Want to have a significant impact on your community’s carbon footprint?
Now there’s a simple way to do this, and—if you want—earn money doing it.
The opportunity is to present commercial property owners with a compelling case for them to save money on energy by 30% or more, from Day 1, with no out-of-pocket costs, and no debt that constrains their purchasing power.
Join us and a small, select group for Possible Planet’s “beta” test of the program.
Tuesday, April 13, 7-8 p.m.
You’ll get an overview of what’s possible, with Q&A. It’s an opportunity to join a collaborative effort to transform the commercial buildings in your community — and get paid if you choose.
At the party, we’ll share our mission and initiatives, and you can contribute to the “mother ship,” Possible Planet, or earmark your donation to one of our initiatives:
Global Carbon Reward Ecovillage New Jersey
Ecovillagers Alliance New Jersey PACE / Regenerative Financing Possible Planet (General Fund)
“You can have the Green New Deal and your hamburger, too” —Embriette Hyde, Writer, SynBioBeta, & Luisa Schetinger, Photographer, Unsplash
“Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.”
—Robert F. Kennedy
By Matt Polsky, Jillian Connelly, Candace Barr, Jazmine Garcia, Dillon Negrao, Dana Ogden, Zachary Potter, Matthew Wojciechowski, Brian Woodward, Andrew Wortman, Margaret Cawley, Mary Dragone
For the course I teach at Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey, Economics, Ecology, & Ethics, we studied the Green New Deal in the last third of the spring semester. We read and discussed articles and viewed videos about it, featuring both its fans and critics. This was after we had explored the course theme: how do we best put economics and the environment together, pulling in equity issues, while learning to identify economics ideas inconsistent with sustainability.
We find that your Resolution already is doing much that is right and is unusually admirable. It is extremely bold, because, as you have pointed out, it has to be to deal with the problem of climate change. It also boldly integrates economic and social issues with it. It is blunt. Its approach is unusual and very challenging, but consistent with tenets of the sustainability field that it invokes.
Much of this, though, has bought the Resolution a lot of criticism, both fairly and unfairly.
The eleven students and I aim to provide ideas to you, your staff and advisors that would build on its strengths, while providing responses to some of the criticisms. For example, as the Resolution has been criticized as “light on details,” this report provides more of these.
In any group report it is best not to assume that all contributors agree wholeheartedly with every point or recommendation, although no one expressed any reservations to anything in the report itself. As this was largely the students’ report, while I guided their exploration, for the most part I went with their views. The nuclear one was tricky. I concurred with it, partially because of the stakes, and the power of their arguments and those of some guest speakers we had. But I want to point out the necessity of the associated conditions with that recommendation discussed there for reluctantly “coming out” on the “pro-nuke” side. Another is the hope that the “new nuclear technologies” advocates cite really does result in less waste and potential for proliferation of plutonium, although I’m still not persuaded that the argument “nuclear waste is a political problem, not a technical one” gets us anywhere. But—still—as climate change is one of the biggest challenges for the next generation… there is that compelling “carbon-free” argument.
Montgomery County, the most populous county in Maryland, was recognized today – Day 1 of the International Decade for Emergency Climate Action – by President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Congress and the United Nations as the first Post Carbon(P-C) community in the United States and the largest jurisdiction on the planet to reduce its net Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions to zero, while also removing millions of tons of GHGs from the atmosphere.
The county government in partnership with its one million residents achieved this ‘moonshot’ goal through the transformation of its energy, transportation, building and agricultural systems, while strengthening the ability of its residents and businesses to withstand the increasingly frequent and severe physical and socio/economic shocks resulting from accelerating climate change.
The Green New Deal resolution introduced in Congress calls for a massive U.S. mobilization over 10 years to achieve the goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions while creating millions of high-wage jobs and sustainable economic growth. Unfortunately, while the science and need for federal action on climate change are clear, we can’t expect serious policymaking on the topic to come out of Washington until 2021 at the earliest.
Fortunately, it’s a new day in Wisconsin and the state is well positioned to make headway on many of the goals and objectives as outlined in the Green New Deal. For example…
The idea of putting a broadly-applied price on carbon dioxide emissions from combustion of fossil fuels from all major sectors of the U.S. economy is gaining traction. Several national organizations are actively supporting a carbon tax, including Citizens’ Climate Lobby[2], the Climate Leadership Council[3], the Carbon Tax Center[4], and PUTAPRICEONIT[5].
A number of nations and other jurisdictions already have some form of carbon pricing. A group of Princeton University students, the Princeton Student Climate Initiative[6], is exploring ways to strengthen New Jersey’s effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions, including development of a state-level carbon tax.
While state-level programs to price carbon could be effective, carbon pricing approaches will be more effective if they are national and, ideally, international in scope.
We recently came across a series of podcasts by our personal Financial Advisor, Jim Cox. Jim focuses on sustainable investments, but we had no idea he was actively interviewing experts and activists from across the country on a variety of topics related to the emerging green economy. Jim writes, “Sometimes it feel like I’m a voice in the wilderness…” which led us to the idea of posting his podcasts for a wider audience.
James Cox is a financial advisor with FFG Advisors. He focuses on wealth and risk management for clients of the firm. He is on the board of several organizations. James joined FFG/DFP in January of 2012. Many of Mr. Cox’s clients are entrepreneurs and business owners. His practice helps individuals manage risk within their finances, even as they are striving toward creating successful companies. To learn more go to http://jamesacox.com.
The first one that came to our attention was the conversation with Janet Kirsch, a physician and public health specialist, who is devoting her life to climate mobilization.
Mobilizing for Climate Disruption (September 21, 2018)
Janet Kirsch is a physician and speaker with 350 Bay Area. We had initially talked days before hurricane Florence made landfall. We chat today about the need to approach climate disruption with increased vigor and commitment.
And here are some other selected podcasts from James Cox, available on iTunes and elsewhere.
The first two articles of this Series, see here and here, discussed ideas and gave recommendations about opportunities to address climate change about which we’re not hearing enough of in New Jersey. We continue to provide more of these in Part 3.
Two historians of science, Oreskes and Conway, responding recently to the latest IPCC report, and invoking the “transformation” concept, both discussed in Part 2, tell us that “Major transformations can happen in a generation. But not without government help.” So, we’re going to have to talk about State Government yet again, because it is that important.
They also rebut the conventional wisdom that the technological advancements many are counting on to address climate change are going to come solely from the private sector.
Over the past several decades, scientists have warned us that we need to curtail further greenhouse gas emissions if we wish to keep global warming below 2°C, which many consider a major danger limit for the Earth’s climate. The latest IPCC Special Report suggests that our economy must undergo a series of rapid transformations if we are to have a chance of staying at or below 1.5°C, and going over that could have disastrous consequences for many millions of people. The global emissions trajectory we are on is clearly incapable of even slowing the rate of temperature growth and sea-level rise, and must be reduced dramatically if we are achieve even a modest extension of the time we have before the Earth hits another milestone and potential tipping point.
Both U.S. and NJ emissions have been declining since the early 2000s, and NJ actually hit its 2020 goal of bringing emissions down to 1990 levels by 2008. But reaching the next set of objectives, an 80% reduction by 2050, will be significantly harder. According to a 2017 Rutgers report, “meeting the state’s limit of an 80 percent reduction from the 2006 level by 2050 will require a 75 percent reduction from 2012 emissions.”[1] The UN estimates that global emissions overall must be trending firmly downward by 2020 (just over a year away) if we are to have any hope of staying “well under the 2°C limit,” which is the language of the Paris Accord.
You’re invited to our
