Each new General Assembly session is bound to bring its fair share of surprises. Chief among this year’s list was the truly shocking (and downright absurd) proposed $100 annual tax on hybrid and electric vehicles. I literally laughed out loud when I first heard of this proposal last November. The tax was heavily debated but ultimately became buried within an enormous transformation reform bill that narrowly passed both the House and Senate. The bill now sits on Gov. McDonnell’s desk. I, along with 1,136 of you, urge the governor to veto this poorly contrived component of the bill.
Marylanders tell General Assembly to “Get to Work” on fracking protections
The following blog post was originally posted under the title, “dear legislators…” on the ClimateHoward Blog: http://climatehoward.wordpress.com/. It was written by Elisabeth Hoffman.
So, we are taking stock. On the downside: The fracking moratorium legislation for Maryland fell one vote short of getting out of its Senate committee during this General Assembly session.
On the plus side: The Senate committee at least voted. And the vote was sooo close.
And, we are not going away. Or giving up.
That was the message from more than 150 concerned Marylanders at yesterday’s rally in front of the State House in Annapolis. In the pointed words of Mike Tidwell, Chesapeake Climate Action Network’s director, we told legislators: You had better “get to work” to protect communities, the environment and the climate from fracking.
The rally, organized by CCAN, included parents and grandparents, college and high school students and teachers (including a group from Glenelg Country School in Howard County), a couple of babies in backpacks and strollers, nurses and other activists, and Western Maryland residents who live in areas that would be drilled or where natural gas compressor stations are planned.
One of the biggest lessons of the day, though, came from Lois Gibbs, who organized her Love Canal neighbors in the late 1970s when toxic waste buried under their homes and schools started making people sick.
'Black liquor' deal goes sour
By Tim Wheeler
A deal environmentalists thought had been worked out to stop mostly out-of-state paper mills from cashing in on Maryland’s renewable energy law by burning so-called “black liquor” has come unglued. The state’s only paper plant in Allegany County has backtracked on a pledge not to oppose the move in return for being allowed to keep collecting from the state’s utility customers for another five years.
Mill’s stance on ‘black liquor’ irks lawmakers
By Steven Mufson
A month ago, the manager of Luke paper mill in western Maryland pledged in writing to remain neutral on a bill in the state legislature that would curtail renewable energy payments to mills burning a residue called “black liquor.”
This week, he changed his mind.
The flip-flop irked key Maryland lawmakers, but the Luke mill manager was just one of a parade of people from the American Forest and Paper Association, the United Steelworkers and Dominion Resources who opposed the bill in hearings in Annapolis on Tuesday and Thursday.
Victory: MD votes for offshore wind!
On September 23, 2010 at St. Paul’s by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Ocean City, Maryland, CCAN and other advocates held our first town hall in the campaign to bring offshore wind power to the state.
Over two and a half years later, on March 8th, 2013, the Maryland Senate joined the House of Delegates in passing the Maryland Offshore Wind Energy Act of 2013 (HB 226), creating a process to support the development of Maryland’s first offshore wind farm.
Marylanders for offshore wind power: what follows is your story – a chronological timeline of key events in the campaign that brought us to today. It was all of your phone calls, your 10,000 petitions, hundreds of hand-written letters, letters-to-the-editor, and trips to Annapolis to rally together and to lobby your legislators that have made this happen. Maryland will be a leader in offshore wind because of you.
Md., D.C. utilities pay paper mills burning ‘black liquor’ for alternative fuel credits
By Steven Mufson
When Maryland and the District set floors requiring electric utilities to use increasing amounts of renewable energy, environmentalists cheered the prospect of money going to new solar and wind projects.
But today, several years after the legislation went into effect, it has had an unexpected outcome.
Thanks to a wrinkle in the definition of renewable, the lion’s share of the money used to meet those standards is flowing to paper companies that burn “black liquor,” a byproduct of the wood-pulping process. Paper mills have been using black liquor to generate most of their power needs since the 1930s.
Ken Cuccinelli Gets a Science Lesson
If VA Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli was featured on the TV show, Are you smarter than a 5th grader, he would have been out before the first commercial.
In his new book, “The Last Line of Defense,” Cuccinelli has a chapter called “Weird Science” dedicated to his qualms with climate science and his use of taxpayer dollars for lawsuits to fight it. As highlighted in Beth’s blog post last week, among other things, the chapter quips that perhaps 97% of the world’s climate scientists are confusing the ‘supposedly dangerous’ greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, with the deadly household gas, carbon monoxide.
Feel free to check out the book yourself for a play by play of his losing lawsuit against the EPA, but for now, it’ll suffice to say that on a basic level, our Attorney General doesn’t understand why carbon dioxide is so dangerous–after all, it’s in our soda!
So what did I do about it? Last Friday during his book signing in Fredericksburg, I gave our Attorney General a 2nd grade science lesson to catch him up with the majority of elementary school students who understand the Carbon Cycle.
And thanks to stretchy yoga pants and my cell phone, I was able to catch the action on film.
Charlottesville climate activists tell Sec. Kerry: No KXL!
Armed with a huge banner and chanting “No tar sands pipeline!” the group drew attention from passersby and Secretary Kerry himself, who walked by with a wave to acknowledge our message. During his speech, Kerry came out swinging on climate change. He made the economic case for climate action, tying rising seas and higher temperatures to greater costs from extreme weather and other climate impacts.
Secretary Kerry is right – we need to see climate action and we need to see it now. He and President Obama have a great opportunity, a great responsibility, to match their words with action.
A Voice for Climate, 40,000 Strong
By Jaime Fuller
Allison Chin, president of the Sierra Club, knows now is the moment to think big on climate. It’s been a year of “records”: A record number of droughts have hit towns across the country, record temperatures slowly roast the planet, and storms have left record amounts of snow and rain in their wake. Finally, too, a record number of people have conceded that we’re changing the environment for the worse. “Mothers, fathers, grandparents, children, businessmen, people of the faith—it’s not just environmentalists that are affected by this,” Chin says. She knows that environmentalists need to be practical—they need concrete demands that all people left adrift by a changing climate can endorse. But facing such long odds and high stakes, how can they be anything but ardent about the environment?
Destroying a clean-energy law
The Virginian-Pilot
By Beth Kemler
Sneak attack, dirty trick, underhanded. Those are some of the terms used to describe Senate Republicans’ move to exploit the absence of one Democrat to pass an off-year redistricting bill – a story that became one of the hottest of this year’s Virginia General Assembly session.
Those terms also apply to one of the least covered stories of the session – a move by climate change-denying Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and electric utilities, including Dominion Power, to effectively repeal one of the state’s core clean energy laws.
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