“This bill is a thinly veiled attempt to shut out community input and roll back bedrock environmental protections like the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act — effectively green-lighting scores of bad fossil fuel projects and stymying the just and clean energy transition President Biden says he supports,” said CLF President Bradley Campbell.
“All landfills eventually leak. While we ultimately need to move away from burying our waste, we need to make sure landfills are safe for New Hampshire in the meantime,” said Tom Irwin, Vice President CLF New Hampshire.
Darrèll Brown, vice president of CLF’s Rhode Island Advocacy Center, talks about the organization’s work to hold Big Oil accountable for failing to prepare its coastal facilities for the climate impacts its polluting products have caused.
“We need to move away from burying and burning, and towards reducing, reusing, and composting,” said Staci Rubin of Conservation Law Foundation. “A sustainable future means reducing burdens on communities of color and low-income residents who shoulder the brunt of waste disposal. We don’t need to invent any new technologies, we just need the Commonwealth to devote resources to education and enforcement.”
Massachusetts faces a host of environmental and public health challenges that will likely take years to solve. But one problem we can clearly solve in the near term is the amount of waste we discard that should be reduced, composted, or recycled.
“The Department of Environmental Services is completely abdicating their responsibility to address out-of-state waste,” said Heidi Trimarco, an attorney with CLF New Hampshire. “DES should be committing to do something, anything about out-of-state waste.”
“After DES blatantly ignored the law requiring an updated waste plan, any progress is a step in the right direction,” said CLF New Hampshire attorney Heidi Trimarco. “But this draft plan is inadequate and uninspiring. Instead of demonstrating leadership and providing the guidance New Hampshire needs, DES has provided just a laundry list of recommendations, without any real steps to actually achieve them.”
Oh, this is certainly a big deal. It gives a major boost to offshore wind, both in terms of some technical ways, like removing the price cap, but also changing the process of selection, so the major utilities aren’t deeply, essentially, controlling the process. There was kind of a fox in the henhouse design of the earlier law.
“So-called ‘advanced recycling’ really isn’t recycling at all,” said Tom Irwin, CLF vice president for New Hampshire. “It’s expensive, high-heat technology that effectively burns plastic waste, creating dangerous air pollution. And with Governor Sununu and the Legislature rolling out the welcome mat for ‘advanced recycling’ – making New Hampshire a magnet for these facilities and out-of-state plastics waste – it’s essential that regulators have all the necessary tools to protect the health of our communities.”
The way we grow our food has a big impact on our climate. Changing how we farm can help our climate rather than harm it.
