Archive for: Lewis Milford

It’s been two years since Superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast. It knocked out electric grids and left millions of people to suffer for weeks without power in public housing, senior centers, hospitals and shelters.

With recent announcements from New York and New Jersey, we now have two emerging finance models to fund community level, climate resilient infrastructure.

New Jersey recently created the first-in-the-nation “Energy Resilience Bank (ERB).” Designed to address a repeat of the devastating impacts of SuperStorm Sandy, when over 8 million people lost electric power in the region, the ERB will provide $200 million for municipalities to finance clean resilient power solutions.

There is a steady drumbeat of statements arguing for limited government: Government should not pick winners.

The IPCC climate report issued this week is tough reading. It suggests we are far from deploying clean energy technologies at the scale needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid catastrophic impacts.

If you are an environmental lawyer, there is nothing more deflating than reading a judge’s decision that clinically rejects all your best arguments. I know because I have had my share of losing environmental cases.

A few weeks ago, Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) announced it had reached a settlement with the owners of a new 630 MW natural gas plant in Salem, Massachusetts.

To become more resilient in the face of severe weather events, communities should rely on proven distributed energy technologies like solar PV with energy storage to protect residents from future power outages, according to a new report released today by Clean Energy Group.

If we’re going to deal with increasingly severe climate-related power outages and are going to make our communities more resilient, we in the environmental community have to change the kinds of technologies we propose to solve the problem.

“Conservative groups use environmental litigation to kill American jobs.” No, that was not the title of the recent New York Times article about the Cape Wind offshore wind project. But it should have been.