November 13, 2019
I’ve been a Sierra Club member for over three-decades, an elected leader for a decade, and now lead/chair/participate in several Club Committee/Group meetings per month. I researched passerines in Canada, then chimpanzees in Africa. As a university scientist, teacher, parent, and organic farmer I have defended renewable energy, women’s rights, wilderness and wildlife, while fighting fossil fuel use.
The Club has evolved. It (and McKibben) once considered methane a bridge fuel. The Club now advocates divesting fossil fuel securities, and 100% renewable energy in New York and everywhere. Since I applied passive solar design to my old farmhouse (making it comfortable) I ask why not pursue net-zero energy for all New York buildings through building codes and incentives? Imagine solar panels on nearly all south roofs, plugin parking meters & roadside stations charging EVs, electric mass transit, towering wind turbines above both farm fields and the waves south of Long Island. Leave fossil fuels in the ground, grab renewable energy from the sky.
The NYS Legislature just passed, and Governor Cuomo signed, the ambitious Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. Implementation will require agreements within the diverse NYS Climate Action Council.
Our planet’s biome is in peril, increasingly so if in the 2020 election we don’t remove this President with his anti-science, anti-environmental, racist, fossil-fuel-promoting, neoliberal, misogynist policies and reactionary judges. Let’s eliminate his war on the poor, the hungry, women (via his global & domestic gag rule defunding family planning), immigrants and the disastrous billionaire tax relief. One study showed slowing population growth could provide 16–29% of the GHG reductions necessary by 2050. Give women choice! Climate change mustn’t reach McKibben’s Falter point on Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth.
Questions? Ask Hal at wilds@newyork.sierraclub.org