Local communities lead the way for clean air

By: centraljersey.com
Environmental legislation is dead in the U.S. Congress, at least until after November’s mid-term election.
The so-called cap-and-trade bill – which would put a price on carbon emissions – has been stalled in the U.S. Senate for more than a year, while a much weaker energy bill remains mired in what has become a political swamp.
The outlook for the environment, therefore, might seem bleak.
And it would be if it weren’t for the efforts of hundreds of local residents and groups for whom the health of the planet is a prime concern.
Communities in southern Hunterdon County, for instance, are launching a renewable energy cooperative that will work with the private sector to install solar power on local government and school buildings without costing taxpayers. Elsewhere, groups like the Stony Book-Millstone Watershed Association, which covers much of the Central Jersey region, and the Friends of the Princeton Nursery Lands in Kingston are planning to be out this coming weekend, cleaning up streams and stream corridors, clearing overgrown brush and educating the public on importance of protecting our waterways.
And then there are the efforts of local governments and schools boards, which have been adding solar panels to buildings, investing in hybrid vehicles and making efforts to reduce not only their energy use but are altering their behaviors to reduce their environmental impacts in other ways.
States like New Jersey, with its push for expanded use of wind and solar, and California, with its tight restrictions on carbon emissions, have stepped into the vacuum created by a lack of national legislation governing greenhouse gases.
All of these efforts will have a positive effect, but they are not enough to address the impending planetary disaster that awaits us if the federal government and United Nations cannot develop a comprehensive plan to address climate change and provide water and energy to the Third World. Local and state efforts can be too easily compromised by neighboring states – Midwestern power plants, for instance, were a major culprit behind the worsening air quality in New York and New Jersey in the 1990s, overshadowing the efforts Eastern states were making.
New Jersey Sens. Frank Lautenberg and Bob Menendez, both Democrats, are vocal supporters of the cap-and-trade bill, as are U.S. Reps. Rush Holt, Frank Pallone, Chris Smith and Leonard Lance – all of whom voted for the 2009 legislation, which would require electric utilities to meet a fifth of their electricity demand through renewable energy sources and energy efficiency by 2020; make $190 billion available for new technologies; increase efficiency standards and reduce carbon emissions by a sixth by 2020.
The legislation is not perfect – it sets aside money for clean coal, a technology many in the scientific community view as a pipe dream. But it goes a long way toward addressing the big energy and clean-air issues facing the nation and the world.
The large army of environmental activists on the ground in New Jersey and in communities across the country need to be mobilized to make change happen on the largest scale possible.