Midwest: Join the Summer of Solutions

(Cross-posted from Its Getting Hot in Here)

First, there was the Campus Climate Challenge, building  a base of action on campuses nationwide. Then, there was PowerVote, mobilizing youth across the country to vote for a clean energy future and shift America’s political landscape. Recently, there was PowerShift 2009, with 12,000 young people convening in Washington DC and continuing the effort in their local states to call for bold climate policy. And now …

As the youth climate movement forges ahead to deliver on its major short-term goals, we start to catch a glimpse of the long-term struggle still ahead – the one in which we must innovate and implement climate and energy solutions that also revitalize the economy and empower of communities. In this struggle, we must slowly wresting control of the economy from the fossil fuels that have run our society and putting it in the hands of millions of local innovators around the world who are harnessing the power of the wind, sun, and landscape to sustain their lives and their local economies. We must figure out how to make our buildings more efficient, our urban planning smarter, our agriculture sustainable, our grid system renewable, and our industries green. This is the epic economic, political, and social project, at least of our generation and probably of more to come – it will take decades, is global in scope, and must be participatory and people-supporting both if it is to be fair but also if it is to succeed.

Let’s be frank: as a movement, we have a pretty good idea of why this needs to happen, and a somewhat more vague idea of what needs to happen, but relatively little sense of how it will be done.  More news: our political leaders, scientists, and economists don’t really know what to do either. We are embarking on a societal process of figuring out how to create this new future, and as a warning, much of the planning is being done by those (supporters of “clean coal”, nuclear, tar sands suburban sprawl, agri-business, central station transmission, etc.) who prefer solutions that will lead us to dead ends.

If you want to spend your summer building your capacity and career as a creative leader helping develop the solutions we need to see, please join us for the Summer of Solutions. In 2008, we piloted a program in St. Paul Minnesota with 25 participants, and a sister program started in Portland Oregon – now we’re going nationwide.

Being Smart and Efficient on the Stimulus and Our Careers

I’ve recently been working in St. Paul on how we’re applying the stimulus funding around efficiency, and I wanted to call a tension to a potential hurdle for successful climate solutions: As activists, we need to make sure that initial investments actually help change the market.

Minnesota is slated to receive about $131.5 million in federal stimulus funding for weatherization and energy efficiency to be spent over the next 18 months, plus about another $54 million in conservation block grants for the state. That’s a lot of money coming in quickly, and energy efficiency is just one small part of a series of investments in renewable energy, job training, infrastructure improvements, and economic aid in the recent federal stimulus package.

This is all very good news. Major investments in efficiency and weatherization are an excellent idea (I explain why at a note at the end of this blog post). The problem is that current market barriers are keeping energy efficiency, which ought to be a no-regrets, win-win-win solution, from being adopted at scale. No one in their right mind would let a 20% low-risk financial return go by, especially these days in a falling economy, yet we do exactly that every day by throwing money out the cracks in our doors and the cold drafts that blow through our un-insulated walls. There are many reasons that we are missing these opportunities – lack of information, lack of access to capital, obscure and complex auditing and contracting services, and little feedback as to how much energy, money, and carbon one is wasting. If we can solve these barriers, hundreds of billions of dollars of investment will flow towards this sector on a sustained basis, helping all Americans cut their energy costs and carbon emissions while creating long-term sustainable jobs. If initial investments (even the roughly $200 million dollars that the stimulus package might provide to Minnesota) only go towards paying for efficiency in some more houses, we will have just scratched the surface and end up with the same stunted efficiency market we have right now. The stimulus funding will only help solve that problem if it is deployed rightly.

ACT: Help End Mountaintop Removal

(Cross-posted from It’s Getting Hot in Here, written by danawv)

Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day over 130 citizen lobbyists from across the US are working to keep our beloved Appalachian Mountains green. With perfect timing, there was a fabulous Op Ed on the need for Obama to take action on mountaintop removal in the NY Times this morning.

We’re here to support the Clean Water Protection Act, HR 1310 –which would stop mining companies from dumping millions of town of blown up mountaintop removal wasted into our streams.

We’ve hit the ground running with appointments beginning at 9 am this morning — a good thing too, since we have over 100 lobby visits scheduled this week.

See if your Representative has signed on yet by clicking here.

If they haven’t — you should call in tomorrow, St. Patricks Day (March 17th), on our national call in day to keep Appalachia’s Mountains Green!

No New Coal in Iowa!

At 8:30am on March 5th, Alliant Energy, a subsidiary of Interstate Power and Light, announced its plans to abandon construction of a 649 MW coal plant in Marshalltown, Iowa.   The decision comes only 6 days after the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) agreed to extend the public comment period from 30 to 90 days and add 5 public meetings after receiving hundreds of emails, postcards and letters from people throughout the state in response to a call for action from groups including the Sierra Club, Iowa Interfaith Power & Light, and Iowa Global Warming.  The extension of the comment period forced Alliant to confront the economic reality that this coal plant just is not a good investment.  

The Marshalltown plant was the last remaining proposed coal plant in Iowa. In early January, LS Power/Dynegy decided to discontinue efforts to build a new coal plant in Waterloo.

In early 2007, Interstate Power and Light spokesman Scott Drzycimski announced a plan to construct a 600 MW coal-fired plant outside of Marshalltown, IA. The project was to be headed by Alliant Energy, one of IPL’s subsidiaries, and would create 65 permanent jobs and 1,000 temporary ones over the span of its construction.  Alliant’s announcement today cited the current economic climate, a recent ratemaking decision by the Iowa Utilities Board, and impending federal future greenhouse gas regulations.

Hello world!

Welcome to the Midwest Climate Network. This is our first post. Stay tuned as we update the site!