Maine has a plan to fight climate change; now comes the hard part

A state climate council has completed a roadmap for reducing greenhouse gases, but the real challenge will be implementing it, advocates say.

The Maine Climate Council is set to release the final version of a four-year climate plan Tuesday, marking an important step for the state as it tries to meet an ambitious renewable portfolio standard.

Gov. Janet Mills signed the renewable standard into law last year, calling for 80% of the state’s electricity to come from renewable resources by 2030 and 100% by 2050.

Now that the plan is all but finalized, advocates say the hard work begins — particularly figuring out how to pay for the strategies it outlines.

The council approved the plan, which includes more than 50 proposed policies and goals, at a Nov. 12 meeting with stakeholders. Council members wrote it based on recommendations by six working groups that met beginning last year and focused on issues like energy, transportation, building efficiency and natural resources. Now that the body of the plan is set, the council — which includes lawmakers and executive branch members, as well as nonprofit representatives and municipal leaders from across the state — will make minor language changes and package the report.

“The plan itself is set in stone, but really we’re getting to the difficult part now, and that plan is going to have to be implemented,” said Jeff Marks, the Maine director at Acadia Center and a working group member. “In a way, putting together the plan was the easy part,” he said.

Read the full article in Energy News Network here

Maine’s bold climate action plan will require money, commitment

Flooded buildings and eroded beaches. More illness from ticks, mosquitos and high heat. A reduced lobster harvest, with crustaceans moving northward to cooler water. Down East weather that resembles present-day Rhode Island.

Those are some of the ways scientists say Maine will change over the next 30 years unless substantial steps are taken now.

To help slow the change, they say Maine urgently needs to slash greenhouse gas emissions and prepare for the myriad impacts of a climate that’s changing so quickly, it poses a cascading threat to the health, prosperity and way of life of every resident and enterprise.

The primary way to do it is to encourage a quick pivot from gasoline and heating oil, Maine’s dominant, longstanding energy options for fueling cars and warming homes. In their place, electricity from renewable generation such as wind and solar, coupled with evolving storage technology, will power electric vehicles and efficient heat pumps.

These areas get special attention because transportation accounts for 54 percent of Maine’s climate-warming emissions, followed by 19 percent for home heating.

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Notably, the plan demurred on endorsing a compact of East Coast states including Maine called the Transportation Climate Initiative. That approach would require fuel distributors to bid into a shrinking limit, or cap, of greenhouse gas emissions. Money raised through the process would go to states to help fund electric vehicles, mass transit and other priorities.

Environmental advocates are for it. Acadia Center, a clean-energy advocacy group with an office in Maine, is pushing for Maine to support what it calls “the only policy proposal that would reduce emissions while providing a stable and sustainable revenue source.”

Read the full article in the Portland Press Herald here

Gas or clean energy? How should Aquidneck Island stay warm?

If anything, the natural gas outage on Aquidneck Island in January 2019 exposed the vulnerabilities of an area that is literally at the end of the pipeline network that sends gas around New England.

The interruption, which left thousands of people without heat on some of the coldest days that winter, was the result of an extraordinary set of circumstances — a malfunctioning valve on a transmission line in Massachusetts, a spike in demand caused by the frigid weather and the failure of a liquefied natural gas plant in Providence to pump much-needed supplies into the system.

National Grid, the only utility that distributes gas in Rhode Island, is looking at ways to shore up the system on the island to try to prevent another outage from occurring.

It may seem a simple matter but many of the options proposed by the company rely on some type of expansion of the gas infrastructure on the island. Environmental advocates, meanwhile, argue that the last thing anyone should be doing in an era of climate change is ramping up use of a fossil fuel that would lead to more greenhouse-gas emissions.

“Every time you light a new fire with a new gas furnace, that’s a fire that’s going to burn for the next 20 or 30 years,” said Hank Webster, Rhode Island director for the Acadia Center, a Boston-based group that specializes in clean-energy issues.

Read the full article from the Providence Journal here