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Hundreds of students, professors, professionals and members of the community came together at the SUNY-ESF Gateway Center to express their opinions about the New York State Climate Action Council draft scoping plan.

The public comment session is one of 11 in-person and virtual events across the state to receive feedback on the draft scoping plan, which the council will submit to state officials by Jan. 1, 2023 as a part of the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.

Oral comments were limited to two minutes per speaker, but members of the community are able to leave written comments until June 10, said Sarah Osgood, the executive director of the Climate Action Council. The council created the draft scoping plan and oversees the public comment period.

The 120-day public comment period that began on Jan. 1 is just a step in the years-long process of designing New York state’s approach to combating climate change. Once the Climate Action Council receives all public feedback on its draft scoping plan, a finalized scoping plan will be presented to state lawmakers at the start of next year, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s website.

The New York state DEC will then have until Jan. 1, 2024 to create legally binding regulations to achieve the Climate Act’s emission reduction goals, the website reads.

Osgood opened the comment session with a brief presentation of the draft scoping plan before opening the floor to members of the community to hear their thoughts. Comments from members of the community ranged from full-hearted support of the plan to critiques and proposed alternatives.

The existing draft scoping plan calls for an 85% reduction in carbon emissions below 1990 levels across the state by 2050, and one suggested method is the electrification of heating methods in buildings to reduce the burning of fossil fuels.

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Maggie Riley, an environmental engineer from New York Mills, NY, said that she and her husband have already transitioned their home off of fossil fuels entirely and support the proactive nature of the Climate Act as well as the jobs it would create.

“If our ancestors could transition from coal to oil, then to natural gas, we can transition to cleaner alternatives such as air source heat pumps and geothermal systems,” she said.

John D. Randall of Webster, New York, shared similar sentiments. Randall expressed his support for the plan and stressed the urgency with which action is needed before it’s too late. He said that the state should move quickly to increase public education on making climate-friendly choices, scale-up an available workforce to execute the carbon transition and ban fossil fuel use to prevent new emissions.

“I am very proud to be a New Yorker right now as we launched an initiative to make a meaningful reduction in our emissions,” Randall said. “The goals of the CLCPA are science-based and achievable and deserve our best efforts to make them a reality.”

Lauren Jones is a junior studying conservation biology at SUNY-ESF who also serves as the Director of Sustainability for the Undergraduate Student Association. Jones voiced support for the plan but said that the plan should focus on local food and energy sourcing, improving electric public transportation and walkability, holding corporations responsible for emissions and minimizing the cost of the transition away from fossil fuels on consumers.

While Aaron Strong, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Hamilton College, was supportive of the current progress the draft scoping plan has made, he said there were still some problems that were unaddressed.

“When it comes to climate policy, the devils are always in the details, and this plan is still short on some of them,” Strong said.

Strong said the drafted plan lacks the regulations and incentives needed for a transition away from fossil fuels and toward all-electric transportation as well as building heating and that the plan needs to avoid concessions that protect the fossil fuel industry.

He also emphasized the need to ensure equity and justice in the implementation of the plan.

Under the Climate Act, a separate Climate Justice Working Group will establish criteria that will be used to identify disadvantaged communities to reduce emissions in and allocate investments to as the CLCPA requires, according to its website.

Sue Fassler, SUNY-ESF’s sustainable facilities manager, said she felt waste management was largely ignored or minimized in the draft scoping plan, adding that the state should focus on “upstream” solutions like waste reduction and reuse rather than just emphasizing green electricity and transportation.

“If New York state truly desires to lead the nation and world into the future, we must do nothing short of truly fundamentally rethinking our way of life and our relationship and reliance on continual extraction and consumption,” she said.

Ethan Gormley, the project coordinator for the Syracuse branch of the New York Public Interest Research Group, spoke about the damage cryptocurrency mining could do in the pursuit of reducing emissions.

He said the state should implement a three-year moratorium on cryptocurrency mining to assess its environmental impacts.

Alberto Bianchetti, the director of customer and community management for Upstate New York National Grid, advocated for the company’s recent counterproposal strategy, which involves weatherization and energy efficiency, targeted electrification and thermal networks and a fossil-free gas network.

“This last piece uses existing infrastructure built over decades to deliver clean energy in the form of renewable natural gas and green hydrogen, and is more affordable and reliable than the scenarios considered in the draft scoping plan,” he said. Bianchetti also cited the support of Tristan Brown, an assistant professor at SUNY-ESF in his testimony.

National Grid’s proposal plans to partially implement renewable natural gas and green hydrogen as low carbon alternatives to reduce emissions by using existing infrastructure.

Brown told The Daily Orange that New York state’s high emphasis on eliminating methane emissions, one of the most potent greenhouse gasses, is evidence of the benefits of National Grid’s proposal.

“This is one of those few situations where carbon dioxide emissions are actually beneficial in the sense that we’re greatly reducing the global warming impact because the carbon dioxide is so much less potent as a greenhouse gas than methane is. So from that standpoint, you want to capture and destroy methane wherever you can,” Brown said.

Brown said that this methane could be collected from places such as dairy farms and wastewater treatment plants that already emit methane across the state, as long as anaerobic digesters could be installed to collect the methane at these locations. Otherwise, all existing infrastructure needed to transport the renewable natural gas is already in place, Brown said.

Brown said that the CLCPA’s targets, including the 85% reduction in economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions are ambitious because, while legislation has historically been focused on decarbonizing specific aspects of the economy, the CLCPA would be one of the first laws aiming to decarbonize an entire state’s economy.

“This has been billed as the world’s most ambitious climate legislation, and I think it certainly stands up to that,” Brown said.

Published on April 28, 2022 at 12:55 am

Contact Danny: ddamron@syr.edu | @dannyamron_