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Monthly Environmental News Roundup 12/1/23
In case you’re just catching up, COP is an international climate meeting held each year by the United Nations. The name stands for “Conference of the Parties,” meaning those countries who have joined the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Parties to the treaty have committed to take voluntary actions to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”
Monthly Environmental News Roundup 11/1/23
Climate change is now recognized as a threat multiplier to international peace and security. When people are under the stress of environmental degradation caused by the climate crisis, violent conflict and atrocity crimes become much more likely. Nearly every geopolitical crisis on earth is now marked in one way or another by environmental strife. Of the 25 countries deemed most vulnerable to climate change, 14 are mired in conflict.
Virtual power plants (VPPs) are networks of hundreds or thousands of households and businesses that agree to share the power of their thermostats, electric vehicles (EVs), appliances, batteries, and solar arrays to support the grid. When these devices are combined and coordinated, they can provide many of the same energy services as a traditional power plant.
Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, poor and marginalized populations have borne the brunt of the toxic byproducts of industry. Environmental justice is a concept that promotes regulation to ensure that all people receive fair treatment and have meaningful involvement with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies, and their impact on projects in their neighborhoods.
This month, let’s talk about something that hasn’t been making the news as much as it should: CO2 pipelines! Carbon dioxide (CO2) pipelines are essential components of carbon capture and storage (CCS) systems, which are proposed to reduce atmospheric emissions of man-made CO2, a greenhouse gas.
Offshore wind! Massachusetts has a bonanza of clean energy off its coastline. What’s holding up the deployment of infrastructure to capture that power?
This month, our focus is on the back end of the infrastructure necessary to support our conversion to a clean energy future: storage!
Not surprisingly, in a globalized world, international tensions have powerful effects on efforts to electrify the grid here in the US. Attempts to isolate China by pressuring U.S. companies to abandon suppliers there threaten to undermine the transition to green energy at home.
- Monthly News Check-In 4/1/23Welcome back!Some good news: for the first time, renewable energy comprised more electricity generated in the U.S. last year than coal or nuclear power, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). The federal agency found the growth was largely driven by increased proliferation of wind and solar energy, which […]
- Monthly News Check-In 3/1/23Welcome back. Massachusetts legislators approved a pilot program last year to let 10 cities and towns ban fossil fuels in new buildings. However, under DOER’s proposed regulations, municipalities that have already asked the state for permission to ban fossil fuels in new construction would need to wait until early 2024 […]