Falmouth becomes Maine's ninth "Cool City"

Thanks to the efforts of some local citizens, Falmouth became the ninth town in Maine to sign the US Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement.

A posting by John Richardson at the Portland Press Herald (click here to read the article) says that there are 7 more towns looking at signing.

Congratulations to Claudia King and others in Falmouth who helped the town take a leadership position in the fight against climate change!

The momentum is building!!!

Portland Press Herald reports SEA's Community Climate Challenge

The Portland Press Herald ran an article yesterday about the Community Climate Challenge - a new program from the Sustainable Energy Alliance, in partnership with Campaign Earth (visit their website at www.campaignearth.org).

Click here to read the article "Residents challenged to fight warming".

(If it is removed from the Press Herald's site, then you can find it in SEA’s Online Community at http://www.seachangehappen.org/smf/index.php/topic,96.msg258.html .)

The Community Climate Challenge is a program that tries to motivate people to make small changes to their daily lives - each of which will help to prevent some of the global warming pollution associated with our daily lives. Click here for more information and to sign up!!

SEA in the Portland Press Herald

The Portland Press Herald ran a story that described various examples of "a new trend among Maine's local governments to reduce energy use and environmental damage... Many of those driving the trend say it's a response to a lack of action or leadership on the national level, especially the Bush administration's refusal to join the Kyoto Protocol and regulate global warming pollution."

The Sustainable Energy Alliance got significant coverage in the article:

"I think we're motivated by the slow pace of progress on global warming. The science is so clear now and yet the progress is so slow," said Jennifer Niese of Kennebunk.

"Niese, a biology teacher and the mother of a kindergartner, was one of a group of friends and acquaintances in Kennebunk who last summer started the Sustainable Energy Alliance (www.seachangehappen.org). The group made a pitch to the town's Board of Selectmen last fall, pointing out the dollars to be saved from reduced energy use.

Niese expects her town to begin by switching to energy-efficient lighting and computer screens and then move through a list of other improvements that should cost little and save a lot. "There's a lot of opportunity to save money on energy bills before you get into things that require a big investment," she said."

Click here to read the whole article: "Bright Ideas" from the 2/7/07 Portland Press Herald

Supreme Court To Hear Global Warming Case

The Portland Press Herald reports that Maine, along with 11 other states and a variety of environmental groups, will soon be arguing in front of the Supreme Court that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must regulate the emissions of carbon dioxide from cars to help fight global warming.

Those against this approach include the federal government, automakers, the American Forest and Paper Association, the American Chemistry Council and the National Association of Manufacturers. Their argument is "no matter how serious a concern global climate change may be, that concern does not justify trying to shoehorn global climate change into a regulatory structure designed and enacted by Congress to address different types of problems."

Rather than try to fix the problem with whatever tools that we have available - in this case the Clean Air Act - they think that we should not do anything at all.

The unfortunate point that this important lawsuit makes all too clear is that there continues to be no leadership on climate change from Washington D.C. Luckily, the leadership is coming from the state and local levels. Rather than leading us to a path of hope and action, the White House and Congress continue to tell us why nothing can be done. It would be interesting to see how much progress the state and local leaders could make with help from Washington D.C.

With a new Democratic majority in Congress, let's hope that this leadership vacuum at the federal level is filled and that real solutions to the challenges of climate change are in our future. In the meantime, we will have to continue to do all that we can at the state and local levels.

For more information about this lawsuit, see the Massachusetts' Attorney General's website.