Charles Bowman - Getzville
My interest in environmental issues arose from my anti-war activism and anti-hydrofracking activism while I was director of the Western New York Peace Center in Buffalo. We unsuccessfully fought to repurpose the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station as a 400-acre solar farm. Serious thought should be given to repurposing our nation’s unneeded-polluted military bases to utility-sized solar and wind installations.
We need to get to 100% renewable energy in electrical generation, transportation and renewable heating/cooling ASAP, and stop new investments in fossil fuel infrastructure. Upstate NY’s nuclear power plants should be closed by 2025, as they reach their designed endpoints. Their enormously dangerous spent liquid nuclear fuel should be housed in hardened structures (it’s not now) on site, and transitioned to safer dry storage, where it can be -- must be watched in perpetuity. We need to stop importing radiologically contaminated material and spent nuclear liquid waste from Canada. As methane, coal and nuclear power generation diminish, monetary support for schools and local governments must be continued. There are tons of untaxed transfers on Wall Street to help with all these transitioning expenses: a $0.01/share tax on all stock transfers would greatly ease the impending burden on the 99.99%.
I earned a Ph.D. in cell biology at SUNY Albany in 1982. My colleagues and I managed to publish 20 papers in peer-reviewed journals. For 24 years, I taught courses in biophysics and neurobiology at SUNY Buffalo.
Now retired, I serve as co-chair of the Environmental Justice Task Force. I frequently write op-eds and letters on environmental issues: 13 since 2011. You can find some of these by using the Buffalo News search feature (they don’t allow Google to cache items in their paper).