The Sustainable Action Network (SAN), Climate Change, Climate Justice: The Time is Now, The Place is Here,Lindsey Allen, Rainforest Action Network (RAN) & X-Files quote: "Mostly, it just makes me afraid." "Afraid?" he replys, "Afraid that God is speaking ... but that no one's listening."

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Final Scene: THE X-FILES, Revelations (3x11) written by Kim Newton
PRIEST: Perhaps you saw these things because you needed to.
SCULLY: To find my way back?
PRIEST: Sometimes we must come full circle to find the truth. Why does that surprise you?
SCULLY: Mostly, it just makes me afraid.
PRIEST: Afraid?
SCULLY: Afraid that God is speaking ... but that no one's listening.

Climate Justice: The Time is Now, The Place is Here. Use the code “activist” for a discounted $25 ticket!
Join us as Lindsey Allen, Executive Director of Rainforest Action Network's and Elizabeth Yeampierre, Executive Director of UPROSE discuss the urgency of the climate movement, how local leadership results in national impact, and the climate change realities that New Yorkers already deal with.

Rainforest Action Network is one of the most effective and innovative environmental organizations today. Since 1985, RAN has challenged some of the biggest corporate offenders in defense of people and planet — including household name brands, major corporations and leading banks. RAN publicly targets high-profile corporations responsible for deforestation, climate change and human rights violations to shift entire industrial sectors and change destructive “business-as-usual” practices. And they get results.

Founded in 1966, UPROSE is Brooklyn's oldest Latino community-based organization. An intergenerational, multi-racial, nationally recognized community organization, UPROSE promotes sustainability and resiliency in Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood through community organizing, education, indigenous and youth leadership development, and cultural/artistic expression. Central to our work is advocacy to ensure meaningful community engagement, participatory community planning practices, and sustainable development with justice and governmental accountability. As lead advocates of climate justice, UPROSE views the just urban policy—ranging from transportation to open space—as the heart of climate adaptation and community resilience.

Join April 30th as @lrallen, Executive Director of @RAN & @yeampierre, Executive Director of @UPROSE discuss the urgency of the #climate movement, how local leadership results in national impact, & #climatechange realities that #NewYorkers deal with. #NYC

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/climate-justice-the-time-is-now-the-place-is-here-tickets-59072503448

Use the code “activist” for a discounted $25 ticket!

It’s cheaper to replace most coal plants with renewables than keep them open, per report. New research finds that replacing 74 percent of coal plants with renewables would immediately reduce costs.

Wind turbines generate electricity at the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm near Palm Springs, California, with snow-covered Mt. San Jacinto in the background.
It would be more expensive to keep the majority of U.S. coal plants open than to replace them with new wind and solar power alternatives, according to new findings published Monday.

Authored by the environmental firm Energy Innovation in partnership with the grid analysis company Vibrant Clean Energy, the research finds that replacing 74 percent of coal plants nationally with wind and solar power would immediately reduce power costs, with wind power in particular at times cutting the cost almost in half. By 2025, the analysis indicates, around 86 percent of coal plants could similarly be at risk of cheaper replacement by renewables.

“We’ve been closely following the cost of wind and solar in the U.S. and globally, and the costs have come down so far that we’re now seeing unprecedented low [costs] for wind and solar,” said Mike O’Boyle, Energy Innovation’s electricity policy director, on a call with reporters.

That trend has opened up an opportunity for a dramatic shift, the groups argue, one that could see coal largely replaced in many areas by energy sources that are better for both human health and the environment.

President Donald Trump has worked hard to save U.S. coal, going so far as to advocate for a financial bailout to rescue the dying industry. But data largely suggests that coal’s economic value will continue to plummet, a downturn that comes as wind and solar power are becoming increasingly cheaper and more viable options.

“America has officially entered the ‘coal cost crossover’ – where existing coal is increasingly more expensive than cleaner alternatives,” the report argues.

Using a data set of coal, wind, and solar costs, the report contrasts the cost of generating energy at coal plants against costs associated with potential wind or solar hubs in the nearby area. The report only examines the “local” area — defined as 35 miles from a given coal plant — to determine whether the plant has the potential to be replaced by cheaper renewables within that zone. Restricting the distance to the local area, however, leads the analysis to be more conservative.

“That local analysis is quite constraining,” O’Boyle said, noting that wind and solar grow in number when considering areas farther away from coal plants. The authors indicated that they opted for the local comparison because it offers a greater incentive to communities looking to transition from coal to renewables.

Nonetheless, the findings are stark even on a local level: 211 gigawatts (GW) of existing U.S. coal capacity as of the end of 2017 is at risk from renewable energy alternatives capable of providing the same amount of energy at a cheaper price. Within six years, that number increases to 246 GW, or nearly the entire U.S. fleet.

Some 93 GW of existing U.S. coal capacity, meanwhile, is substantially at risk from new renewable energy sources in 2018, with wind and solar poised to undercut costs by 25 percent. Even as federal renewable energy tax credits phase out, the amount of coal at risk of being replaced by renewables is projected to increase to 140 GW by 2025.
The firms behind the study both support renewable energy and argue in favor of a transition away from fossil fuels. But their analysis builds on existing research showing that the U.S. coal industry is rapidly on the decline. In fact, more coal plants shut down during Trump’s first two years in office than during former President Barack Obama’s entire first term. U.S. coal consumption also dropped to its lowest rate in nearly 40 years in 2018.

That swift decline has come hand in hand with the rise of wind and solar energy, both of which are widely considered far more economically appealing than coal.

“Coal is a dirty and expensive way to generate electricity,” the report observes, going on to note that it is becoming “increasingly uneconomic” when contrasted with new wind and solar opportunities.

Regional opportunities also abound. While the Midwest is likely to be disproportionately impacted by the closure of coal plants within the next five years, the region has ample potential for wind energy, according to the report. There are also abundant solar opportunities in a number of areas, including the sunny Southeast, where almost all coal plants are already substantially at risk.
The report, however, doesn’t analyze the role of natural gas in dethroning coal power plants. Natural gas is widely seen as a cheap alternative to coal, along with renewables. But natural gas is a fossil fuel with severe implications for human health and the environment, a reality that played a role in its exemption from the report, the authors told ThinkProgress.

The analysis also offers mixed findings for those championing efforts like the Green New Deal resolution introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA). The resolution pushes for moving away from fossil fuels while creating jobs and protecting the livelihood of communities impacted by the shift. Monday’s study acknowledges that if regulators, customers, and utilities looked beyond the local 35-mile limit examined in the report, the potential for costs to drop increases — but this could mean fewer jobs in the immediate area as renewables replace coal farther outside the local community.

“Building local renewables in the immediate vicinity of coal plants implies wind and solar could replace local jobs, expand the tax base, reuse existing transmission, and locate in the same utility service territory. But these constraints are quite restrictive,” the analysis acknowledges.

That doesn’t mean that starting with a local framework isn’t a good approach. O’Boyle noted that the findings could prompt “policymakers and other stakeholders” to assess the benefits to their communities that a shift to renewables might entail.

“Using local renewables can really be used to address some community transition issues,” he said, in a nod to the jobs that could be lost as the coal industry declines. “[They] can look at that as they’re considering new options.”
Last time CO2 levels were this high, sea levels were 60 feet higher and Antarctica had trees. Study finds the Earth's climate is highly sensitive to "relatively small variations in atmospheric CO2."
Antarctica's Collins glacier has retreated in the last 10 years and shows signs of fragility in this February 2, 2018 photo.

The last time carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were as high as they are today, sea levels were 60 feet higher and it was so warm that trees grew in Antarctica.

Current CO2 levels of 410 parts per million (ppm) were last seen on Earth three million years ago, according to the most detailed reconstruction of the Earth’s climate by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and published in Science Advances.

Their in-depth analysis of plant fossils and sediments reveal that such CO2 levels were last seen in the late Pliocene Epoch, a time when there were no ice sheets covering either Greenland or West Antarctica, and much of the East Antarctic ice sheet was gone. Temperatures were up to 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer globally, at least double that at the poles, and sea levels were some 20 meters (65 feet) higher.

“This is an amazing discovery,” Jane Francis, director of the British Antarctic Survey, told The UK Guardian. “They found fossil leaves of southern beech. I call them the last forests of Antarctica.”

While the discovery is remarkable, it’s implications are dire. “Twenty metres of sea level rise would have a major impact on our all our coastal cities,” Francis warned.
The good news is that the Earth does not warm instantly, and mile-thick ice sheets melt even more slowly. So the temperature rise will take several decades, and tens of feet of sea level rise will take hundreds and hundreds of years. That means the choices we make now can affect the rate of rise and determine whether we blow past 65 feet of sea level rise to beyond 200 feet.

But the bad news is that each threshold of higher temperatures and sea levels is all but irreversible, so absent very aggressive action over the next decade, tens of feet of sea level rise will be unstoppable.

Even worse, the climate policy agenda President Donald Trump is pushing — actions that include rolling back U.S. laws that reduce carbon pollution and abandoning the Paris climate agreement — would lock us in to such high CO2 levels, sea levels would rise a foot per decade in just a few decades.

One aspect of the study that hasn’t received much attention is the researchers’ finding that the Earth’s climate is highly sensitive to small changes in CO2 levels.

“The role of CO2 changes in shaping the glacial cycles has not been fully understood,” explained lead author Matteo Willeit of PIK. “It is a breakthrough that we can now show… that changes in CO2 levels were a main driver of the ice ages, together with variations of how the Earth’s orbits around the sun, the so-called Milankovitch cycles.”

Yet again, their remarkable finding is also quite worrying for present-day inhabitants of Earth. “Our results imply a strong sensitivity of the Earth system to relatively small variations in atmospheric CO2,” Willeit said. “As fascinating as this is, it is also worrying.”

The fact that the Earth’s climate demonstrates a strong sensitivity to CO2 levels is particularly worrisome because it means we are much more likely to face the worst-case scenario when it comes to climate change impacts. And that makes it even more urgent that the nations of the world cut carbon pollution immediately and keep the rise in atmospheric CO2 as small as possible.


The Sustainable Action Network (SAN), A Don Lichterman non-profit organization dedicated to building a global community raising awareness of corruption, injustice and the need for action across a full range of issues impacting people and animal/wildlife welfare around the world, such as conservation, climate change, campaign law, lobbying, government action and rescue work. SAN’s vision is to create safer world, free from political, environmental, and social oppression, where all the inhabitants of Earth can live in harmony within their own natural environments.


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