Earlier this week Secretary Salazar announced the Department of the Interior’s five-year proposal for oil and gas leases in our nation’s oceans. Much to the relief of New England’s fishermen, beachgoers, and coastal businesses, the Obama Administration’s proposal keeps the oil industry out of New England’s ocean and the rest of the Atlantic coast. CLF has long opposed oil drilling off of New England’s coasts and joined with the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association to block drilling 30 years ago when test wells were being drilled on the rich fishing grounds of Georges Bank. CLF opposes offshore drilling for the very simple reason that a healthy, thriving ocean free of oil spills is worth far more to our region than the oil that potentially lies beneath the waves. From fishing to read more…

                Wouldn’t it be great if Maine law required that our power companies must save their customers money by investing in the cheapest form of energy, known as energy efficiency, while simultaneously ensuring that the sources of power sold in Maine increasingly come from clean, renewable energy sources?  If you agree, you are not alone. A coalition of Maine businesses, workers, health professionals, citizens and public interest groups, including CLF, feels the same way and we have initiated a referendum for next year’s election that will make it happen—with your help.                 To do so, our coalition will have to gather more than 70,000 signatures from Mainers seeking to place this issue on a ballot for state-wide vote in November 2012. This Election Day (tomorrow- November 8—VOTE!) keep an eye read more…

CLF is a proud founding member of Renewable Energy New England, a non-profit association that brings together companies working on and supporting clean renewable energy (including developers of wind farms, manufacturers of equipment that harvests wind and solar power, private builders of transmission lines that serve wind farms) with environmental advocates. RENEW (as the group is known) has a nice new revamped website worth visiting. Solving our massive environmental and energy problems will involve a lot of saying no to bad projects but will also will require saying yes to what affirmative projects that can meet the needs of our society and economy in a cleaner and better way. Environmental advocates like CLF will never agree with everything that businesses like renewable project developers say and we will scrutinize their read more…

This was a big week for TalkingFish.org! We launched a re-designed website as well as a new Special Features section, making it easier than ever for you to get the information you're looking for about the scientific, financial and social aspects at work in New England’s fisheries. Here's a weekly recap of this week on TalkingFish.org read more..

In late October, Senator Scott Brown called for the resignation of NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco. CLF’s Peter Shelley wrote the following Letter to the Editor of the Boston Globe in response to Senator Brown’s statement. read more..

CLF is pleased to welcome Zak Griefen, a Vermont native and former litigator for Cheney, Brock and Saudek, in the newly created role of environmental enforcement litigator. Based in CLF’s Vermont office, but working on cases throughout New England, Zak will be focused initially on cleaning up our region’s inland and coastal waters by ensuring that polluters are aware of their Clean Water Act permitting requirements and bringing federal litigation when necessary. The environmental enforcement litigator position was created to hold polluters accountable for the violations of environmental regulations—Clean Water Act and others—that are rampant across New England, compromising our region’s health and the health and safety of our citizens. Zak has a BA from the University of New Mexico, and earned his JD, cum laude, and Master of Studies read more…

Today, the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services provided an annual report to the New Hampshire legislature detailing the results of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) Carbon Dioxide Emissions Budget Trading Program.  The report notes that the program has supported approximately $20 million in job creating energy efficiency investment in New Hampshire and that each dollar of invested RGGI revenue resulted in $3.42 in direct energy savings (See this study by the University of New Hampshire). The report concludes that the effect of the RGGI program on rates has been negligible, amounting to .06 cents per kWh, or approximately 30 cents per month per household. At the same time, electricity bills for customers of New Hampshire electric utilities have decreased dramatically since RGGI went into effect, with the exception read more…

A new report released last week by Transportation for Massachusetts, a broad coalition of which CLF is a founding member, details the origins and scope of the transportation financing crisis in Massachusetts. Written as a primer to achieve better understanding among decision-makers,  taxpayers and transportation users, “Maxed Out” provides illuminating background amidst an increasingly urgent call for solutions to one of the Commonwealth’s most pressing problems.  The report emphasizes that the lack of revenue to maintain the Commonwealth’s transportation system in its current condition, let alone meet future needs, jeopardizes jobs, the environment, and the quality of life across the state. The report details how the state’s long dependence on borrowed money unsupported by new revenue to pay off the debt has left all pieces of the state’s transportation network read more…

The unfortunate news that Beacon Power, an innovative technology company based in Massachusetts,  declared bankruptcy has inspired a bit of a media feeding frenzy centered around analogies to the failed California solar company Solyndra,  because Beacon (like Solyndra) received  a federal loan guarantee. This analogy simply doesn’t hold up for the following reasons: Beacon Power has a fully operational facility in Stephentown New York that is an operating model of their flywheel technology, a innovative technology that provides an essential service to the electricity grid, providing stability to the power system at a very low cost.  This stability will allow smoother operation of the power grid and allow for integration of many more renewable resources like wind and solar smoothly at a reasonable price. The Federal loan guarantee is structured read more…

Much of CLF‘s work these days is focused on the challenge of global warming and in particular reducing immediately, structurally and effectively the release into the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and the other “greenhouse gases” causing the problem. This is, of course, not all that we do.  But much of our work on this over-arching problem overlaps with other important work like reducing air pollution that directly harms the health and lives of people or providing good transit access to urban communities, thus providing access to jobs for residents of those communities while reducing automobile trips and emissions. Still other CLF work, like protecting and nurturing our fisheries and forests, ensures that management of those resources is mindful of the changing climate while preserving unique ecosystems both for their own read more…