East End - Long Island, New York

The East Hampton Star - Letter to the Editor 06.09.16 - by Linda James

Return of Wind Power - East Hampton - June 6, 2016

Dear David,

Last week, the U.S. Interior Department, following a presidential directive, announced it would lease 81,000 ocean acres off New York’s coastline for wind development. Announcing this new leasing auction, in a release by Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Sally Jewell, secretary of the Interior, was quoted: “In addition to providing clean power, offshore wind energy marks a new frontier in renewable energy development, creating the path for sustainable electricity generation, job creation, and strengthening our nation’s economic competitiveness.”

Aerial view overlooking landscaping on April 4, 2015 in San Diego, California.  Photo: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

by Sarah Ferris and Peter Sullivan - April 25, 2016

The United States is on the verge of a national crisis that could mean the end of clean, cheap water.

Hundreds of cities and towns are at risk of sudden and severe shortages, either because available water is not safe to drink or because there simply isn’t enough of it.

The situation has grown so dire the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence now ranks water scarcity as a major threat to national security alongside terrorism.

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Mamaroneck, NY, another of the Sustainable Westchester communities that want to go forward – photo by Doug Kerr via Flickr

cleantechnica.com - by Roy L. Hales - March 18, 2016

Seventeen municipalities are involved in this pilot program, which has been described as “a transformative shift in the way we buy and use electricity.” Audrey Zibelman, Commissioner of the New York State Public Service Commission, said she has “great hopes for this as a critical pilot for the Reforming the Energy Vision.” This will be the first Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) pilot program under Governor Cuomo’s Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) strategy.

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inhabitat.com - May 27th 2016 - Lacy Cooke

Danish architectural firm EFFEKT envisioned a future where self-sustaining communities could grow their own food and produce their own energy. They incorporated that vision into the ReGen Village, a planned off-grid community that addresses issues ranging from climate change to food security through sustainable design. They plan to start building these utopian communities this summer.

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Many of us will be firing up our grills this weekend for some well-deserved barbecue time. After all, barbecuing is one of America’s greatest pastimes, but it certainly isn’t one of our most environmentally friendly. Whether you prefer charcoal, wood chips or propane, grilling releases emissions and contributes to poor air quality.

submitted by Gordian Raacke - May 15, 2016

Dear East End residents,

I am reaching out to you on very short notice today to see if you can still alert your membership about the important Public Hearings on the NYS Clean Energy Standard scheduled for this Tuesday, May 17th in Riverhead. It is crucial we show a solid turnout and explain why New York needs to switch to renewables without further delay.

Below are the details and relevant web links for the event. People interested in attending can RSVP via Renewable Energy Long Island’s website (or the Facebook event). People unable to attend can submit a comment online. We have posted some basic talking point on reLI’s website.

Image: A raccoon was to blame for the loss of power to almost 40,000 homes. Photograph: Luke Massey/Rex Features

theguardian.com - May 11th 2016 -  Nicky Woolf

Nearly 40,000 homes were without power on Wednesday morning after a raccoon broke into a substation in Seattle, Washington, and single-pawedly brought down the electric grid in a dozen suburbs.

The creature caused 13 separate system outages during its brief but energetic visit.

Seattle Power and Light tweeted that “an animal entered one of our substations” in the early hours of the morning, causing a power outage that stretched across the suburbs from Golden Gardens Park to Queen Anne, north of the city.

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CLICK HERE - STUDY - Pew Research Center - America’s Shrinking Middle Class: A Close Look at Changes Within Metropolitan Areas

latimes.com - by Don Lee - May 11, 2016

America's shrinking middle class, a growing concern for the economy and a central issue in the presidential race, cuts across virtually all communities from coast to coast, according to a study released Wednesday.

The report by Pew Research Center found that the share of the middle class fell in 203 of the 229 U.S. metropolitan areas examined from 2000 to 2014, including major cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, which saw a relatively sharp drop in its middle class.

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City’s Zika action plan enhances mosquito surveillance and control - Expands testing of humans and mosquitos, and launches public awareness campaign

nyc.gov - April 18, 2016

NEW YORK––Marking the start of mosquito season, Mayor de Blasio today detailed a three-year, five-borough plan to protect New Yorkers and prevent the spread of the Zika virus in New York City.

“We are doing all we can to target the mosquito that could transmit Zika here in the city, and building the capacity to respond to every possible scenario, no matter how unlikely,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio. “We will spare no effort to protect pregnant New Yorkers from the devastating consequences of Zika, and we ask New Yorkers to help us by taking simple steps to get rid of standing water where mosquitos can breed. We also ask pregnant women who may have been exposed to Zika to talk to their doctors about getting tested.”

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CLICK HERE - REPORT - Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2016

nytimes.com - by The Editorial Board - April 4, 2016

Some world leaders, especially in developing countries like India, have long said it’s hard to reduce the emissions that are warming the planet because they need to use relatively inexpensive — but highly carbon-intensive — fuels like coal to keep energy affordable. That argument is losing its salience as the cost of renewable energy sources like wind and solar continues to fall.

insidebayarea.com - by Seth Borenstein - January 18, 2016

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Nature Climate Change - Industrial-era global ocean heat uptake doubles in recent decades

WASHINGTON -- The amount of man-made heat energy absorbed by the seas has doubled since 1997, a study released Monday showed.

Scientists have long known that more than 90 percent of the heat energy from man-made global warming goes into the world's oceans instead of the ground.

And they've seen ocean heat content rise in recent years. But the new study, using ocean-observing data that goes back to the British research ship Challenger in the 1870s and including high-tech modern underwater monitors and computer models, tracked how much man-made heat has been buried in the oceans in the past 150 years.

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A September 2008 photo released by the Ocean Conservancy on March 10, 2009, shows a trash-covered beach in Manilla, Philippines. (Tamara Thoreson Pierce/Ocean Conservancy/AP)

CLICK HERE - REPORT - World Economic Forum - The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the future of plastics

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Independent study tallies 'true catch' of global fishing

washingtonpost.com - by Sarah Kaplan - January 20, 2016

There is a lot of plastic in the world’s oceans.

It coagulates into great floating “garbage patches” that cover large swaths of the Pacific. It washes up on urban beaches and remote islands, tossed about in the waves and transported across incredible distances before arriving, unwanted, back on land. It has wound up in the stomachs of more than half the world’s sea turtles and nearly all of its marine birds, studies say . . .

. . . But that quantity pales in comparison with the amount that the World Economic Forum expects will be floating into the oceans by the middle of the century.

Image: A photograph of a city skyline at dusk with lamps in the foreground that resemble stylized trees.

huffingtonpost.com - October 20th, 2015 - Jeremy Rifkin

The global economy is slowing, productivity is waning in every region of the world and unemployment remains stubbornly high in every country. At the same time, economic inequality between the rich and the poor is at the highest point in human history. In 2010 the combined wealth of the 388 richest people in the world equaled the combined wealth of the poorest half of the human race.

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sustainableeastend.blogspot.com - by Francesca Rheannon - October 21, 2015

LISTEN - CLICK HERE

With its miles of low-lying coast land and population pressures, the East End of Long Island is vulnerable to disaster. It could come suddenly in the form of a storm like Hurricane Sandy. Or creep inexorably toward us on the encroaching tide of sea level rise or the degradation of our land and water resources. Or from some other completely unexpected direction, like a pandemic.

Yet we are also a community rich in people committed to the health and well-being of the region. We also have fisheries and farmland to sustain us.

Bringing our resources to bear on building community resilience is the goal of the East End Resilience Network.

We talk today with the organizer of that network, Michael McDonald. As Coordinator of the Global Health Response and Resilience Alliance and Chairman of Global Resilience Systems, Inc., McDonald has been involved in building resilience networks all over the world.

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odi.org - Aditya Bahadur, Emma Lovell, Emily Wilkinson, Thomas Tanner - August 2015

CLICK HERE - Resilience in the SDGs - Developing an indicator for Target 1.5 that is fit for purpose (7 page .PDF file)

We outline a comprehensive approach for developing a cross-sectoral, multi-dimensional and dynamic understanding of resilience. This underpins the core message of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that development is multi-faceted and the achievement of many of the individual development goals is dependent on the accomplishment of other goals. It also acknowledges that shocks and stresses can reverse years of development gains and efforts to eradicate poverty by 2030. Crucially, this approach to understanding resilience draws on data that countries will collect for the SDGs anyway and entails only a small additional burden in this regard.

(CLICK HERE FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION)