Here is a quote from Martin Luther King that everyone in the climate change movement should take to heart:
We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.
Listen to the King audio excerpt here and also to his full Dec. 10, 1964 Nobel Prize acceptance speech below.
The formation of the Sandwich Climate Crisis Coalition was inspired by the Pachamama Alliance and the Drawdown Project. Now they jointly have produced an inspiring 90-minute video demonstrating how the reversible is possible and how you can make a difference. Register to watch the free video here.
Politics matter and so will the Presidential election in the fall when it comes to solving climate change. Those of us interested in ending global warming must get fully involved in this upcoming election.
Here is what the New York Times reports:
A small number of people at a few federal agencies have vast power over the protection of American air and water.
Under the Trump administration, the people appointed to those positions overwhelmingly used to work in the fossil fuel, chemical and agriculture industries. During their time in government they have been responsible for loosening or undoing nearly 100 environmental protections from pollution and pesticides, as well as weakening preservations of natural resources and efforts to curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
The Sandwich Climate Crisis Coalition has a goal that in some ways is similar to Jeff Bezos’ of Amazon. We both have plans to be replace fossil fuels with renewables by 2030 and reduce greenhouse grasses.
In September 2019, Amazon ordered 100,000 electric delivery vans. The Los Angeles Times reported, CEO Bezos’ goal is to have “100% renewable energy companywide by 2030, a goal the employees’ group has been seeking” The employees, according to the story, want Amazon “to end its contracts with oil and gas companies”
Of course, Amazon is the epitome of our nation’s consumer mentality run amok. We want instant gratification to get anything, anytime which is the antithesis of slowing down on consumer impulses.
Nonetheless, 100,000 electric powered vehicles will move the needle for both consumer and industrial EVs. Perhaps the bigger story is that employees are pushing their companies to do better. Here is an open letter from the employees posted back in April 2019.
The Sandwich Climate Crisis Coalition (SCCC) leadership believes that fossil fuel companies can no longer be allowed to freely dump pollutants into the sky. We wrote earlier about demanding that banks, investment and insurance companies divest their investments in these companies.
Another well documented approach is to make them pay a fee high enough to force them to stop polluting our air, with dividends coming back to residents. Here is a video, with more information from the Carbon Cash-Back Coalition.
Earlier we wrote about how Taos, N.M, is establishing solar arrays that could service up to 18,500 homes. Mount Desert Island in Maine is doing the same on a smaller scale. Communities like these are worthy of the Sandwich Climate Crisis Coalition (SCCC) to watch and perhaps emulate as we move towards our goal for Sandwich, N.H of 100% reliance on renewable sources of electricity by 2030 and for all other energy needs, including heating and transportation, by 2050. Learn more from the both video and a recent newspaper article summarized below.
Here is more about Mount Desert Island from a Jan. 1, 2020 article in the Mount Desert Islander:
TREMONT — Details are still being worked out, but soon residents here will be able to purchase shares for their home or business in a proposed community solar farm located next to the one that currently powers municipal facilities.
Phase One of the solar project was completed at the beginning of 2019 and included installation of about 500 solar panels on about a third of the 3-acre parcel that was once the town’s landfill…
At the beginning of 2019, eight buildings owned by the town, including the school, town office and harbormaster’s building, began being powered by the solar array constructed on the closed landfill located next to the town office.
In Phase II, approved by all five members of the Board of Selectmen, the town hopes to also meet the needs of 40 residential homes too, if enough residents invest in the array. Sundog Solar of Searsport is doing the construction. Selectman Kevin Buck told the Islander: “We can offer people a really good rate, without up front costs with the model we are looking at.”
An action step: Right after I read the article referenced below I sent an email to my retirement fund broker and told him to read this article, adding that he and his young colleagues might want to lead a corporate-wide discussion about how it invests my and your dollars. Stop underwriting fossil fuel exploration. Read on, there is more we can do.
The New Yorker article:
Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns: What if the banking, asset-management, and insurance industries moved away from fossil fuels?
Bill McKibben, New Yorker magazine contributor and co-founder of 350.org, recently wrote:
I suspect that the key to disrupting the flow of carbon into the atmosphere may lie in disrupting the flow of money to coal and oil and gas.
He adds that since we are running out of time, it might be the quickest way to stop the problem. It’s not a new idea the 350.org campaign pressured colleges to divest and in his this commentary article he explains how some fossil fuel companies felt the pinch.
Then he adds:
Every year, after six months of detailed analysis, (Rainforest Action Network (RAN)) publishes a thick report called “Banking on Climate Change,” which ranks the financial giants according to how much damage they’re doing.
This year’s edition, the tenth, shows Chase in the lead, as usual, followed by Wells Fargo, Citi, and Bank of America. Two Japanese banks and the British giant Barclays are also among the top ten, but it’s mostly a North American club—three Canadian banks round out the list. And the trend is remarkable: in the three years since the signing of the Paris climate accord, which was designed to help the world shift away from fossil fuels, the banks’ lending to the industry has increased every year, and much of the money goes toward the most extreme forms of energy development.
Here’s more:
Jason Opeña Disterhoft, ran’s senior campaigner, told me, “It’s a climate moment. We’re in a process, as a society, of naming the actors most responsible for driving the climate crisis, and banks are absolutely on that list. And Chase—they’re No. 1 with a bullet, right at the top of the list of who should be held accountable.”
One civil disobedience activist in Seattle who closed down Chase bank branches, said the message to Chase customers was pretty straightforward:
You can tell the story in one sentence: they’re funding the fossil-fuel industry, which is wrecking the planet.”
When asked if the idea could scale, the activist said:
“Every town has a bank,” (not to mention an insurance agent and a stockbroker.) “If you could protest at forty-four Chase branches, you could do it at all five thousand across the country.”
Mark Z. Jacobson, Director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford University, has mapped out how countries worldwide can transition to mostly wind, water and solar energy by 2050; But we have to start now.
In this new paradigm, we will use electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles instead of fossil fuel or biofuel vehicles; electric heat pumps for air and water heating instead of gas, oil, or wood based heaters; electric furnaces instead of fossil fuel furnaces; and electric induction cooktops instead of gas cooktops. The electricity will come from wind turbines, solar panels, concentrated solar power plants, hydroelectric plants, geothermal electricity plants, tidal turbines, and wave devices. Building heat will come from solar and geothermal heat and electric heat pumps. We will also need electricity, heat, cold, and hydrogen storage. To avoid 1.5°C global warming, at least 80% of the transition needs to occur by 2030 and 100% by no later than 2050.
The Sandwich Climate Crisis Coalition agrees that there is global warming caused by too many greenhouse gases. Of course, fossil fuel companies are the major culprits, it’s time we stop allowing them to profit at the expense of the Earth and all its inhabitants.
Taos, New Mexico is one of more that 150 cities and towns across the USA that have made the pledge to commit to a goal of 100% reliance on renewable sources of electricity by 2030 and for all other energy needs, including heating and transportation, by 2050. It’s the same pledge that Town of Sandwich, NH will be asked to vote on at its March 2020 town meeting.
The pledge though is just the start. Taos sees solar power as the future and has been getting solar arrays built. Read this opinion piece in the Taos News. Here is the crux of it:
These arrays produce enough electricity to power 8,000 households. An additional 21 megawatts of solar arrays will be built beginning in 2020 and 2021. That will bring the total amount of solar serving Kit Carson members up to 37 MW, enough to power 18,500 households. Add in off-the-grid and behind-the-meter and well over 19,000 north-central New Mexico households will be powered by solar by 2021.
