Call and Email your elected officials: Contacting your local leaders is a quick and easy way to use your voice. It may not seem like much, but by just picking up the phone and calling their office, you can let them know that you want climate action to be a priority and not an afterthought. Some organizations like the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace have email templates pre-made for you to send. Likewise, the Union of Concerned Scientists has a page full of current legislation that you can speak to your leaders about. It’s just a few clicks or a quick phone call to make a difference!
Sign Petitions: Petitions are a great way for constituents to make their voice heard. You can also choose which causes to pledge your support to. Large organizations, like Greenpeace and the WWF, have petitions ready to sign on their websites. Similarly, on sites like change.org, you can search for petitions that interest you. Whichever petitions you end up choosing it’ll help make a difference.
Donate: Organizations like CCAA run on volunteers and donations. While we are in the middle of a pandemic, it is difficult to have mass gatherings to bring attention to the climate crisis. Donate to CCAA or buy carbon offsets and reduce your carbon footprint. The CNY Carbon Challenge has a list of carbon offset programs. If money is tight, you can always donate your time, and CCAA is looking for volunteers to help out with various projects and you can find more information about that here.
Vote: It goes without saying that the upcoming 2020 election will be very important for the future of the climate crisis. The Presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden will have an impact on American climate policy. Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, while Biden recently released a two trillion dollar climate change plan. But don’t put all of your focus on the Presidential election. There are congressional elections and state senate and assembly elections. These elected officials have more say on what happens in your communities, so be sure to vote for the candidates that make climate change a priority!
Take the CNY Carbon Challenge!: Now that most of us are still working from home, it’s a great time to begin the CNY Carbon Challenge! It’s a great way to understand how big your carbon footprint is and learn how to reduce your carbon footprint. So far, we’ve had just over 300 people sign up, and they could potentially reduce CNY’s emissions by about 1,800 tons of carbon. The challenge is laid out in 7 easy steps that you can complete at your own pace. You can take the first step today when you sign up on our website.
CCAA hold their monthly meetings on the second Tuesday of every month. If you’d like to learn more feel free to email cc.awareness.action@gmail.com.
For an even more comprehensive list of events pertaining to sustainability and climate change, contact Diane Brandli with GreeningUSA to subscribe to the GreeningUSA listserve or to publicize an event you are organizing. dbdesigninteriors@verizon.net
CCAA Member Spotlight
George Lorefice
George Lorefice’s passion for the environment began through his career in biology. Lorefice worked in freshwater biology, microbiology and other roles throughout his career, and it was that passion for science that drove his interest in the environment and climate change.
Lorefice decided to take the CNY Carbon Challenge, which was launched by CCAA earlier this year. The Carbon Challenge is a seven-step process where people evaluate their carbon footprint and then work through different ways to reduce it. Lorefice credits Annalena Davis for laying out the challenge in a simple way, which he said made it easier for him to complete. While it felt a bit overwhelming at times, Lorefice is glad he decided to go through with the challenge because it forced him to reflect on his lifestyle.
“I felt kind of guilty not doing everything to the tee as it was laid out, but the important thing with that is that it lays out a program that makes you realize what your carbon footprint is,” Lorefice said. “It makes you look at your lifestyle. It gives you places where you can reduce your carbon footprint.”
The first step for Lorefice was to calculate his carbon footprint. So, he checked the number of miles he drove in his car, logged his most recent grocery bill and had an energy audit done on his house. After seeing his initial footprint, he decided to replace almost all of his lights in the house to LED and is currently figuring out how to do the same thing in his workshop. That may not seem like much, but LED lights use 75% less energy than incandescent lighting.
Lorefice is also planning for more eco-friendly changes with his car. Currently, he and his wife have two cars, a hybrid and a gas car, but he said when the time comes to upgrade, they’ll swap the hybrid for a plug-in or electric vehicle and change the gas car to a hybrid.
With cars being expensive and people possibly having relatively new cars, it can be tough to make that change. Similarly installing solar panels on your house may be out of some residents’ budgets. However, Lorefice found a solution to that problem by buying into community solar.
Community solar works like a subscription service. Users, like Lorefice, can subscribe to a solar or wind farm and when the system is up and running, the company will put that energy into the national grid. Residents won’t get that energy directly, but the utility companies will calculate the amount of energy produced by the farm in residents’ names and give them credit on their utility bill. That credit will lower your monthly energy bill and in Lorefice’s case, the company guaranteed that his bills would be 10% lower than National Grid and other companies.
“According to statistics, it shows that your carbon footprint is reduced, just as much by buying into community solar, as it is putting your own panels on,” Lorefice said. “The nice thing with community solar is I don’t have to do a capital investment of solar panels and any maintenance involved in it.”
Lorefice will not only reduce his carbon footprint but will also save money by switching to community solar. As he worked through the Carbon Challenge, Lorefice started researching how much it would cost to switch his furnace to a heat pump. That planning served him well as a recent thunderstorm flooded his basement and damaged his hot water tank and furnace. Lorefice replaced the hot water tank with a high efficiency power vent gas and is looking to replace the broken furnace with a high efficiency furnace or heat pump.
With all those changes to his house, Lorefice also changed his lifestyle to eat less meat, as meat is a large contributor to carbon emissions. But more than anything, he said that the awareness of the impact his everyday actions have on the environment was the most important aspect of the challenge.
“If nothing more it made people aware of their lifestyles and what they can do to cut the carbon,” Lorefice said.
NEWSLETTER COMMITTEE
Editor: Yvonne Chu Publisher: Gaurav Shetty Chair: Peter Wirth
Last month, CCAA signed onto a letter to the New York Public Service Commission asking them to require utility companies to file accurate cost information on a gas subsidy called the 100-foot-rule. The Renewable Heat Now Campaign wrote the letter, which CCAA and 53 other businesses and organizations signed as well.
So what is the 100-foot-rule and why is it important?
The 100-foot-rule requires current gas customers to subsidize the full cost of gas service if they are 100 feet from the gas system. There have been estimates that say the rule has cost nearly one billion dollars over five years. Basically, the rule helps promote gas expansion.
In the letter, Peter Wirth said, “now is not the time to subsidize gas energy infrastructure if NYS is to meet the ambitious goals stated in the Climate Change Leadership Protection Act to achieve a carbon-free electricity system by 2040 and reduce greenhouse gas emissions 85% below 1990 levels by 2050.”
How does this affect you?
Bill Nowak works with The Renewable Heat Now Campaign and said the rule creates an unfair playing field for gas and renewable energy companies. The subsidy helps boost the appeal of gas while making renewable energy more expensive.
According to Nowak, residents are usually stuck footing the bill for gas expansions as, “They have to pay for other people to get gas services. If somebody requests gas service utilities by law they have to provide it, so folks in Central New York are paying for this free infrastructure.”
While we are in the midst of a climate crisis, the 100-foot-rule is promoting the expansion of fossil fuels and giving incentives to businesses to choose gas over renewable energy. Currently, utility companies aren’t even required to disclose the actual cost that customers bear when they have to help pay for the infrastructure.
What’s next?
The Renewable Heat Now Campaign sent the letter in the hopes that the rule would change and force utility companies to report the cost of the subsidy. With that information, consumers and legislators could accurately gauge the impact it has had in New York. For now, the campaign is in its early stages, but Nowak said there are still ways for residents to show support.
“Currently, they could call their legislator and tell them to repeal the hundred-foot rule, knowing that they don’t want to continue paying this subsidy for fossil fuels to keep expanding when we need to be pulling back on fossil fuels when we need to reduce the amount of fossil fuels we’re burning,” Nowak said.
The campaign is currently looking for a state legislator to sponsor a bill that would repeal the 100-foot-rule. The hope is that when the 100-foot-rule is repealed, it would get rid of that unfair playing field and allow more customers to make the switch to renewable energy.
ABOUT CCAA
Climate Change Awareness & Action (CCAA) was formed for the purpose of educating others and actively working towards reversing the anthropogenic climate disruption that threatens the earth.
It is imperative that we increase awareness and spur action on climate change:
to support fair and just public policies and legislation
to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
to support regenerative agriculture and conservation
CCAA seeks to create a community of people working together in CNY to bring about the changes we need to avoid an environmental crisis.
VOLUNTEERS NEEDED
If you are interested in working on the issue of climate change, please contact us at cc.awareness.action@gmail.com or call at 315-308-0846. Don’t worry about your skill level. We are all learning. We need people who can:
