Our Climate Change Perspectives mini-blog series is a 3-part series that brings to light the personal impacts of climate change on Green Energy Consumers' staff members' lives. This series aims to clarify what is at stake for people around the world and how those realities influence the choices we make on a daily basis.
Pua Higginson is our phenomenal Marketing & Outreach Coordinator.
As Bill McKibben so eloquently points out, the resistance to Trump, including his climate denial, will be local. That's why local environmental advocacy is crucial for Earth Day 2018. And environmental advocacy doesn't have to mean petitioning in the streets, although it can. It can also mean helping a neighbor choose an electric car over a gas-powered one, or joining a committee in your community.
You might be looking around for Earth Day activities. Here are 3 activities through which you and your neighbors can make a difference.
Earlier this week, the Massachusetts Senate Committee on Global Warming and Climate Change released a comprehensive omnibus energy bill, An act to promote a clean energy future: to protect our public health, create jobs, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The bill is a compilation of several pieces of legislation filed this session, including the important RPS & the Appliance Efficiency Standards bills, but it also reflects public input provided during a series of Clean Energy Conversations that Committee Chair Marc Pacheco hosted throughout the spring and summer. Several of the bills have received favorable recommendations from the joint energy committee of the House and Senate (read more about this below).
Massachusetts and Rhode Island are nationally recognized as clean energy leaders. The gains made to date are impressive, but mitigating climate change necessitates even more substantial investment in efficiency, renewables, and emerging technologies.
In recent weeks, policymakers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island have taken actions that will affect the states’ likelihood of meeting their stated goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Their actions, or inaction, in the transportation sector are especially worth noting.
With the closure of the Brayton Point, coal generation in MA is officially a thing of the past, but will it be replaced with a 21st century solution or more of the same?
May 31st marked the end of an era in Massachusetts when Brayton Point, the state’s last remaining coal-fired power plant closed. Located in Somerset, the 1500 MW plant was the largest coal-fired generator in New England. Its closure was first announced in 2013 with owners citing costs associated with maintaining the decades’ old facility and coal’s inability to compete economically with natural gas.
As a nonprofit organization, we’re not here to tell you how to vote, but we can speak out on the president’s policies. We’ve already commented on his appointees. A truly comprehensive article covering the range of his energy policies would be quite long, so for this piece, I will cover just a few of the more recent announcements of particular relevance to consumers and the environment.
The Mass Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is currently finalizing regulations aimed at achieving compliance with the May 2016 decision by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) and Executive Order 569 (EO 569) signed by Governor Baker in September. In this blog post, I provide an overview of the regulations that were proposed and what lies ahead as MA attempts to comply with its climate law.
We talk a lot about the need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels to fight climate change. We run programs and support policies in an effort meet our states' greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals: in Massachusetts, the statutory requirements of the Global Warming Solutions Act, in Rhode Island, the Resilient Rhode Island Act. With our climate going haywire (see the record-setting droughts, floods, and heat waves of 2016) and the emissions reductions of electric vehicles, climate change is one of the reasons we launched Drive Green with Mass Energy and People's Power & Light. But, setting climate change aside for a moment (a big ask, we know), replacing internal combustion engines on our roads with electric vehicles should still be a state priority. Why?
We’re excited for the US Green Building Council, Massachusetts Chapter’s upcoming event on February 16th – the Building Tech Forum – and we hope to see some of you there too!
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