Last week I attended the Ninth Annual Rhode Island Local Food Forum, organized by Farm Fresh Rhode Island. The forum’s theme was “Center of the Plate,” reflecting its focus on local protein production. Particularly enlightening was a panel discussion whose moderator, academic chef Bill Idell, posed questions that resonate across the region.  These questions ultimately boil down to two big ones: First, what does a sustainable food system look like? And second, how can we make one happen?

The panel’s meat experts – local guru Pat McNiff of Pat’s Pastured and Mel Coleman from national good-meat powerhouse Niman Ranch – agreed that sustainable meat means raising animals in their natural habitats (not concentrated feedlots) and in a way that feeds both animals and soil. The panelists also highlighted that sustainable food systems require local capacity because geographically concentrated animal operations are at risk from extreme weather: last summer’s drought, for example, “force[d] livestock producers to liquidate herds because feed [wa]s too expensive.” All this means that local meat is not just grown in a place, but it also grows that place by enriching both land (ecologically) and community (economically).

Building capacity for local meat is tough, however, when farmers have limited access to land. This is the case in Rhode Island. Not only is land itself expensive here (as throughout New England), but property and estate taxes can make it almost impossible to keep productive land in agricultural use when it is more valuable as land for development (and is assessed as such for tax purposes). We at CLF are looking closely at this issue.

Moving from the land to the sea, the discussion yielded different insights from the panel’s seafood experts.  “Eating with the Ecosystem” founder Sarah Schumann and seafood-aggregation specialist Jared Auerbach of Red’s Best noted that sustainability means something much different for seafood than for meat, because so many fish and shellfish stocks are wild. They agreed that a sustainable seafood system should be biodiverse – instead of a singleminded focus on cod, for example, a sustainable system would mean sending more fluke, skate, scup, and squid to market. Diversifying the types of seafood we typically eat would allow overfished stocks to recover, and would also contribute to the resiliency of ocean life in the face of climate change and ocean acidification. Furthermore, a sustainable seafood system would mean – to borrow from Sarah Schumann – eating with the (local) ecosystem. Seafood brought in to local ports is easy to trace and to verify species, boat size, and fishing method – factors that are federally regulated but relatively easy to lose track of as more steps are added to the supply chain. Encouraging demand for diverse seafood products, localizing seafood markets with robust tracing and verification systems, and streamlining state and federal fisheries regulations would all help foster local, sustainable seafood systems.

All four panelists, farmers and fishers alike, agreed on another point: we need local, sustainable food systems both to limit and to respond to harms wrought by carbon dioxide emissions. These emissions cause climate change, leading to droughts and other extreme weather that disrupts agriculture; these disruptions, in turn, require robust local systems to add resilience to the global food system. And carbon dioxide emissions also cause ocean acidification, which poses an immediate risk to shellfish and a long-term risk to all ocean life.

All this highlights the importance of CLF’s farm-and-food and climate-change programs. Our work shutting down coal-fired power plants and promoting renewable energy helps to limit emissions that threaten our current food system (not to mention our planet). And our farm-and-food program promotes local and regional food systems that provide a broad range of environmental benefits. As CLF’s newest staff attorney, I am excited to be joining these efforts here in Rhode Island. The Local Food Forum made it clear that there are many good ideas brewing here – we just need to do the work to get our food policy right.

I was on television the other night talking about the impact of sea level rise and storms on Boston and how the impacts of global warming mean that coastal cities like Boston face very real threats. During that interview, I found myself comparing the process of adapting to a changed climate to finding out the house is on fire and grabbing the cat and the kids and getting out – steps that should be followed by calling the Fire Department in order to save the rest of the house and neighborhood.

The climate equivalent of calling the Fire Department is reducing carbon emissions to head off even worse global warming and the wide gamut of effects that we are feeling and will feel from that phenomenon. On the national level, our problem is that Congress is not sure what kind of Fire Department we should have – and in fact a powerful contingent of folks in Congress refuse to believe in the existence of fire.

But here in the upper right hand corner of the U.S., the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, our state governments have been rolling the big red truck out of the garage and taking action to address the greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, a key source of this pollution causing global warming, by capping carbon emissions through the program known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (“RGGI”).

Today, February 7, those states (including the New England states of Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Connecticut) announced an agreement  to strengthen that cap on carbon  from 165 million tons down to 91 million tons (2012 levels).

This step, along with associated refinements to the RGGI program, is an important step toward meeting the climate imperative of an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, but we temper our applause by clearly noting that more sweeping action will be needed to get there. Listen to the wise words of Jonathan Peress, my colleague and our lead advocate on RGGI from our official release marking this announcement:

“This is a very meaningful step in the evolution of RGGI and a powerful example of how markets can drive solutions to climate change,” said N. Jonathan Peress, VP and director of CLF’s Clean Energy and Climate Change program. “Over the past four years, the RGGI program has proven that putting a price on carbon emissions and using the revenues to expand energy efficiency and clean energy as part of our mix is a formula that works. The program refinements announced today will further accelerate the ongoing transition away from dirty and inefficient fossil fuel power plants to meet our energy needs. Once again, the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states have demonstrated a path forward for others areas of the country.”

RGGI, the nation’s first market-based cap and trade program requires power plants to hold permits, known as “allowances,” for each ton of CO₂ they release into the atmosphere. Revenue from the sale of these allowances is reinvested in energy efficiency programs that reduce costs for businesses and make the states more competitive.

Peress continued, “We applaud the New England states for supporting and strengthening RGGI as an important tool in their toolkits for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and advancing a clean energy economy. The RGGI program has proven that carbon cap-and-trade programs can reduce carbon pollution while contributing to economic growth and prosperity. However, state leaders still have much to do to meet the emissions reductions levels dictated by science and our understanding of what it will take for our region to thrive in the face of climate change. Today’s action to strengthen the regional electric power plant cap-and-trade program is a step in the right direction, but we have a long way to go.”

The new cap level locks in emission reductions achieved to date, and continues to drive additional reductions through 2020. Since it was launched in 2009, economic experts say the increased energy efficiency that RGGI is driving has been generating greater rates of economic growth in each participating state.

How are PSNH’s coal plants like Mark Sanchez? (photo credit: flickr/TexKap)

Earlier this week, the Concord Monitor published a must-read editorial addressing PSNH’s future. Much like an earlier widely-printed op-ed on the subject, the editorial correctly describes the PSNH death spiral of escalating costs, fleeing customers, and dirty inefficient power plants kept alive by massive ratepayer subsidies.

The editorial also points out one key reason why PSNH’s argument that its plants are an insurance policy against high natural gas prices is increasingly off the mark: it ignores the damage that those plants do to the climate and to the environment. In 2012, despite not operating for much of the year, PSNH’s plants were nonetheless collectively the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in New Hampshire.

As time goes on, PSNH’s “insurance policy” argument only gets more specious. Relying on inflexible power plants that take many hours to start up and shut down is diametrically at odds with the dynamic and advanced electric grid that will help New England move toward a clean energy future and address concerns around the region’s increasing use of natural gas. We know what we need to do: the region needs to reduce energy demand through cost-effective energy efficiency investments, to deploy clean renewable technologies like wind that displace fossil fuel use, and to optimize the rules of the wholesale electric market to ensure smooth operation of the grid. Indeed, regional grid operator ISO New England’s recent market design efforts will almost certainly make poor-performing, inflexible power plants like PSNH’s less competitive, not more.

Propping up outdated physical assets – with high fixed maintenance costs – in the hopes that they will someday become competitive again is not “insurance.” It’s the kind of backward thinking that no competent manager or economist would endorse.

As a matter of policy, PSNH’s strategy enacts the classic economic mistake of “throwing good money after bad” by placing too much emphasis on “sunk costs,” an unfortunately common problem that James Surowiecki recently discussed in The New Yorker in describing the irrationality of sports teams’ commitments to ineffective players, like the Jets’ Mark Sanchez, after years of poor performance and bloated salaries.

At least sports teams suffer the consequences of their choices – they lose. With guaranteed profit and regulator-approved rates to recover its costs, PSNH and its parent Northeast Utilities have continued to win, even after a decade or more of terrible investment decisions. Unless of course PSNH can be made to pay for the mess it has created.

The key paragraph of the Concord Monitor’s editorial argues precisely this same point:

[L]awmakers must ensure that the lion’s share of the loss is incurred by investors in PSNH’s parent company, Northeast Utilities, not by New Hampshire ratepayers. That includes the huge cost of the mercury scrubber. It was investors, after all, who gambled that it made sense to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to keep an old coal plant running. They could have said no. So it’s investors who should lose if that gamble doesn’t pay off.

As PSNH looks for opportunities to spread its costs to the New Hampshire businesses and households that have escaped PSNH’s high rates, this is timely advice for New Hampshire policymakers. They should heed it.

Today, nearly 70% of all Rhode Island bus riders are going to and from work or school. That’s why having good public transit is so important to growing Rhode Island’s economy.

Gas is nearly $4 a gallon and, as a result, more Rhode Islanders than ever are taking the RIPTA bus. Meanwhile, many of Rhode Island’s bridges (maintained by DOT) are unsafe, and we all know what the pot-holes in our local streets are like.

In 2011, the Rhode Island General Assembly had a chance to address both sides of the transportation issue – RIPTA and DOT – with the “Transportation Investment and Debt Reduction Act.” The General Assembly did a good job back then with the first half of the problem, the DOT part. Now it’s time for the legislature to help RIPTA. The right way to do that is to pass H-5073, also known as the O’Grady Bill, for one of its chief sponsors, Rep. Jay O’Grady.

The Transportation Investment and Debt Reduction Act, passed two years ago, provides a stable and secure source of funding for the DOT without burdening Rhode Island taxpayers with huge debt-service obligations. In the past, Rhode Island floated a bond issue of $80 million every two years to raise the local matching funds needed to bring hundreds of millions of dollars of federal highway funds into the state. This constant borrowing was unsustainable, and was saddling our children with huge debt-service costs. According to the Rhode Island Secretary of State’s Voter Guide, Rhode Island tax payers are now obligated to repay $59.85 million in debt service alone (over and above principal repayment of $80 million) on just the 2010 bond. The Transportation Investment and Debt Reduction Act ensured that DOT would be able to get its matching funds without bonding and without more debt service.

That law is now saving Rhode Island tax-payers tens of millions of dollars over the life of those bonds. That’s a lot of money, especially when the economy is in tough shape.

But transportation is more than just roads and bridges. With gas at almost $4 a gallon, RIPTA ridership is at an all-time high. The O’Grady Bill provides much-needed sustainable funding to RIPTA. With those funds, RIPTA will be able to maintain existing service, put more busses on the busiest routes, increase the number of commuter Park-and-Rides, build more bus shelters at stops, and create new hubs for faster transfers and connections.

Today, nearly 70% of all Rhode Island bus riders are going to and from work or school. That’s why having good public transit is so important to growing Rhode Island’s economy – and why the business community supports the O’Grady Bill.

Other people use to bus to get to medical appointments and doctor’s visits. Having good public transit is linked to cleaner air. That’s why Rhode Island health organizations, including the American Lung Association in Rhode Island (and others), are supporting the O’Grady Bill.

The O’Grady Bill also provides additional funds for DOT’s construction projects. That’s why the unions are supporting the O’Grady Bill.

By providing additional funds for public transit, the O’Grady Bill will help reduce carbon emissions from the transportation sector. That’s why environmental organizations like CLF are supporting the O’Grady Bill.

In fact, when the O’Grady Bill was heard last year in the House Finance Committee, dozens of people spoke in favor of it – from business and labor, from community groups and environmental groups. There are not many bills that have such widespread support. Not one person spoke against the bill.

The General Assembly did not pass the O’Grady Bill last year. It should pass it this year. The O’Grady Bill will help us grow the economy, and will help all Rhode Islanders. That’s why it has garnered such wide support.

After extensive discussions with CLF, Deepwater Wind has agreed to voluntarily adjust its planned construction period to minimize potential impacts to migrating North Atlantic Right Whales -- like this breaching beauty here.

Deepwater Wind is taking exciting new steps to build on last month’s historic agreement to protect critically endangered right whales while developing offshore wind projects. The offshore wind developer, expected to begin construction on the proposed Block Island Wind Farm in 2014 or 2015, has announced an agreement to voluntarily adjust its planned construction period to minimize potential impacts to migrating North Atlantic right whales. This announcement follows extensive discussions with CLF, and shows a willingness to go above and beyond to protect North Atlantic right whales in the pursuit of renewable energy.

In order to fasten the five proposed turbine steel foundations into the steel floor, the developer must undergo pile driving, a process of hammering steel pipes up to 250 ft into the ocean floor. This stage of production could potentially harm migrating right whales, which have been documented feeding in Rhode Island Sound throughout the month of April. Deepwater Wind has adjusted its construction schedule accordingly, deciding that no pile driving will occur before May 1 of the project’s construction year.

Deepwater Wind’s decision to alter its construction schedule for the Block Island Wind project follows another agreement to adopt protections for endangered right whales in federal waters. A first-of-its kind coalition of offshore wind developers and environmental organizations agreed to adopt voluntary measures to protect right whales while expediting responsible offshore wind development. This historic agreement sets out measures that developers will voluntarily implement over the next four years in the Mid-Atlantic Wind Energy Areas stretching from New Jersey to Virginia. In it, key ocean stakeholders have shown great leadership in setting a model for future coalitions, and they have demonstrated a commitment to developing clean energy projects while protecting critically endangered species.

Keeping the lights on shouldn’t be this difficult. The response by Entergy to the outage at the Super Bowl is very reminiscent of the responses by Entergy to the many problems at its Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. It boils down to a piece of equipment failed and the power went out. A repeated problem at Vermont Yankee has been equipment failures – from cooling tower collapses to leaking pipes.

Sure problems happen, but c’mon. Enough already. The problem is that the same company that can’t keep the lights on for the Super Bowl is also challenged to keep its nuclear fleet running smoothly.

Even without news of the Super Bowl outage, UBS issued another report  about the shaky financial future of Vermont Yankee. The report states:

“We continue to believe Entergy is likely to decommission at least one of its units, such as Vermont Yankee, in 2013. We anticipate the process of decommissioning will become of greater importance to Entergy shareholders, as concerns around shareholder-financed contributions to decommissioning funds continue to garner concern.”

The financial outlook looks bleak. Meanwhile, next week hearings begin at the Vermont Public Service Board about Vermont Yankee’s future. Entergy has money to keep four law firms employed working on the case. That money would be better spent closing the plant and cleaning up the site.

The Boston Harbor Association has a powerful message about the very real threat of sea level rise driven by global warming.  Their report, “Preparing for the Rising Tide”, is a dramatic wake-up call about the fundamental threat to the historic and economic heart of Boston.

The report starts with very solid science that shows how the homes, businesses and cultural institutions (like the New England Aquarium) that sit on the waterfront are now on the edge of entering, and have in some cases already entered, a very real danger zone.  A zone where the flooding and catastrophic damage that Hurricane Sandy brought to the New York region would tear across our coastline – with the prospect of worse to come.  Indeed, had Sandy hit only 5 ½ hours earlier than it did, when tides were high, the floodwaters would have reached Boston City Hall, nearly ½ mile inland from the City’s waterfront. In other words, Boston got lucky compared to New York City and other communities that were brutally whacked by the storm.  And this near miss begs the question:  do we really want to leave the vitality of our coastal communities to chance?

The report provides a few key lessons:

• Many vulnerable places, like the entrance to the UMass Boston campus, key MBTA stations like the one at the New England Aquarium and sections of waterfront buildings like the Long Wharf Marriott are in very real danger, today, from the severe storms that are becoming an unfortunate, and all too frequent, visitors to the Northeast.
• Indeed, some of these vulnerable places would have suffered very real and painful damage if Sandy had slightly changed course and struck Boston instead of New York, or if Sandy had arrived just a few hours earlier.
• As climate change continues to worsen due to the build-up of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, a build-up that grows a little bit every day, the likelihood of a severe flooding event increases. In a very real way the march of time is our enemy here – with each passing year, as we continue to pump enormous quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the chance of a catastrophic flooding event grows.
• Addressing this fundamental problem will require an integrated approach that reaches across all aspects of society, the economy and government – fundamentally transforming the way we plan, use our land and water resources, build, travel, manage our buildings and use energy – in order to make our communities more resilient and able to handle inundation and other impacts from the changing climate but also to reduce the emissions that are causing the problem in the first place.

In other words, while it remains critically important to tackle the root causes of climate change by reducing energy waste and cleaning up our energy supply, that’s not enough any longer. The emissions we produce today from driving our cars and heating and lighting our buildings will produce effects that are beginning to materialize now – as with Superstorm Sandy – and that will present ever more daunting challenges for future generations. We therefore need to brace for impacts that already have been set in motion. And we must adapt a broad range of infrastructure and institutions to make our communities more resilient to those impacts.

Conservation Law Foundation, as a group with roots in Boston and nearly 50 years of work here, applauds the work of the Boston Harbor Association in preparing and releasing this Report.  As a regional organization that works across New England, we recognize that the Report reflects an absolutely vital case study that provides guidance for planning and preparations in Massachusetts’ largest city, while also providing an example of the kind of sober analysis and planning that needs to unfold from Connecticut’s Long Island Sound coastline to the frigid waters of Downeast Maine.

This Report is a reminder that we must act now to protect our communities from the harm that has already been done – and we need to act on emissions reductions to prevent even worse and more catastrophic harm beyond the massive flooding outlined in TBHA’s chilling maps.   This is the mandate of the Massachusetts Global Warming Solutions Act that has been on the Commonwealth’s books since 2008. Having had the foresight to enact this law the question becomes whether we here in Massachusetts will have the courage to truly implement it.  TBHA’s Report, which looks at both the impacts that are unavoidable and the even worse impacts if massive greenhouse gas emissions continue, provides a compelling reminder of the  consequences of inaction.

Vermont keeps working on better ways for people and goods to get where they need to go. The threats from climate change and the high cost of maintaining our travel ways mean we need to be smarter and greener.

In 2011 Vermont’s Governor Peter Shumlin announced that the Circ Highway – an expensive, polluting and ill-conceived highway project outside Burlington — would not be built as planned. In its place a Task Force would work on solutions that won’t bust the budget or foul our air and water.

Over the past year a good part of that work looked at targeted improvements in the immediate Circ area. The result is a study of the network . With this are recommendations that were just adopted by the Task Force to move forward with making improvements to some existing roadways in and around Williston.

A public meeting will be held on Tuesday, February 5, 2013 from 7:30 – 9:00 PM at Williston Town Hall, with a presentation of the findings of the study and the recommendations. The meeting is hosted by the Williston Planning Commission. Refreshments will be served.

CLF has been mostly pleased with this work and encouraged that new and more effective solutions are moving forward. As we noted in comments to the group, a bigger role for transit and roundabouts could cut costs and pollution further.

Come learn about new projects and let the transportation officials working on these projects know what you think.

The massive drag on New Hampshire’s economy caused by PSNH’s continued operation of the uneconomic and obsolete Merrimack Station and Schiller Station coal-fired units—extracting hundreds of millions per year in above market costs for its shareholders—is spiraling out of control, and several recent developments at the NH Public Utilities Commission raise troubling questions about what the agency empowered to protect ratepayers is doing about PSNH’s problems.

While competition among energy suppliers in New England is fostering efficiency, benefitting the environment and saving ratepayers money, PSNH’s energy service business, for which it collects its cost of service and a handsome profit, is increasingly looking like a dinosaur ready for extinction. Thousands of NH ratepayers are taking advantage of lower cost, more efficient electricity suppliers, but those remaining with PSNH are being dragged down into its death spiral.

One recent indicator is PSNH’s skyrocketing energy service rate. In early December, PSNH requested a 34% energy service rate increase (to 9.54 cents/kwh, equating to hundreds of dollars extra per household per year) beginning in 2013. At the end of December, the PUC approved the rate increase. CLF is challenging that increase at the PUC on the grounds that, even aside from the fact that it entirely consists of above market costs, NH law prevents the PUC from approving a utility’s requested rate increases when the utility has not submitted required planning documents demonstrating that it has a sound plan for serving its customers at the lowest cost. PSNH failed to submit long term least cost planning documents due last September; until they do so, the PUC is not authorized to approve their rate increases.

Fundamentally, the job of a utility commission dealing with a regulated utility like PSNH is to ensure that prices mimic the results of market competition while ensuring the best service for ratepayers. Thus far, the PUC has shielded PSNH from the consequences of its poor decisions, lack of meaningful planning, and insistence on retaining antiquated power plants that sit idly due to their high costs. It also is once again delaying the release of economic and environmental information that PSNH used when deciding to build the $422 million scrubber project at Merrimack Station. And days ago the PUC approved PSNH’s 2010 plan for its energy supply resources – a plan that utterly ignored lower natural gas market forecasts and impending environmental regulations when planning its future operations.  CLF is acting to protect ratepayers from PSNH’s dying business model; the extent to which the PUC is doing so is less than clear.

The PUC is engaged in dockets investigating both the costs of the scrubber project and PSNH’s increasing energy service costs. It remains to be seen whether these investigations will have any impact on the expensive mess PSNH has yoked to NH ratepayers, and whether PSNH will continue even farther down the path of  eroding New Hampshire’s advantage as a low cost state to grow a business and a family.