Tag Archive for: climate change
National climate draft document highlights dangers for Alaska
The public comment period for an update on the National Climate Assessment closes Jan. 27 as the U.S. seeks to shore up efforts to address climate change.
The draft update, now the fifth, is considered “the preeminent source of climate information for the United States, used by hundreds of thousands of people across the country and around the world,” according to a news release from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The National Climate Assessment first published in 2000, with its last update released in two parts between 2017 and 2018.
The 1,695-page draft report evaluates everything from rising ocean levels and shifting weather patterns to economical and social impacts. The draft includes a 63-page chapter on Alaska’s role in climate change, including threats and reactions.
Citing a 2018 study, the draft states that Alaska is warming two to three times faster than the global average.
The draft report notes climate change presents some positive impacts for Alaska’s food security, including longer growing seasons.
Twenty-four people from federal, state, environmental, science and academic backgrounds contributed to the Alaska chapter.
Alyssa Quintyne, the Alaska Center’s Interior community manager, served as one of the Alaska chapter’s contributing writers.
“Alaskans are the best people to tell the story about climate crisis in Alaska,” Quintyne said, adding that public comments from Alaska residents are essential.
“We don’t want our chapter to go out without Alaskan eyes on it,” Quintyne said. “We want to engage with our fellow leaders and community members, and we want to make sure we got the story right.”
Noticeable impacts include thawing permafrost, shrinking sea ice levels and a sharp, noticeable drop in several fish and crab populations, which have led to several fisheries crashes over the last years.
Other elements highlighted in the draft report include prolonged summer wildfire seasons and the adverse health affects caused by the smoke, shifts in wildlife migration patterns.
Quintyne noted health impacts from wildfire smoke struck a personal note.
“A lot of my friends developed bronchospasms,” Quintyne said. Bronchospasms are cause by airway muscles tightening, which results in wheezing and coughing.
Quintyne noted some people had to receive breathing treatments as a result. Several things trigger it, including emphysema, chemical fumes and allergens — and wildfire smoke.
“To see healthy people that are normally out there running or exercising all of sudden developing these conditions hit me personally,” Quintyne said.
The report references some of the most recent severe weather events, including the harsh 2021-2022 winter season that hammered the Interior with freezing rain and snow.
The Alaska chapter also cites personal stories from residents, including Fairbanks resident and tax preparer Marjorie Casort’s testimony on the 2021-2022 snowpocalypse.
“In April we are still feeling the effects, with an inch of ice stubbornly clinging to roads,” Casort wrote. “Many of my elderly clients are housebound, unable to even cross the road to check their mailbox because of the dangerous ice conditions.”
The draft report is available online for review and comment at review.globalchange.gov. People wishing to comment will need to create an account to view, download or comment.
Quintyne encourages people to comment.
“We greatly appreciate having this chapter written and edited by Alaskans, so we appreciate any comment and we want to make sure we got the story right,” Quintyne said.
Originally published on January 4, 2023 by the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.
A Big Step Forward For Climate
The passage of the most historic climate legislation in U.S. history should give us a moment of hope for the process of lawmaking and Democracy in our country – a brief, sweet moment of exaltation.
Now on the next beat, as heatwaves, wildfires, and floods rage across the globe, we must also take some time to recognize the urgent need for the legislation and the bitter tradeoffs that occurred with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). We are looking at the sacrifice of millions of acres of offshore oil and gas leases in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, and elsewhere before federal leases for renewable energy production can be offered. This means, in many instances, especially in Alaska, that coastal and Indigenous lands are Joe Manchin’s tradeoff for the compromise that got the bill through congress. This is a bad compromise, even with the IRA’s historic investment in environmental justice.
On the next beat, it is good to remind ourselves that this is just the starting point for a much larger race to save the planet, defeat racism and protect Democracy. The majority of Americans are with us, and momentum continues toward a just future.
Many of the provisions of the IRA will reverberate in Alaska. The bill contains important apprenticeship and wage requirements that will provide good jobs for Alaskans, and makes sure the clean energy industry catches up to the union-created standards of working that the fossil fuel industry requires.
The IRA substantially increases support for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s existing efforts to address methane emissions. It creates a new system of fees that would impose charges on oil and gas infrastructure owners if methane emitted from that infrastructure exceeds specified thresholds. Methane emissions are a significant problem for Alaska’s aging oil and gas infrastructure. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas causing steep increases in global temperatures.
The IRA will extend and create clean energy tax credits, including the existing tax credit for electricity produced from renewable resources, which has been a major benefit to the Solarize Anchorage, Fairbanks, Kenai, and Mat-Su programs. The IRA also creates a new tax credit that rural electric cooperatives like ours on the railbelt in Alaska can apply for to finance new clean energy generation facilities. This will make policies to require utilities to adopt renewable energy generation (like the Renewable Portfolio Standard) more financially achievable in the near term.
The IRA creates a Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to be funded at $27 billion over the next decade to better leverage private sector investment and community lenders to build wind, solar, electric vehicle, and energy efficiency projects at the community level. Of that money, $7 billion will go directly to state-operated Green Banks. The legislation to establish an Alaska state Green Bank will likely be re-introduced in Alaska in the 2023 legislative session. (Note that previous legislation proposed to put the Green Bank in the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, an agency that lacks transparency and accountability, so many groups opposed this.) With your help, we can ensure that a state Green Bank in a more trusted agency like the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation becomes a reality.
The transition to clean transportation is facilitated by a $4,000 consumer credit for lower/middle income individuals (i.e., couples making less than $300,000 and individuals $150,000 annually) to buy used electric vehicles and a $7,500 tax credit to buy new electric vehicles. We must advocate with our local utilities and governments to continue the rapid build-out of fast charging stations in Alaska.
With the passage of the IRA, there will be many programs and opportunities for individuals, homeowners, business owners, utilities, local governments, state agencies, Tribes, Native Corporations, and NGOs to save energy costs, decrease emissions, and more in Alaska. We need to work with our elected leaders to ensure that the benefits of the new legislation move forward with equity and at a speed that meets the moment of our climate crisis.
Onward!
The Alaska Center
Just Transition is growing the future of sustainable practices
Folks may have heard about Just Transition in the news, but what is it exactly? In short, Just Transition is a movement to shift from our current extractive and violent systems and economies, to more regenerative and restorative ones, across the board. Shifting away from sole dependence and subsidies on oil, gas and coal, to investing in community and commercial solar, wind, hydrothermal. From corporation crop and land ownership, to localized agricultural ownership and food allocation. Walkable cities, consistent and stable funding to education, affordable health care, and other public services. The good news, these transitions to other industries, work forces, energy and food sources are already here.
Farmer’s markets and locally-owned grocery stores like Southside Market, Calypso Farm and Roaming Root are thriving and providing a respite from food deserts in our communities. Community energy initiatives like Alaska Native Renewable Industries’ solar workforce training with Tanana Chiefs push this work forward. And our communities are redefining what works best for their members in crisis with programs like the Crisis Response Center. These are real, tangible and localized solutions led by our neighbors, building toward a healthier, restorative and sustainable Fairbanks.
However, we must guarantee that justice, equity and intersectionality are at the core of this transition. For any Just Transition to happen, it must center and amplify the very people our current system marginalizes: Black, Brown and Indigenous communities, queer people, disabled people, poor people, first-generation Americans and immigrant families. Otherwise, we foster the same obstacles we already face, and our solutions fall short.
We already see the consequences of not working with and for the communities when building toward this Just Transition. The Borough Assembly pushed the transition to Natural Gas, and we quickly saw that transition move. However, homeowners were not adequately consulted beforehand to see if that transition was even affordable and if the implementation would work with contractor season in the first place. Homeowners have to figure out if they need to switch out and potentially pay for new boilers or wood stoves, wait and pay an inspector to see if a line can even be installed, then wait to be connected. That takes time, research and money that homeowners already don’t have. GVEA was jazzed about the new electric car charging station installed right in Fairbanks. But when their member-owners are already struggling to pay their electric bill because of the price of energy sources, who’s got money for an electric car, let alone to charge it? For communities marginalized and experiencing discrimination through homeownership and a lack both of quality housing and affordable means for utilities and transportation, those solutions become salt in the wound from a system that isn’t working.
Both of those solutions have the necessary intentions. We need clean, affordable energy to heat our homes. Natural gas lines aren’t the direct solution. We need more reliable and cleaner transportation. Electric cars aren’t either. Neither solves the actual root of the problem — dependence on oil, gas and coal, poor city planning and zoning, and prioritizing car ownership instead of quality public transit. When you expect engagement rather than directly consulting with the communities facing the brunt of those issues, your solutions will always fall short.
Communities marginalized have already been transitioning for decades; we’ve had to since these systems were not made for us in the first place. When you live in the throes of oppressive systems, you find creative ways to navigate. Our communities take care of each other. We feed each other, invest financially and spiritually, and work and create with each other. We are creating firms and businesses and collectives and projects an initiative together that addresses the issues and crises we are experiencing. Villages are in an energy crisis; Edwin Bifelt said, “alright, bet.” Communities needed better access to locally-grown foods, Calypso said, “alright, bet.” Black residents were tired of not having a place to buy quality products for our health. Epic Hair & Beauty said “Babe, I gotchu.” It takes that kind of energy to make these transitions just, which is exactly why we need to lead them. People suffering will have the very solutions to address it directly. We need the room, decision-making authority, the investment, and the collaboration to make this. Nothing for us can truly be done without us.
Alyssa Quintyne is a Fairbanks resident and a community organizer with The Alaska Center.
By Alyssa Quintyne
Originally posted by Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
May 7, 2022