The story of renewable energy development in the United States has included many important moments in which the states have provided leadership – most notably through fostering the shaping and building of new markets for renewable energy markets through programs like Renewable Energy Standards (also known “Renewable Portfolio Standards”).  These efforts have been of great value to the states who put them in place and have complemented and reinforced the incentives and programs to build up renewable energy resources like wind and solar by the Federal Government.

We are at a critical moment in the history of renewable energy development.  The collapse of coherent federal renewable energy policy, due to congressional inaction, in the form of failed attempts to put in place a Renewable Energy Standard and renew the Production Tax Credit, has created a greater need for state action – especially when clean renewable energy is an essential puzzle piece in solving the fundamental climate crisis that we face.

An interesting new element in this story is the quest by the New England States, working through a variety of vehicles, to develop a new “regional procurement” strategy that will allow the states to minimize the cost and maximize the benefits of renewable energy development for the region. This idea, also being discussed by leading scholars, could be a way to move forward smart and effective energy and climate policy, producing great value for a very reasonable investment.

This is far from a theoretical question.  Last year, in July 2011, the New England Governors directed their staff and the New England States Committee on Electricity who work with that staff, to continue to develop and build a mechanism for regional procurement. On July 29-30, 2012 the Governors meet again in Burlington Vermont and will hear a report on how that work has gone.  Will they take the critical step of moving beyond study and consideration of this idea and take action?

Rush Hour in Copenhagen, photo courtesy of Mikael Colville-Andersen @ flickr

On the afternoon of July 6th, I rode my bike home from work through the streets of Portland, Maine, sharing the lane with car traffic. Parts of my commute could benefit from a bike lane or increased signage, but the prospects for those projects do not look good in the near term. Earlier that day, President Obama had signed a new transportation bill that slashed federal funding for biking and pedestrian infrastructure.

The bill reduces funding for bicycling and pedestrian improvements by about thirty percent. Additionally, it allows those reduced funds allocated for bike and pedestrian projects to be used instead for other transportation work at the discretion of the state. This despite the fact that a 2010 census study showed that the number of people who used a bicycle as their primary mode of transportation increased by 43% in the preceding decade. Even greater gains were seen in cities, where commutes tend to be shorter.

My own bike obsession (my third-floor walk-up houses eight bikes, four of which are mine) began when I spent a semester abroad in Denmark. Its capital city, Copenhagen, is full of wide bike lanes bustling with two-wheeled traffic. The bike lanes are bordered by a curb to separate them from the road and are built so that bikers can safely pass one another within the lane. According to the City of Copenhagen, half of its residents bike to work or school every day. To compare, in Portland, Oregon, the large U.S. city with the most bikers, 6% of residents primarily use their bike to get to work.

Bicycling is contagious. Living in Copenhagen I found that having so many bikes on the roads and such good infrastructure makes it more fun, safer, and easier to ride. Drivers expect cyclists and operate accordingly. Bike racks sit on seemingly every corner. People carry heavy loads of groceries in bike baskets, transport their children around the city in specially-made cargo bikes, and use fenders or even an umbrella to get around in the rain. My memory could be deceiving me, but I still swear that I once saw a man in a business suit eating a sandwich and talking on a cell phone while navigating rush hour bike traffic.

I returned to Portland for law school largely because it is such a wonderful place to live. The city is big enough to have great restaurants and good music, but relatively quiet and geographically small. I own a car, but never drive within the city because biking is cheaper, more fun, and often faster. Traffic is light, speeds are slow, and drivers are generally courteous.

The city has made strides in recent years, adding bike lanes, pursuing federal grant money for further improvements, and even hiring a bike-pedestrian coordinator.  However, more remains to be done. Dangerous intersections, narrow streets, and perilous railroad crossings remain unsafe even for experienced cyclists, and intimidate those who might otherwise choose to commute or recreate on a bike. Greater federal funding would enable Portland to more quickly and completely make its streets safer for all users.

Our country’s transportation system needs help, that much is clear. Many roads and bridges need costly repairs to remain safe. But it is short-sighted to spend huge sums on automotive infrastructure in lieu of making cities more livable for bicyclists and pedestrians. Walking and biking keeps people healthier and happier, all while saving gas and reducing emissions. American cities could be cleaner, more bikeable, more walkable, and less car-dominated if we choose to invest wisely in our biking and walking infrastructure.

Pressure is building to reopen the St. Croix River to the alewife, a critical forage fish.

Earlier this week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a letter adopting the recommendations made in our lawsuit seeking  to restore alewives, a key forage and bait fish, to the St. Croix River.

As noted last month, CLF initiated a lawsuit against the EPA due to its failure to review and reject the Maine law that requires an existing fish passage facility at the Grand Falls dam to be closed. You can find the blog post here, explaining why we sued EPA.

As I said in the press statement, “EPA’s letter is a gratifying sign that we’re finally making substantive progress in restoring this important fish to the St. Croix River watershed. As EPA now agrees, this law is scientifically and legally unsupportable. We hope that further litigation is unnecessary to ensure that the state follows the directive of EPA in allowing alewives to return to their native waters.”

Since CLF filed its complaint, the Passamaquoddy Tribe, joined by other Maine Tribes, has formally requested Maine’s Governor Le Page to repeal the state law and, in the alternative, asked the International Joint Commission to invalidate the law. See a copy of the letter here. CLF is working with the Tribes to achieve the goal of restoring alewives to their native waters in the St. Croix watershed

This story was the subject of a front page article by Colin Woodard in the Maine Sunday Telegram. You can find that article here.

Urban agriculture holds great promise for Boston.

This post was coauthored by Melissa Hoffer & Jo Anne Shatkin.

We are excited to share with you the news that today CLF and CLF Ventures released a report that, for the first time, details the economic development potential for urban agriculture in Greater Boston, assesses its environmental and health co-benefits, and examines current market and policy barriers to expanded food production in Greater Boston. The report‘s findings confirm that urban agriculture can play an important role in creating a more livable, carbon resilient, healthier, economically vibrant, and environmentally sustainable city—if we put smart policies in place and encourage market development for Boston grown foods.

Download a free copy of the report here: http://clf.org/growing-green/

The City of Boston has taken important steps over the past two years to advance urban agriculture, and new businesses are taking root, including City Growers, a Mattapan-based farming business that is featured in this report. There is a palpable sense of excitement about the potential of this new urban vision for agriculture for communities; possibilities abound. But CLF and CLF Ventures believe it is more than possible— it is a necessity, and an urgent one at that as we face the challenges of climate change, an obesity epidemic, lack of availability of healthy foods in many communities, and a fragile economy.

The report found that converting as few as 50 acres of vacant or underutilized land around Boston into agricultural production would spur job creation, improve access to healthy, local, fresh food, and reduce environmental harms. Key findings of the report include:

• Land is available. 50 acres – an area the size of Boston Common – is a small portion of the vacant or underutilized land available in Boston.
• Urban farms would stimulate the economy by creating jobs. 50 acres of urban agriculture in Boston will likely generate at least 130 direct farming jobs and may generate over 200 jobs depending on actual business characteristics and revenue.
• Healthy, local and affordable food. 50 acres in agricultural production would provide enough fresh produce to feed over 3,600 people over a six-month retail season. If the produce is used to prepare healthy school lunches in Boston Public Schools, 50 acres could provide more than one serving of fresh produce for each lunch served to a student eligible for free or reduced school lunch over a six month period. If 800 acres of potentially available City-owned land were put into agricultural production, the food needs of approximately 10 percent of Boston’s total population could be fully satisfied during a six-month retail season.
• Significant environmental impacts. Urban agriculture in Boston will result in a net reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. 50 acres of properly managed soils would sequester about 114 tons of cabon dioxide (CO2) per year and may result in an additional CO2 reduction of up to 4,700 tons per year.
• Community adaptation. No less than 6,000 new temperature records were set during the recent March 2012 heat wave, and more than 40,000 have been set for the year-to-date. Meanwhile, the July 2011-June 2012 period was the warmest 12-month period of any 12-months on record for the contiguous U.S., with the first half of 2012 being the hottest ever recorded. The International Energy Agency’s recent projection of a 10.8 degree F temperature increase over pre-industrial levels by the end of this century underscores the fact that a more decentralized food system will be necessary to enable our communities to better adapt to changing climate conditions, including the impacts of more frequent severe weather. Urban agriculture is a part of this solution.

As Jo Anne said in the press release announcing Growing Green, it’s clear that even 50 acres of sustainable agriculture on available land would be an economic stimulus and environmental resource for Boston. While we focused on a 50 acre test scenario, these conclusions are scalable across New England. Imagine how vibrant New England would be like with a robust and sustainable regional food system.

In addition to the potential benefits, the report also considers the policy and market barriers to fully realizing the potential of urban agriculture, examining the ways in which promoting urban agriculture will require city and state involvement and key needs for such involvement. Such barriers include the need for policies that provide affordable access to land, one of the key market barriers for both new and experienced farmers; strategies to reduce the risks associated with the Commonwealth’s hazardous material cleanup law; improved access to high quality compost; and better financing options to overcoming prohibitive capital and operating costs, amongst other findings.

Our ongoing work seeks to link urban agriculture to the larger regional food system, and focuses on how to overcome some of the barriers we have identified.

Boston is ideally positioned to play a lead role in coordinating with the Massachusetts Food Policy Council, other New England states, and cities around the region to build a vision for a New England regional food system and make it happen. Boston is emerging as a national leader in urban agriculture innovation, and can be a voice for the benefits of urban agriculture and as one of the region’s largest consumers, help to build the market for regionally grown food.

For more resources on this topic:

Find a copy of the report here: www.clf.org/growing-green/
Find an infographic detailing the report here: http://bit.ly/clfgrowinggreen
To read more about CLF’s Farm & Food Initiative, click here: http://www.clf.org/our-work/healthy-communities/food-and-farm-initiative/

A recent scientific article from four Maine ocean scientists reminded me of a not-very-good environmental joke. An archangel was reporting to God all the terrible things that humans had done to the earth’s environment. God listened patiently as the list expanded, interjecting regularly that the archangel was not to worry; these events had all been anticipated. But when the angel reported that there was now a hole in the ozone layer, God bolted upright in shock: “I told them not to mess with the ozone layer!”

The article I was reading was not about ozone holes. Obscurely titled Step-changes in the physical, chemical and biological characteristics of the Gulf of Maine, as documented by the GNATS times series, four researchers, led by Dr. William M. Balch from the prestigious Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, reported on work they had done looking at a number of data bases of various physical, chemical, and biological markers in the Gulf of Maine. They focused on a series of ship-based sampling data collected between 1998 and 2010.

The researchers reported a startling fact: “[t]he standing stock of phytoplankton … generally decreased since 2005” and there had been a “dramatic” decrease in carbon fixation by phytoplankton across the Gulf of Maine in recent years.

The paper explained this dramatic decrease by pointing to increased precipitation in the Gulf of Maine watersheds in recent years. Four of the eight highest annual precipitation years in the last century in Maine occurred between 1998 and 2010. The data led them to conclude that this increased and atypical precipitation—a commonly predicted phenomenon associated with climate change –interfered with phytoplankton production by discharging increased amounts of colored dissolved organic matter from the watersheds into the Gulf that outcompeted marine plankton for available light.

This is no small matter. Phytoplankton is the base of virtually all marine life in the ocean. Moreover, marine phytoplankton around the world has been estimated to draw more carbon dioxide—a primary climate change gas—from the atmosphere and the oceans than all land plants combined. The punch line to the joke might just as well have been: “I told them not to mess with the phytoplankton!”

While it will take some time before a decline in phytoplankton production in the Gulf of Maine would manifest itself higher up in the marine food web by fewer numbers of high level fishes, the Bigelow researchers were correct to point out that historic high fish productivity in the Gulf of Maine marine system is directly linked to its high productivity of plankton. The health of the marine food web depends on the strength of its planktonic base.

This report’s startling analysis aligns in a troubling way with anecdotal information from fishermen and from fisheries science data that has been surfacing recently. Fish don’t seem to be as large at the different ages as they used to be and a number of predicted strong larval year classes of fish like Atlantic cod have “disappeared” before they became big enough to enter the fishery. Are Gulf of Maine fish failing to thrive like they once did as a consequence of declines in plankton production?

Climate change is happening and its impacts are already being registered in New England. The consequences of our profligate carbon consumption patterns will continue to challenge our ecosystem, our economy, and our way of life through both dramatic and random events that devastate coastal areas as well as chronic ecosystem changes that can be seen at the level of a single-celled phytoplankton. Sadly, it’s no joke.

This week, along with millions of Americans, I will cheer at a parade, join a BBQ, and watch fireworks. I will do this with my family, in a familiar place, with familiar faces, and celebrate this most American of holidays.

July 4th has always meant a great deal to me, first as an American boy growing up, and now as an American environmentalist. It is a great holiday because it is a holiday that makes us proud of what we’ve accomplished. Independence. Self reliance. Prosperity.

These values are often associated with places: when we think of America, we think of the icons of America. Yellowstone. Zion. And New England’s very own Acadia National Park. As Americans, preserving these natural treasures is among our proudest accomplishments. Our oceans should be no different. Here, in the Gulf of Maine, we have George’s Bank, Stellwagen Bank, and Cashes Ledge – a spectacular undersea mountain range – where you find steep canyons, deep kelp forests, and vibrant, charismatic marine life. Their beauty and majesty are breathtaking.

Why, then, do these special ocean places not stir us like our special places on land? I believe it’s because  we don’t see them. We don’t think of our underwater treasures as icons of America because we can’t light up our grill next to a kelp forest and watch seals swim by, like we can an eagle flying over head.

There can be no doubt that our oceans are national treasures. To help raise awareness – and to literally raise these places out of the sea and into our living rooms and offices – we have launched the New England Ocean Odyssey with National Geographic photographer Brian Skerry. The photos from this first-of-its-kind journey will show just how magnificent, and how fragile, the ocean can be. Indeed, they already have. This early collection of photos from Brian is only the beginning.

The photo of a sea star, featured above, is a bright burst of color against a dark backdrop – a firework against a night sky. The seal is part friend, part pastor, welcoming you and praying at the same time. And the image of the right whale bursts with strength. It swells with American pride.

Just as there is no doubt that our oceans are treasures, so too is there no doubt that they are being damaged. Bottom trawlers damage huge swaths of the ocean floor with their heavy chains, doors and dredges, likened by some scientists to a bulldozer scraping the delicate floor of a pristine forest. New England’s oceans are rising much faster than predicted. They are also becoming more acidic from harmful greenhouse gas emissions. Recent record increases in precipitation may even be fundamentally altering plankton production, jeopardizing the very productivity of our marine web of life.

As you celebrate Independence Day this week, and think about America’s independence, think about what makes us proud to be Americans. Think about the pride we take in our National Parks, and the foresight we had to protect them and so many other treasured landscapes. And think about how much we depend on, but how little protection we give to, our oceans.

In our increasingly interdependent world, that is pushing the limits of our ecosystems, certain renewed forms of independence would be a good thing.

Independence from fossil fuels.

Independence from unhealthy food and transportation systems.

Independence from water-polluting infrastructure of all types.

The natural independence – and security – for our children and grandchildren, that flow from creating a truly sustainable future.

And independence that comes with the pride of protecting America’s natural resources – on land and under our shining sea.

Llike so many of us, I love New England’s ocean treasures. This July 4th, stand with CLF in remembering and protecting them, so our children and grandchildren can love them too.

Last week I stood in front of a group of young, energetic and extremely well qualified people and welcomed them as CLF’s 2012 summer interns – an act being repeated thousands of times around the country this summer. As I looked across the room at this highly talented group of young people, two thoughts occurred to me: among them are our future leaders, and our movement – the environmental movement – will be very different when they are standing in my position, welcoming interns to their organizations in the years ahead.

The movement certainly was different when I joined it, 35 years ago, as an intern with the Sierra Club. Working out of their DC office, I worked on issues related to Native Americans in Alaska. At the time, when the American environmental movement was still young, our issues were advanced primarily by litigation, by males, and by people who were predominantly well educated and white. That, thankfully, is no longer true.

Looking into the faces of our interns, I saw not just lawyers but city planners, economists and biologists. I saw people from all over the country, and people from all walks of life. Their toolbox is larger and more refined, their network larger and more informed than ours was 35 years ago. Looking around the room, at the new members of CLF’s family, I thought: some of these people will change the world. Of that I am convinced.

I also have little doubt that our movement will continue to change, as it has during my lifetime. In talking to these interns, I wondered: what advice could I give them, and people like them at other environmental organizations across the country? What advice could I give to young people hoping to enter the movement? I have three suggestions.

**

Be aggressive. Be creative.

Many people are hired as interns for specific projects that match their interests and the needs of the organization. This is a good thing, certainly. But it has been my observation that people often find their calling – where their skills and their passion combine with their work – when they least expect it. A career is often made not of straight lines, but of surprise turns that, once taken, are committed to.

Be aggressive in pursuing that which interests you. So long as you get your assigned work done, everyone will benefit from you going the extra mile and pursuing your interests.

Let it change. Help us grow.

Just like any movement, our movement needs to change so as to remain effective and fresh. Innovation and change occur because people have new ideas, and new people join the movement.

We have been successful as a movement, but the challenges facing us remain systemic and, at times, daunting. We need change; we should welcome and encourage innovation.

How do you do this as an intern? Become an advocate. Recruit your friends. Don’t settle for a system you think is broken. Make a ruckus, and make it as loud or as quiet as you need to be effective.

Be substantive.  Communicate well.

People trust others who know their stuff. Learn the details. Understand the science behind the positions we take. Learn the policy-making and regulatory processes you’re working with. There is no substitute for depth of knowledge and understanding of nuance. But hone your ability to explain what you know to ordinary people. It’s an art, and it takes constant practice. It is essential. An expert in isolation is a waste of an expert; and expert who can make her depth of knowledge readily understood is a gem.

**

On the day I greeted our new interns, someone else greeted my son as he began his internship in Chicago. I hope that person felt about him as I do about our interns: here at CLF is one of our new great leaders.

I’d like to think that CLF is fertile ground for nurturing environmental advocates. Among the ranks of our alumni are the leaders of companies, leading environmental advocates, leading public servants, and two current, long-standing CLF staff members who started as interns and never left.

To all those working for us this summer, I say: welcome to the CLF family. Now, go out and change the world. Make New England, and our world, thrive.

Moving to a clean energy future means keeping the dirty stuff out. If you are cleaning house in a dust storm, the first thing you do is close the door. 

photo courtesy of Zak Griefen

Environmental groups gathered to show the need to close the door in New England on tar sands oil – the dirtiest of dirty oil. We are moving in the wrong direction to bring oil in and through New England that increases global warming pollution even more.  

Tar sands are a carbon bomb that will catapult us past several dangerous climate tipping points. It has no part in our region’s clean energy future.

A new report, Going in Reverse: The Tar Sands Threat to Central Canada and New England, outlines an array of threats associated with tar sands.

In late May, a pipeline company announced it would reverse the flow of a 62-year-old pipeline bringing oil from southern Ontario to Montreal. Reversing the pipeline opend the door to another pipeline reversal enabling tar sands to flow through Vermont, and New Hampshire to Portland, Maine. The tar sands industry has been in a desperate search for a port of export since the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway projects have become mired in controversy. CLF and others expressed concern that these proposals are being advanced by the same pipeline company responsible for the largest tar sands spill in U.S. history resulting the devastation of the Kalamazoo River near Marshall, Michigan. 

As the placard of one young CLF supporter noted, we need “More Tarzan, Less Tar Sand.” The help of a super-hero would be nice. In the meantime, let’s just shut the door.

Associated Press story:  Alarm Raised About Potential Tar Sands Pipeline