claims that the plant could run purely on waste wood, and that, to keep operating, it would have to use actual trees, which are vital to cleaner air.
I was going to write about how we keep dumping our back-of-house operations in communities that seem powerless to protect themselves — places like Chelsea, East Boston, Saugus, Revere, and Springfield, where there are more low-income residents and people of color. And about how all the talk of environmental justice means nothing if we allow a plant like this one to happen.
“We view some of our communities as sacrifice zones,” Andrea Nyamekye, co-director of the grass-roots organizing group Neighbor To Neighbor, had told me.
Forces marshaled to prevent yet another sacrifice in Springfield. Environmental advocates and some city officials sued to stop the project. Elected officials, including state Senator Eric Lesser of Longmeadow and both our US senators, vowed to prevent it.
“Building a plant that would be billowing thousands of pounds of smoke into the air in a residential community in the asthma capital of the country is outrageous,” Lesser said last week. “Massachusetts ratepayers should not be subsidizing it.”
But we’ve seen fight like this before, to no avail.
Then, late on Friday afternoon, something amazing happened: The Department of Environmental Protection revoked its approval of the Springfield biomass-fired power plant, citing an overlong interruption in its construction. To the surprise and delight of those fighting it, the DEP also cited the “heightened focus on environmental and health impacts on environmental justice populations from sources of pollution.”
The developer, Palmer Renewable Energy, has 10 days to appeal the DEP ruling, but advocates say the state has struck a fatal blow here.
It is a massive victory. And there may be another to come. When I spoke to state officials earlier in the week, they told me they were listening to those who were asking them not to include wood-burning among the forms of renewable energy eligible for state subsidies.
“We are going to be proposing changes based on that feedback,” an official said. “Especially related to impacts on environmental justice communities.”
That certainly sounds hopeful. In the unlikely event that revoking the air permit doesn’t kill the Palmer plant, withholding state subsidies that would make it profitable probably would.
In any case, this is a huge and spectacular affirmation for folks who have had precious few of them through the decades. The question now: Is Springfield’s unlikely victory a one-off, or is the tide actually turning?
We can dream ... See MoreSee Less

State has hopefully struck a fatal blow to Springfield power plant - The Boston Globe
www.bostonglobe.com
The Department of Environmental Protection on Friday revoked its approval of the Springfield biomass-fired power plant, citing an overlong interruption in its construction.Climate Action Now MA shared a video from the playlist Defund Line 3/ Stop Line 3.
04/04/21
... See MoreSee Less
04/03/21
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
04/02/21
🚨 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
04/02/21
Mass. Revokes Air Permit For Controversial Biomass Facility In Springfield ... See MoreSee Less

Mass. Revokes Air Permit For Controversial Biomass Facility In Springfield
www.wbur.org
The state says it revoked the permit because of a lag in construction activities as well as major public health and environmental justice concerns.Yay!!!!!!!!!
04/02/21
And on the national scene, dealing with a horrendous case of climate injustice. Make your voice heard! ... See MoreSee Less

Dozens of Democrats Urge Biden to Immediately Shut Down Dakota Access Pipeline
truthout.org
Indigenous tribes and environmentalists argue that the Dakota Access pipeline is operating unlawfully.04/02/21
https://masslive.com/news/2021/…
Hurray! Thanks to all the folks who put in hard work to make this happen. When you fight, you win! When you work together, you win! Here's to a breathable Springfield and a livable planet. ... See MoreSee Less

State revokes permit for Springfield biomass plant
www.masslive.com
The revocation follows a decade-long battle between the developer, Palmer Renewable Energy, and opponents including residents and city councilors who raised concerns about air pollution and asthma.Yay!!