Eight million strong are demanding action on climate change

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officially closed the public comment period on December 1 on their proposed standard to limit carbon pollution from existing (think "dirty old") power plants. This follows closely on the heels of another proposed standard from EPA that would limit carbon pollution from not-yet-built power plants.

It's great news that more than 8,000,000 Americans weighed in officially in support of these two proposed standards. There are so many reasons to support EPA on this: Concern about our children's future and everyone's health; worries about the economic devastation caused by ever-increasing extreme weather events; threats to national security; fear for wild animals and wild places; and more.

PennFuture's senior energy analyst, Rob Altenburg, an expert in federal and state legislation, did a great job explaining the human side of regulations in an interview he gave to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette earlier this week.

Our staff gathered on December 1 alongside dozens of volunteers at EPA's Region III headquarters in Philadelphia to thank the agency for its great work, specifically on the proposed carbon pollution limits. Susan Saxe, a volunteer with the Philadelphia chapter of Pa. Interfaith Power and Light, baked an apple pie as a thank-you to EPA staff, because...protecting the environment is as American as apple pie!

"Kudos and Cookies" (led by Susan Saxe) baked a pie for the EPA.

Joy Bergey is federal policy director for PennFuture and is based in Philadelphia. She tweets @joybergey.

A nasty circle: A warming atmosphere and diminished power reliability

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has issued its second important report within a month. "Power Failure: How climate change puts our electricity at risk—and what we can do about it" raises some important questions. As science has been telling us for years, extreme weather events due to climate disruption will increase over time. And "global weirding" (as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman refers to global warming) seems to already have visited too many of us in the Mid-Atlantic.

Concerns about climate change are not new. But the UCS report connects some dots in a way that spells big trouble ahead: The country's infrastructure for distributing electricity from power plants to homes and businesses (a.k.a. the grid) is aging. And its age increases its vulnerability to extreme weather events.

A few examples from the report:

• Power plants are vulnerable to water-related risks. Because fossil fuel and nuclear power plants rely on copious amounts of water for cooling, they are invariably located on rivers or bays. Many of these plants are ancient, relatively speaking, and were not engineered for warmer water.
• Sea level rise threatens coastal power facilities in particular. Climate Central reports that about 100 power plants and substations are within four feet of local high tide. And with science predicting likely sea level rises of 1.6 to 6.6 feet above 1992 levels by 2099, we'd better be making some new plans.
• Heat waves are a double whammy: reducing efficiency at power plants while simultaneously increasing demand ("Honey, it's too hot in here! Turn up the A/C.")

This is where it hits home for me, literally. I experienced days-long power outages from  Superstorm Sandy in late October 2012 and again this past winter, the third snowiest on record for Philadelphia.

So what's to be done? We need to find the collective will to "harden" our electricity infrastructure—burying power lines and building sea walls, that type of thing. But it's expensive. So let's really fix the problem and move toward a cleaner energy future, where generating electricity doesn't make climate change worse, which further threatens our aging grid—a positive feedback loop we just can't accept.

See PennFuture's Clean Energy Wins report, just released in March, that offers a roadmap as to how Pennsylvania can displace fossil fuels with clean energy and energy efficiency.

Please help keep the lights on -- and the planet safer.

This offending branch that knocked out my neighborhood's power for 2+ days in February

Joy Bergey is PennFuture's federal policy director and is based in Philadelphia. She tweets @joybergey.

Weather extremes everywhere. Even in my back yard. Whither my daffodils!

"All politics is local," as famously stated by then-Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill.

I'll paraphrase Tip in a way I hope he wouldn't mind: Extreme weather is (now) local. I live in suburban Philadelphia, an area where we have occasional bits of extreme weather but, by no means, an anticipated hot spot for climate change.

That said, I just read Joe Romm's article in ClimateProgress about a new study that connects California's terrible drought with our recent frigid winter in the east -- and anthropogenic climate change. This is written by serious, reputable scientists, and endorsed by Pennsylvania's own climate scientist, Dr. Michael Mann.

Now to my own little bit of extreme weather: Tuesday afternoon, it was 67 degrees in my backyard and raining hard. It's April, so rain is expected. However, within eight short hours, we had frozen precipitation (sleet and snow) falling. It was 31 degrees when I got up yesterday morning, and my daffodils have taken a huge hit. A 36-degree drop in temperature in less than a day is not unheard of and doesn't, in and of itself, prove anthropogenic climate disruption.

But, for much of the country including Pennsylvania, this has been the winter to end all winters and it just won't end. Snow on Tax Day? Ridiculous.

And yes, I do realize I'm being whiny and narrowly focused to complain about my daffodils.

Much more seriously, I also realize that people around the world are dying due to climate disruptions. (And thanks to the excellent premiere episode of "Years of Living Dangerously" this past Sunday, I now see that the drought in Syria -- likely a result of climate change -- has played a huge role in the disastrous revolution in that country with so many thousands of lives lost to violence.)

Climate disruption is now smacking us in the face, every day, in so many ways -- from international headlines to the broken daffodils by my front door.

Memo to Washington and Harrisburg: It's time to wake up, smell the (mangled) flowers, and act.

Joy Bergey is PennFuture's federal policy director and is based in suburban Philadelphia.

More disturbing news on climate change

This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest assessment of global progress -- or lack thereof -- on tackling climate disruptions: "Impacts, Adaptations, and Vulnerabilities."

As noted in the New York Times, the report makes clear that climate change is already visibly changing our world: Arctic sea ice is melting precipitously -- and contributing to rising sea levels that threaten coastal populations (think Miami); mountain snowpack is melting earlier each year, leading to more frequent summer droughts (think western wildfires); and increased incidents of extreme weather are killing those least able to defend themselves (think everywhere).

The authors do a great job connecting the dots on the physical manifestations of climate change with likely impacts on geopolitics:

"Throughout the 21st century, climate-change impacts are projected to slow down economic growth, make poverty reduction more difficult, further erode food security, and prolong existing and create new poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hot spots of hunger."

"Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change," said Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the IPCC, at the public release of the report on March 31.

The IPCC reports have huge academic credibility, representing the best scientific thinking from experts around the world, with the report this week representing the work of 243 lead authors and 436 additional experts.

So what does all this have to do with Pennsylvania? Our relatively small population of 12+ million people creates nearly one percent of the world's heat-trapping emissions -- a hugely disproportional ratio, given a global population of 7 billion.

So I would argue that Pennsylvanians bear extra responsibility to take action, since Congress won't. Here's an easy step you can take right now and it won't take more than a minute.Tell the EPA to move quickly and decisively to limit industrial climate pollution from power plants.

Future generations will thank you.

Joy Bergey is PennFuture's federal policy director and is based in Philadelphia.

Climate deniers in Congress. And yet, they like the money...

Thanks to the Center for American Progress for the insightful report it has just released titled

States of Denial: States with the Most Federal Disaster Aid Sent Climate-Science Deniers to Congress.  

The report shows all too well the actual cost of carbon pollution, as we reflect on extreme weather events of recent years. These weather disasters, fueled in part by climate change, are costing the country billions of dollars, even as more than 160 members of Congress continue to deny climate change.

To quote the Center, "Interestingly, many of the states that received the most federal recovery aid to cope with climate-linked extreme weather have federal legislators who are climate-science deniers. The ten states that received the most federal recovery aid in FY 2011 and 2012 elected 47 climate-science deniers to the Senate and the House. Nearly two-thirds of the senators from these top 10 recipient states voted against granting federal emergency aid to New Jersey and New York after Superstorm Sandy."

Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey voted to send aid to our neighbors in New Jersey and New York. However, Senator Pat Toomey voted not to help them. How is this compassionate, or even fair? These are fundamental American values in my perspective, so I simply don't understand how Sen. Toomey can vote this way.

I'm relieved to write that Pennsylvania is 20th on the list of states in terms of aid received, due in some part to the luck of our inland geography. And yet, Pennsylvania ranks as the third worst state in terms of producing global warming pollution. We're a big part of the problem, so a big part of the responsibility should fall on our shoulders.

We're hearing that the Obama Administration is set to publicly propose this Friday (September 20) a carbon pollution standard for new power plants, as authorized by the Clean Air Act. This regulation, if allowed to stand by Congress, will ensure that no new power plant built in this country will be permitted to release unlimited amounts of dangerous carbon pollution into the air, endangering public health and fueling the storms that are devastating communities and costing billions.

I'm only sorry that our country didn't have the foresight to do this a decade ago.