Leslie Harroun, a longtime supporter and friend of CLF, has entered a “Blog Your Way to the North Pole” contest offered by Quark Expeditions of Vermont.

Check out her eloquent statement and vote for her, if the spirit moves you (and I hope it does).   While you have to register this is NOT one of those email capture deals that will result in you being flooded with spam.  Leslie has traveled the world and has a deep appreciation of special places (from the heart of Roxbury in Boston to Papua New Guinea to her current home in Maine) and would be a special witness to unique, and threatened, polar environment.

Stateline, the excellent online news service of the Pew Center on the States reports on the continuing interest and efforts to develop renewable energy across the nation, even where Republican governors face pressure to change course because of misconceptions that renewable energy efforts are based solely on an environmental agenda.

The article opens with the story of how the new Governor of Ohio backed down from a threatened effort to roll back an important renewable energy effort when it became clear that renewable energy, and wind energy in particular, enjoyed broad support across the state and was a bright spot in the economy during a very tough time.  It goes on to discuss the issue more generally discussing the progress continuing on clean energy in the states despite the failure of climate and energy legislation in Washington and then telling the tale of Kansas, how an anti-cap and trade Senator Sam Brownback is changing into pro-Clean Energy Governor Brownback:

With cap-and-trade off the table in Washington, and with 29 states either run by or about to be run by Republican governors, the prospects for legislation aimed explicitly at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions are not bright, at least in the near term. Shifting to cleaner forms of energy, however, is another matter. It’s just that saving the environment won’t be the driving thrust. Creating jobs will.

“The opportunities to grow new industries in business are relatively rare right now, and the clean-energy economy’s got a lot going for it from an economic development viewpoint,” says Seth Kaplan, of the Conservation Law Foundation. “There’s the number of jobs, but also the breadth: from university researchers doing basic research into the next generation of LEDs, thin-film solar or wind-turbine designs, to the blue-collar jobs, which are hard to come by these days. So Republican governors are trying to figure out how to position themselves between two poles: ideological opposition to anything with ‘climate’ on the label, and the economic development opportunity presented by the clean-energy economy.”

So it is that New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie, under pressure from conservatives, began saying in November that he was “skeptical” about climate change — yet has shown no inclination to withdraw his state from the Northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and remains a strong backer of developing offshore wind power. Some of the most concerted wind-energy development in the country has occurred in Texas — and especially in the Republican strongholds of West Texas — thanks to policies enacted under the leadership of Republican Governor Rick Perry. Sam Brownback, who is moving from the U.S. Senate to the Kansas governor’s mansion, opposed federal cap-and-trade legislation in the Senate but joined with Democratic senators in September to back creating a national renewable energy standard for power plants.

“Sam is very much on record as wanting Kansas to be a national leader on wind, he’s been active on how to facilitate new transmission, he’s been committed to bioenergy,” says Nancy Jackson, who chairs the Climate and Energy Project, an effort to persuade Kansans to embrace renewable energy and energy efficiency. “I feel really good about how this administration will line up on energy issues.”

Click here for full article

CLF is a founding member of Renewable Energy New England (RENEW), a collaborative between the renewable energy industry and the environmental community.  After ISO-NE (the operator of the New England electricity grid) gave a press briefing about a report on “wind integration” yesterday, RENEW issued the following statement, check it out:

Renewable Energy New England (RENEW) today issued the following statement about the New England Wind Integration Study (NEWIS) currently underway by the Independent System Operator of New England (ISO-NE).  The final NEWIS report from ISO-NE is not yet available, but is expected to be released later this week.

“RENEW is encouraged by the study results released thus far and looks forward to seeing the final report soon,” said Abigail Krich, president of Boreas Renewables and a consultant to RENEW.  ”The study demonstrates that a great deal of wind power can be reliably integrated into the New England power system.  New England is well-positioned to see extensive growth in wind energy in the coming years.

“The results thus far show that wind energy located in New England will significantly reduce regional carbon dioxide emissions, in support of the New England states’ strong renewable energy and greenhouse gas policies.  The findings show that if New England were to receive twenty percent of its electricity from wind power, its carbon dioxide emissions from power plants would decrease twenty five percent.

“As recommended in the report, ISO-NE has stated they will set up a centralized wind power forecasting system. The wind forecast will use atmospheric modeling to predict minutes and days ahead of time how much wind power will be produced within the region. This forecasting will allow the system operator to effectively manage the variability inherent in wind power in the same way it is currently able to manage the variability inherent in electricity usage.

“Today wind generates approximately half a percent of the electricity used in New England. The NEWIS studied a number of scenarios between 2.5 and 24% of New England’s electricity being provided by wind. Even at the lowest level studied, this represents more than four times the amount of wind currently operating in New England.

“New England is just starting down the road toward increasing its use of renewable power, but this study is providing a helpful roadmap as we look toward growing wind power in the region.”

The Boston Globe ran an interesting essay in its Ideas section on whether we should do “randomized trials’ of new laws before applying them to our entire society and economy.

Louis Brandeis, a great Boston lawyer before ascending to the Supreme Court once eloquently and clearly presented the mechanism we have long had in place for doing something of the sort:

“It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” – New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262, 311, 52 S.Ct. 371, 386-387, (1932) (dissenting opinion of Brandeis, J.)

Back in 1932 a knuckle-dragging Supreme Court invalidated a law enacted by the State of Oklahoma that required  people who wanted to manufacture, distribute or sell ice obtain a license first.  In the dissent quoted above Justice Brandeis blazed a path that continues today – a path based on the clear recognition that states should be generally allowed to enact their own laws subject only to clear preemption by federal law.

This history has served the environment well.  Over the last 40 years the great advances in clean air, clean water and toxics reduction have come from the states – with the Federal Government following along. Sometimes these efforts have been states going it alone and sometimes it has been coordinated action by a group of states.  Two key examples of that kind of collective action are the way that automobile emissions regulations were developed by California and then adopted by a range of states, led by the New England states and the development of a Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative by the states of the East Coast.

“The states as laboratories” does not have all the virtues of randomized trials like the experiments used in the pharmaceutical world but it does have the advantage of being very real.

Recommended reading:  A good piece in Slate about the folks in the Evangelical Christian community who are serious about taking on the challenge of global warming.   Because if you think a loving god gave us a wonderful world that we have a duty to preserve and protect you oppose damaging it through flooding the atmosphere and seas with pollution that will cause global warming and acidify our oceans.

For over 15 years CLF has been incubating an important new concept – car insurance that rewards you for driving less.  We have made it a reality through our affiliate – the Environmental Insurance Agency.

But to move into full scale operation of the concept we needed a full blown academic grade review of hard data to show that when you drive less you get into fewer accidents (yeah, I know it sounds obvious but we really needed to do that).

While the study is done, the results are in.  Read our press release about it. Read more information and the study itself (warning for the mathphobic, it has equations but you can skip them, they will not hurt you).

Or you can read about it on the Boston Globe website:

Pay as you drive car insurance? New study says a good idea

by Beth Daley December 2, 2010 03:11 PM

For several years now, Massachusetts environmentalists have said there is a better way of insuring drivers.

Called pay-as-you-drive, the idea has its roots in a link between miles driven and risk of accidents. Paying a certain amount of cents for each mile driven is a fairer way to insure drivers, many environmentalists say – and at the same time will encourage less driving, therefore emitting fewer greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Now, a new study commissioned by Conservation Law Foundation that looked at $502 million of claims on more than 3 million cars in Massachusetts, found that basing premiums even partially on mileage could end the practice of low-mileage drivers subsidizing higher-mileage ones.

The study estimates that switching all Massachusetts drivers to pure per-mile auto insurance pricing would reduce mileage, accident costs, and fuel consumption by 9.5% and cut two million tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Another model with a flat yearly rate, plus per mile pricing after the first 2000 miles, would reduce both figures by about 5%.

The study had some surprises, such as even though suburban and rural car owners tend to drive more than city dwellers, their per-mile charges could be lower than they currently play for traditional insurance if they drive less than the average for their area.

The study, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Joseph Ferreira, Jr. and Eric Minikel, a recent MIT grad, is the first to link real miles driven with actual claims filed – the insurance claims the two examined totaled 34 billion miles.

“We believe that the proven benefits to business, consumers and the environment spelled out in this study make a compelling case for adoption of PAYD in Massachusetts and beyond,” said John Kassel, president of Conservation Law Foundation.

While prior research has shown that risk increases with mileage, CLF officials say the study brings it down to an individual level.

Before Lori Ehrlich was elected to the Massachusetts Legislature she was a committed local activist fighting to protect the health and environment of her family and community.  In fact, CLF’s journal, Conservation Matters, ran a profile of Lori describing her critical role in the advocacy around the Salem Harbor Power Plant back in 2003 under the title “Mother Grizzly from Marblehead” – a good five years before a similar phrase was employed on the national scene to describe a very different person.

Lori (now “Rep. Ehrlich”) continues in her role as the voice of reason and truth with regard to the Salem Harbor plant in an articulate op-ed in the Salem News in which she argues that by ignoring “unequivocal statement of closure” that the Salem News editorial voice is “‘shamefully out of sync with the plant owners and city elected officials who have begun to take important steps to accept and plan for the inevitable”.   Rep. Ehrlich notes that given Dominion’s own statements, the cost of keeping the plant limping forward and the planning for the future now underway that the time has come for collaborative problem solving, not finger pointing:

The ratepayer deserves better than the false choice of “plant or no plant.” Ratepayers have borne the burden of keeping this plant afloat for years and now are paying above-market rates to the tune of $20 million for the next two years to import and burn cheap coal here.

Dominion’s CFO made clear in his remarks at the Edison Electric Institute gathering that the company will not invest its dollars in this plant. Why should we invest ours? With a just transition, local businesses and tourism can be bolstered without ruining our health, killing workers and destroying our natural resources.

Private citizens and several brownfield developers are coming forward with creative and potentially lucrative development ideas. Any development will also enjoy the benefit of a 2002 $6-million cleanup of on-site contamination from unlined impoundment ponds. With a federally designated deepwater port, it’s not a stretch to imagine this 65-acre property hosting cruise ships or other types of maritime commerce.

There will no doubt be unique challenges transitioning this property. But it’s not the only coal plant in the country going by the wayside, just the oldest.

The Salem News and those naysayers who spend so much time and energy pointing out what cannot be done, need to change their tune and join Dominion, city and state leadership, and the air-breathing public, in imagining other possibilities.

Rep.  Ehrlich is doing what our leaders are supposed to do: she is leading. Specifically, she is leading us forward towards a cleaner and more prosperous future and is trying to do so in a manner that heals wounds, considers the values and needs of many communities and she is using honest, tough but civil language to build a real conversation about what needs to be done.

Tonight on WBZ radio’s “Nightside with Dan Rea” starting at 9 pm CLF’s Sue Reid will debate Audra Parker, Executive Director of the anti-Cape Wind “Alliance for the Protection of Nantucket Sound.”  The show will run until at least 10 PM and could go longer.  Tune in to AM 1030 or listen live online and call in at 617-254-1030.

The show is likely to focus on the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities decision approving a long term contract between Cape Wind and National Grid but is sure to be full of discussion of Cape Wind generally.

From November 15, 2010 Boston Globe:

There are reasons aerotropolis didn’t get off the ground