“We have many options for heating our homes,” says Greg Cunningham, Director of CLF’s Clean Energy and Climate Change program. “Alternatives like heat pumps avoid the use of oil and natural gas furnaces, which pollute our environment and damage our climate.”
Despite many good intentions, curbside recycling has turned out to be a disaster. But that doesn’t mean recycling is dead. We have solutions. One of the best systems for recycling our plastic, glass, and aluminum containers is the bottle return program, also known as the “bottle bill” or deposit-return.
Although some New England states pioneered the bottle return system, they have since fallen behind. But New England can improve its recycling by updating or adopting bottle return systems in each state. This would help reduce litter in our neighborhoods, parks, and waterways; it would keep recyclable material out of landfills and incinerators; and it would lift some recycling costs off of communities.
Our electricity grid was designed over 100 years ago. But times have changed. Today, clean, renewable energy can be harnessed right where we live, so electricity doesn’t have to come from polluting power plants miles away. But we have to update our electricity grid to take advantage of it.
CLF’ers Elena Mihaly and Tom Irwin show that you don’t have to live in a major city, or even on a paved road, to benefit from driving an electric car.
“By erasing protections for the majority of our Nation’s wetlands and more than 18% of streams, this rule green-lights the dumping of pesticides and toxic chemicals into our waters,” said Heather Govern, Director of CLF’s Clean Air and Water program. “Large corporate interests bought and paid for this rollback, which will harm our communities and public health for decades to come.”
Winter snow and ice bring out Big Gas’s fearmongers. Why is the region’s electric grid operator among them?
Installing solar panels helped Melissa and her husband slash their energy bills – and also reduced their family’s carbon footprint.
Ever winter, as the cold rolls in and New Englanders turn up their heat, the gas industry starts calling for more pipelines. But if we want to avoid a climate catastrophe, we need to end fossil fuel use—including the use of fracked gas—by 2050 at the very latest.
CLF is no stranger to tough fights and seemingly impossible odds. In our 50-plus-year history, we’ve taken on – and taken down – Goliaths, from Big Coal to Big Gas. Here’s what we have learned from the biggest battles of the past decade – and what we must, and will, do before we reach 2030.
