Commission’s Building Energy Transition Plan Takes an Important Step Toward Reducing Emissions from the State’s Building Sector
Baltimore, MD — The Maryland Commission on Climate Change has released its 2021 Annual Report and Building Energy Transition Plan, which recommends that all new construction in the state meet water and space heating demands with all-electric appliances no later than 2024. The Commission found that all-electric new homes have lower construction and energy costs than mixed-fuel homes and therefore this recommendation would help improve housing affordability and local air quality while reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Maryland.
Importantly, the Commission also calls on legislators to retrofit 100% of low-income households by 2030. Low-income customers in Maryland are already paying unsustainably high energy bills. The average annual energy burden for low-income Maryland households is 13 percent, according to a 2018 report commissioned by the Office of People’s Counsel.1 That is more than twice the threshold for a high energy burden, which researchers define as 6 percent. (See the Commission’s recommendations.)
In response to the Commission’s recommendation, Anne Havemann, General Counsel at the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, issued the following statement:
“Burning fossil fuels in homes, apartment buildings, and commercial buildings in the state accounted for 13 percent of Maryland’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2017. While we wish the report had gone further in certain respects, it contains some ambitious and necessary steps that will help the state begin to confront a large source of greenhouse gas emissions.
“When you’re in a hole, stop digging. The report’s all-electric new construction recommendation is a sensible first step in the building electrification transition that prevents us from making the problem worse. Moreover, all-electric new buildings typically have the lowest construction and operating costs and can actually help improve housing affordability while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. An all-electric new construction requirement is a win for the climate and your wallet.”
As customers transition off the gas system, gas rates will increase as costs will be distributed between fewer customers. Without intervention, low-income customers without the upfront capital to switch to electric appliances will be left paying even higher energy bills. For this reason, the Commission found it to be “critical that the state assist households with high energy burden to transition off the gas system before gas rates increase beyond current levels.”
Havemann’s statement continued:
“We agree with the Commission that it is critical to retrofit 100 percent of low-income households by 2030. Low-income Marylanders are already faced with unsustainably high energy bills, paying on average 13 percent of their income on energy bills when six percent is the threshold. As Marylanders transition off of gas and the rate base shrinks, gas bills will go up. Without deliberate policy design, we risk making the energy-burden problem worse for our low-income residents.
“We call on the General Assembly to follow the Commission’s recommendations and pass an all-electric new construction requirement in the 2022 legislative session. Further, local governments don’t need to wait for the General Assembly before taking action. To tackle climate change and lower costs, local governments can and should pass their own all-electric new construction requirements.”
The Maryland Commission on Climate Change is chaired by Maryland Department of the Environment Secretary Ben Grumbles and its mission is to advise the governor and General Assembly on strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and preparing for and adapting to the impacts of climate change. The Building Energy Transition Plan is the result of multiple years of work from members of the Commission’s Buildings Sub-group.
Everyone has a few quirks. A big one of mine is to travel each year to a place I’ve never been and do a 100-mile bike ride. Since 1996, I’ve travelled across the US to a new spot each year to do a bicycle “century” ride. At first, I did them for the adventure and to stay in shape. But they morphed into something bigger along the way and became pieces of a puzzle showing how geology and climate change have impacted our country. I rode the “Hotter Than Hell 100” in Wichita Falls, TX in 2013, which lived up to its name with an air temperature of 102 degrees. The natural waterfall that gave the town its name was no longer- having been taken out by a flood in the 1800’s. In 2015, the “Cycle Greater Yellowstone” ride passed trilobite fossils embedded in Wyoming cliffs from the Eocene epoch (34 to 56 million years ago) when a vast, shallow sea covered the state. This year, I went to the heart of Cajun country in Louisiana for a Bayou Century Ride.
Central Louisiana prospered in the 1700’s when French Canadians (known as Acadians) were lured to the area from Nova Scotia with the promise of a better future. The Acadians created the Cajun culture by combining their French traditions with their new bayou homes. They hunted, fished, trapped and raised cotton. Cotton was replaced by rice and sugarcane fields after the Civil War and through the 1800’s. Next up was the oil industry, which drilled its first well in a rice field near Jennings, LA in 1901. Today, over 205,000 oil wells exist in the state. Climate concerns and the need for a cleaner environment are making oil a tenuous business, and Louisiana suffers some of the harshest climate impacts of any state. Louisiana’s Gulf Coast region accounts for nearly half of the US mainland’s coastal wetlands. Yet since the early 20th century, the commercial ventures of oil exploration and logging, along with hurricane damage, have led to the destruction of almost 2,000 square miles of wetlands. Louisiana has been hit with 28 hurricanes since the year 2000. The strongest was Hurricane Katrina in 2005, causing over 1,800 deaths and $100 billion in damages. The second-strongest, Hurricane Ida, occurred on August 29, 2021 (ironically, the 16th anniversary of Katrina), rendering the entire state a FEMA “Disaster” area.
FEMA Disaster Declaration for Louisiana, 10/19/21 (Image Credit: FEMA)
According to a 2020 ProPublica study, an estimated 4 million US residents will become “climate refugees” between 2040-2060. They will move to the north and midwest as the southern and coastal regions of the US become too difficult to live in. When we hear the term “climate refugees” we tend to think of people in countries thousands of miles away. We think of heat waves in India causing residents to move to cooler locations or of sea level rise in Indonesia that is forcing the entire city of Jakarta to move to higher ground in Borneo. In reality, climate refugees are all around us and their numbers are on the rise. As the ProPublica study shows, the need for habitable land, freshwater and safety will be driving millions of Americans to flee sea level rise, wildfires, extreme heat and drought in the coming decades. No federal agency has authority to lead national assistance on climate migration efforts. This is a problem that needs to be solved- quickly.
St. Martin Parish, Louisiana is ranked number 3 on the “most at-risk counties” due to climate change (behind Beaufort County, SC and Pinal County, AZ). My Bayou Bike Ride was centered in St. Martin Parish, starting in the town of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. The self-proclaimed “Crawfish Capital of the World”, Breaux Bridge could have been the original movie set for “A River Runs Through It”, as the Mississippi River cascaded directly through the area 5,500 years ago. Like any river, the Mississippi is always in search of the path of least resistance, and it shifted eastward over millennia, carving out new channels as it went.
Over thousands of years, the Mississippi River has meandered like an unattended garden hose as it approached the Gulf of Mexico. (IMAGE CREDIT: Army Corps of Engineers)
Ever-changing outlets and inlets formed Louisiana’s bayous. A bayou is technically a slow-moving stream. It differs from a “swamp” because swamps are stagnant water bodies with no flow-through, although their waters may rise and fall seasonally. Louisiana’s coastal bayous contain a mixture of saltwater and freshwater, known as brackish water. Vast cypress forests thrive here, as do alligators and over 200 species of birds. The shifting path of the Mississippi created healthy swamps and bayous, but caused irreparable damage to communities displaced by the whims of the River. In Breaux Bridge, it left behind a channel that now holds Bayou Teche. The town of Breaux Bridge was inundated with 25’ of water in 1929 when the Mississippi River flooded. To prevent this from happening again, the US Army Corps of Engineering developed the Atchafalaya Basin Project, a series of levees and locks that contain an 833,000-acre floodway to catch Mississippi River floodwaters. Breaux Bridge is protected by a levee to the east of the town, a 30-foot tall earthen mound that runs for many miles and has become the social scene. Airboat swamp tours and restaurants dot both sides of the levee, with bayous on one side and the floodway and swamps on the other. I booked an Atchafalaya Basin Airboat Swamp Tour, joining a group of 7 others as we glided through 500-year old cypress trees. The swamp was alive with wildlife, and we watched herons, egrets, owls, nutria, and a dozen or so alligators go about their day.
Photos by Janet Redman
My Bayou Bike Ride took place on November 6, 2021, while much of the state was still recovering from Ida. The scheduled “sunrise” start of 7:33A was delayed for 30 minutes by a heavy fog. About 125 riders took off, covering anywhere from 15-100 miles on a variety of routes. The 100- mile route followed Bayou Teche north from Breaux Bridge, looped through St. Landry Parish and returned south on the levee. Along the way, four rest stops refueled riders with Gatorade (naturally), bananas and gouda-and-pimento sandwiches. The ride began and ended at Tante Marie, a Cajun restaurant that welcomed riders home with gumbo, jambalaya and local beer from Bayou Teche Brewery. Although the route was fairly flat, it was challenging due to the wind and the need to pedal constantly.
Image Credit: Janet Redman
I spoke to Glenn Monte, a volunteer on the century ride and the owner of a construction business that builds metal houses, primarily in St. Martin Parish. He has more business than he can handle right now, thanks to Hurricane Ida, and estimated that his company was building 18-20 homes in the town of Houma alone. His metal homes can withstand winds of up to 200 mph, an appealing trait in a battered state. I asked him about the resilience of the communities. How many times can someone rebuild, after all? He replied that the area “is simply home” to many people, and moving elsewhere is a hard concept to grasp. Having lived in LA for 55 years himself, Glenn has seen coastal degradation of his favorite hunting and fishing spots. The environmental crisis spawned a new word in the early 2000’s. “Solastalgia” is a term formed by the combination of the Latin words sōlācium (comfort) and the Greek root -algia (pain, suffering, grief). It describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change, such as living through a storm that devastates one’s home or community. The feeling of safety that someone once had in that home is gone forever.
One of the first examples of “climate refugees” in the US is found in Louisiana, where a relocation program is underway. Isle de Jean Charles is a narrow island in Terrebonne Parish that is home to indigenous tribes (the Bilox, Chitimacha and Choctaw). The island once encompassed 22,000 acres, but erosion and subsidence have slashed that to just 320 acres. The road to the mainland- Island Road, built in 1953- is often impassable due to storm surge, sea level rise, tides and high winds.
Island Road in Isle de Jean Charles, 2021 (IMAGE CREDIT: Julie Dermansky, weather.com)
In 2016, Louisiana was given a $48.3 million dollar Community Development Block Grant to work with Isle de Jean Charles residents to retreat and resettle into a safer community about 40 miles north. Plans call for all homes to be built 3 feet above the 500-year flood plain and the first residents are scheduled to move in by the end of 2021.
Closer to home, Tangier Island, a small Virginia fishing town that 400 people call home, is sinking quickly and predicted to be uninhabitable wetlands by 2051. To relocate the townspeople to the mainland is pegged at $150 million; to bulk up the island and protect its shoreline would cost $350 million. It is a victim of both sea level rise and ground subsidence and over 67% of its land mass has disappeared since 1850.
My bike rides have revealed climate secrets over the years, showing how wind has carved mesas and buttes in Albuquerque, New Mexico and flowing water has created canyons in Moab, Utah. In Louisiana, I learned that the dual destructive forces of climate change and humans are strong enough to drive long-standing communities to safer ground. And I don’t see a finish line in sight.
REFERENCES
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). (October 19, 2021). Areas of assistance, FEMA map. dec_4611.pdf (fema.gov).
Photos of “The Awakening” in National Harbor, Maryland, during Halloween weekend, 2021. Photos courtesy of Dean Najouks, Potomac Riverkeeper Network.
Halloween weekend always produces some startling sights, but in 2021, the most frightening image of all wasn’t a ghoul or ghost, but a very real picture of an iconic statue slipping below climate change-driven flooding.
“The Awakening” is an aluminum statue located in National Harbor, MD, just a few feet away from the tidal Potomac River. The statue was originally created in 1980 by the late Seward Johnson and located on Hains Point in Washington, D.C. before being moved to its current location in 2008.
In normal conditions, the statue depicts a giant grasping at the air, struggling to emerge from the earth. However, after the Mid-Atlantic experienced some of the region’s worst tidal flooding in years this weekend, the sandy space where the statue sits was inundated with unusually high floodwaters. Instead of emerging from the dry ground as the artist intended, the giant appeared to be drowning as water filled its open mouth and rose several feet to nearly eclipse one of its massive hands.
What The Awakening statue in Maryland looks like normally, and what it looks like today pic.twitter.com/UdS3JsCBYP
Unfortunately, this image is one that we will see with increasing frequency as climate change causes more precipitation and severe storms along the East Coast, including in D.C., Maryland and Virginia. According to a 2018 NOAA report, the average incidence of high-tide flooding in the Mid-Atlantic doubled between 2000 and 2015, from three to six days a year. National Harbor wasn’t the only local area affected by the flooding over the weekend—the mayor of Annapolis paddled through his city’s streets to assess flood damage, waves lapped at storefronts in Alexandria’s Old Town, and the Tidal Basin overflowed in downtown D.C. In Annapolis, early data shows this weekend’s flood was the fourth-highest in the city’s recorded history.
What is especially concerning about this weekend’s flooding is, as anyone who was in the area can attest, there wasn’t a deluge of rainfall that caused the Potomac River to flood D.C. and surrounding areas. Instead, as Dean Najouks of the Potomac Riverkeeper Network pointed out, distant storms drove water up the river from the Atlantic, meaning the flooding was the “direct result” of sea-level rise and climate change. Although hurricanes and large rainstorms will also pose increasingly dire threats, it’s clear that it doesn’t take a direct hit from a storm anymore to cause significant flood damage in the region.
Although the viral photos of “The Awakening” this weekend provide a dramatic snapshot of the effects of climate change, the more haunting fact is that these impacts are constantly occurring whether we get a striking picture of them or not. To preserve our region’s health, safety, economic-well being and overall quality of life, it is imperative that we take steps now to immediately reduce our climate-disrupting emissions.
