“We have these goals that, frankly, we’re not hitting,” said Amy McLean Salls, Connecticut director at the nonprofit Acadia Center, a clean-energy advocate. “We’re behind.” Read the full article from Hartford Business Journal here.
Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza had powerful words about the role equity must play in climate work when the city released its Climate Justice Plan in late October. “Despite being one of the three pillars of sustainability, equity is often an afterthought when it comes to climate action planning,” Elorza wrote in the plan’s introduction. “In creating this plan, we chose to lead with equity and partnered with those who are most impacted by the climate crisis and other environmental injustices.” Acadia Center is proud to have supported Providence and its Racial and Environmental Justice Committee (REJC) in developing a plan
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“We’re not going to meet these goals with the way we’re going right now,” said Amy McLean Salls, a senior policy advocate at the Acadia Center, a member organization of the Connecticut Electric Vehicle Coalition. She said that overall, the Acadia Center was “pretty happy” with the draft road map. Read the full article from Yale Daily News here.
Jeff Marks joined Acadia Center as senior policy advocate and Maine director. Marks previously served as executive director of E2Tech, a business trade association of Maine’s energy and environmental companies. Prior to that role, he was deputy director of the Maine Energy Office where he advised state officials and agencies on energy, environmental and economic policy. Read the full article from Portland Press Herald here.
The Acadia Center, a regional environmental group based in Rockport, recommends 500 new inter- and intracity electric buses for Maine at a cost of $750,000 each. The center’s Jordan Stutt told me that this very large expense ($375 million, plus the cost of electricity-charging stations) could be financed by a “cap-and-invest” (a.k.a. cap-and-trade) agreement with oil companies similar to the existing emissions-trading agreements between power plants and 11 Northeastern states, including Maine, known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). Read the full article from The Free Press here.
A report released last month by nonprofit environmental group Acadia Center found that the RGGI states — Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont — reduced carbon dioxide emissions in the power sector by nearly half, exceeding the national rate by 90%. At the same time, the economies in the partner states grew by 47%, much faster than the rest of the country, the report concludes. And it’s clear that RGGI drove at least some of this movement, said Jordan Stutt, carbon programs director at Acadia Center. “The RGGI states took a bold step when they
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Member organizations of the Connecticut Electric Vehicle Coalition were glad to see the draft’s release, but at the same time, “we were surprised at the contradiction in the reduction of the rebates,” said Amy McLean Salls, state director and senior policy advocate at the Acadia Center, a coalition member. “How do you achieve your goals if you’re actually reducing the incentives you’re offering to consumers?” Read the full article from Energy News Network here.
The nine northeastern states that participate in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative have seen average retail electricity prices drop 5.7% from 2008 to 2017, according to a separate study by the Acadia Center, a clean energy advocacy group. Read the full article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette here.
Last month, young people around the world marched to demand action from decision makers. They echoed what thousands of the world’s climate scientists have concluded: only a short period of time remains — 10 years, from now until 2030 — for the world to reduce climate pollution by at least 45% from 2010 levels and shift to clean energy systems so the globe can avoid the worst impacts of a warming planet. For twenty years, Acadia Center has been accelerating strong state, local, and regional action to address climate pollution. Now, it will draw from its strengths in analysis, thought leadership, relationship building, and informed advocacy to meet these urgent climate deadlines and implement a refined strategy it calls Make the Next Decade Count TM. Make the Next Decade Count seeks to bring greater attention to the
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Given these impressive results, it’s no surprise that the RGGI states have outperformed states outside the program both environmentally and economically. In a recent report, our friends at the Acadia Center found that over the last decade power plant carbon pollution in the RGGI region has fallen nearly twice as fast compared to other states. At the same time, the RGGI states’ economies have grown 31 percent faster than non-RGGI states and electricity prices in the RGGI region have fallen by an average of 5.7 percent, even as prices have risen by 8.6 percent in other states. Read the full article from NRDC
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