NY Climate and Community Protection Act targets Renewable Energy, Jobs & Justice

Momentum grows for New York’s Landmark Climate-Equity Bill

By Greta Moran | Feb 16, 2019 | Grist

Walter Cooper, a labor union leader, stood on the steps of New York City Hall to fight for new kind of contract.

“We need a contract for a future of our state and for our communities,” Cooper said in support of the Climate and Community Protection Act, a bill making its way through the state legislature.

Cooper’s labor union is part of New York Renews, a broad coalition of 160 labor, climate, and community groups that has been pushing for climate justice since 2015. The Climate and Community Protection Act would move New York to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. The bill’s labor and justice measures have garnered it wide grassroots support. And increasingly, the attention of lawmakers.

On Thursday, as part of New York Senate’s first-ever hearing on climate change, testimonies were heard on behalf of the bill. The legislation would make its goals across energy, transportation, and buildings legally enforceable — a contract with the environment.

The hearing, chaired by Senator Todd Kaminsky, signaled the Democrats’ fresh resolve to address climate change.

It’s not the first time the CCPA has come close to becoming law: Last April, it passed in the Assembly for the third time. But the Senate’s leaders didn’t allow it to come to the floor for a vote. Now that Democrats control the Senate, the passage of the bill — or a similarly ambitious climate bill — is looking more likely.

“The CCPA is the main vehicle through which we will address climate change and these hearings will go a long way toward ensuring that all stakeholders will have input in the legislative process,” Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said in a statement.

Along with mandated energy goals, the CCPA would require that state agencies consider not only climate but also equity in their decisions. It would require fair labor standards for jobs created in renewable energy and would invest 40 percent of the state’s energy funds in communities likely to be hardest hit by climate change.

A New Year’s Message About Climate Change - Act Quickly

Bill McKibben Has A New Year’s Message About Climate Change — Act Quickly

January 1st, 2019 by Steve Hanley | Clean Technica

Bill McKibben has been writing about climate change for 30 years. Along the way, he has been arrested multiple times, spat on, had his life threatened, and been spied on by minions working for fossil fuel companies. Oh, he also founded 350.org, whose stated mission is to keep the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere below 350 parts per million. The world blew by that benchmark some time ago and is racing toward the 450 ppm level.

He has written almost 30 books on the subject, including The End Of Nature in 1989 and Oil & Honey in 2013. If you want to be fully informed on the topic of climate change, the writings of Bill McKibben are the definitive source.

In a piece for Rolling Stone dated December 1, 2017, McKibben penned these words, “The technology exists to combat climate change — what will it take to get our leaders to act?” As 2018 draws to a close, it is appropriate to examine his thesis and see what, if anything changed this year. McKibben started his Rolling Stone piece with these words:

“If we don’t win very quickly on climate change, then we will never win. That’s the core truth about global warming. It’s what makes it different from every other problem our political systems have faced.

“I wrote the first book for a general audience about climate change in 1989 – back when one had to search for examples to help people understand what the ‘greenhouse effect’ would feel like. We knew it was coming, but not how fast or how hard. And because no one wanted to overestimate – because scientists by their nature are conservative – each of the changes we’ve observed has taken us somewhat by surprise. The surreal keeps becoming the commonplace.”

Watching The Arctic Melt

“[W]ith global warming, the fundamental equation is precisely what’s shifting. And the remarkable changes we’ve seen so far — the thawed Arctic that makes the Earth look profoundly different from outer space; the planet’s seawater turning 30 percent more acidic — are just the beginning. ‘We’re inching ever closer to committing to the melting of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which will guarantee 20 feet of sea-level rise,’ says Penn State’s Michael Mann, one of the planet’s foremost climatologists. ‘We don’t know where the ice-sheet collapse tipping point is, but we are dangerously close.'”

As if to underscore Mann’s and McKibben’s warnings, on December 5, NASA posted a video on YouTube showing how the Arctic ice sheet has melted from September, 1984 through September, 2016. It’s pretty scary stuff. [To view the video, click here.]

“Another way of saying this,” writes McKibben, “By 2075 the world will be powered by solar panels and windmills — free energy is a hard business proposition to beat. But on current trajectories, they’ll light up a busted planet. The decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter; indeed, the decisions we make in 2025 will matter much less than the ones we make in the next few years. The leverage is now.”