Mitzvah Moments by Tish Levee - June 2017
Staycations equal lower carbon footprints.Staying home, enjoying Sonoma County is great, but if you opt to travel, check your carbon footprint. Surprisingly, for a family vacation, flying is actually less carbon intensive than driving. But if you fly, go non-stop to lower your footprint. Counteract your carbon use by buying carbon offsets. I offset mine through Sonoma County’s Center for Climate Protection (CCP).
Sip it Sonoma. Without bees, our diet would be extremely limited. About one-third of our A Campaign encouraging people to refuse straws in restaurants, while leaving cards asking their servers not to offer them, was kicked off at the Zero Waste Symposium (see my Gazette article, “1st Zero Waste Symposium in Sonoma County” online for more on this event). The US uses and discards 500 million straws daily – that’s 175 billion a year. Most end up in our waterways. More information at ZeroWasteSonoma.org.
Climate Protection Campaign brings CCE to more areas.Sonoma County’s Center for Climate Protection (CCP), and especially the efforts of Ann Hancock andBarry Vesser, helped bring San Jose, the largest city in California to adopt CCE, into the family of Community Choice Energy (CCE). CCP works actively to bring CCE to more Californians; there’re now eight communities with CCE and five more coming soon. By 2020 about 18 million Californians will be served by Community Choice, with cumulative greenhouse gas emissions’ savings of 5.5 million metric tons, while saving their customers $190 million annually.
Order a TESLA Solar Roof.TESLA is now taking orders for their innovative solar roofs, made of tempered glass, 35% of which consists of solar panels. On average, the solar roofs cost less than a normal roof, even without the energy savings.The panels are stronger and weigh less than conventional roofs, and they’re self-defrosting.
Glaciers melting in Glacier Park.Three years ago I went on the first Climate Hike, fundraising for CCP. We hiked for four days in Glacier National Park to highlight the rapid retreat of its glaciers, joking that soon we’d have to rename it “Mud National Park.” Now a US Geological Survey report confirms that soon there’ll be no glaciers in the park. Western Montana is heating up twice the global average, which exacerbates the glacier’s melting.
“It’s the Economy!”Fighting climate change is good for it.There’s economic and job growth in clean energy, renewables, and fighting climate change. In 2015 over 8.1 million people were employed globally – 769K in the US – in jobs helping reduce climate change. Now the World Economic Forum projects that clean energy and energy efficiency can offset the cost of keeping fossil fuels in the ground, resulting in a worldwide gain of $19 trillion by 2050, while creating six million new jobs in green energy. Because the current administration’s opposed to fighting climate change, the US is rapidly losing its leadership position in this arena. With it we’ll lose economically; we’ll lose jobs; and we’ll increase risks to our health. Coal and other fossil fuels are becoming more and more uneconomical, with renewable energy such as solar and wind rapidly replacing them as cheaper resources – ones that are healthier for people and for the planet. For instance, wind energy now supplies 5.5% of US electricity; the Netherlands just opened the world’s second largest offshore wind farm, which will provide 13% of that country’s electricity. Meanwhile on April 30th, Germany produced 85% of its electricity from renewables: wind, solar, biomass, and hydroelectric power, and on March 23rd solar and wind power, combined, hit a peak of 49.2% of demand in California. Locally, Sonoma County’s ranks 13th in solar jobs in the nation, with a 44% increase last year.
Learn about Sustainability & Climate Change at SRJC in July.Two friends of mine are teaching classes in the Community Education Program at SRJC this summer that are worth checking out. Barbara Oldershaw, the new Business and Community Outreach Coordinator at Solar Works, teaches “Conscious Consumer: Shop Your Values” on July 19th & 25th.Dawn Keiser, MS in Aeronautics, teaches “How Space Exploration Benefits Society,” including NASA’s role in providing critical climate change information, on July 8th & 15th.
There’s more online.Go tosonomacountygazette.com to see “1st Zero Waste Symposium in Sonoma County” and “We Keep Marching,” articles that wouldn’t fit into the print edition. © Copyright Tish Levee, 2017
