Since installing solar panels on their barn, Sean Mahoney and his wife have noticed a huge difference in their energy bills. They’ve also been able to reduce their carbon footprint.
Erica Kyzmir-McKeon is a Communities and Toxics Senior Attorney in CLF’s Environmental Justice Program. Erica first joined CLF as a Senior Fellow focused on legal food hub work. In 2019, she became a staff attorney, dividing her time between CLF’s Clean Air & Water and Environmental Justice programs. Most recently, Erica worked as a staff… Continue reading Erica Kyzmir-McKeon
Every winter the gas industry tries to scare us, claiming there isn’t enough gas during cold snaps to heat and power our homes. Their solution? More fracked gas and new, expensive gas pipelines. But we don’t have to buy into their propaganda. We have all the power we need without expensive new pipelines.
“We have many options for heating our homes,” says Greg Cunningham, Director of CLF’s Clean Energy and Climate Change program. “Alternatives like heat pumps avoid the use of oil and natural gas furnaces, which pollute our environment and damage our climate.”
Despite many good intentions, curbside recycling has turned out to be a disaster. But that doesn’t mean recycling is dead. We have solutions. One of the best systems for recycling our plastic, glass, and aluminum containers is the bottle return program, also known as the “bottle bill” or deposit-return.
Although some New England states pioneered the bottle return system, they have since fallen behind. But New England can improve its recycling by updating or adopting bottle return systems in each state. This would help reduce litter in our neighborhoods, parks, and waterways; it would keep recyclable material out of landfills and incinerators; and it would lift some recycling costs off of communities.
Our electricity grid was designed over 100 years ago. But times have changed. Today, clean, renewable energy can be harnessed right where we live, so electricity doesn’t have to come from polluting power plants miles away. But we have to update our electricity grid to take advantage of it.
CLF’ers Elena Mihaly and Tom Irwin show that you don’t have to live in a major city, or even on a paved road, to benefit from driving an electric car.
“Combatting the climate crisis is going to take everything we’ve got, and this legislation is a huge step forward,” said Alyssa Rayman-Read, Vice President and Director of CLF Massachusetts. “Getting to net-zero emissions by 2050 is an absolute necessity to protect our communities and our health. But we must hold our leaders accountable to make sure Massachusetts hits the ambitious goals laid out in the bills. We won’t be given another chance to get this right.”
“The areas where urban canopy is the scarcest tend to coincide with neighborhoods that are low-income, minority neighborhoods, and historically red-lined areas,” says Deanna Moran of the Conservation Law Foundation.
