Climate fight front and center

MILLERTON — Local residents were inspired to get involved in combating the climate fight after tuning into Jennifer Metzger’s presentation “Green the Grid & Electrify Everything” on Thursday evening, June 9.

Organized by Climate Smart Millerton and the NorthEast-Millerton as a belated Earth Day event, the presentation was arranged over Zoom at 6:30 p.m.

Thrilled to talk about a subject she was deeply passionate about, Metzger started by relaying her experience in fighting the climate fight for the last three decades.

“It’s going to take all of us working together at all levels — individual, local, state on up — to address the climate crisis and make the kind of changes we need to make,” Metzger said. “The solutions exist — we just have to implement them.”

Metzger explained the “Green the Grid & Electrify Everything” has been developed by New Yorkers for Clean Power, whose campaign is to “shift New York State to a clean energy economy as quickly as possible.” As she talked about fossil fuels and their damaging impact on the climate, environment and public health, she dove into how the state’s fossil fuel dependence has big costs, such as public health costs, the costs of clean-up from fossil fuel infrastructure spills and leaks and the costs to the economy from sea-level rise, extreme heat and severe storms. In fact, Metzger said a recent analysis commissioned by the New York State Energy Research & Development Author and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation estimates that the costs of continued reliance on fossil fuels will exceed the costs of shifting to a clean energy economy by $90 billion by 2050.

As far as how the state will get to a clean energy economy, Metzger shed a light on shifting to energy efficiency based technology and beneficial electrification and making sure all these technologies are powered by clean renewable energy rather than by fossil fuels. These, Metzger said, are the basic elements of New York’s Draft Climate Plan, which is currently open for public comment until Friday, July 1, and she emphasized that it’s important for the public to weight in since the plan is “the blueprint for achieving climate goals.”

Metzger explained an analysis was done for the state for the climate action plan process, and after looking at different scenarios for meeting its goals, the conclusion that surfaced across the scenarios was that New York needs to electrify one to two million homes with heat pumps and replace three million gas vehicles on the road with electric vehicles by 2030.

In terms of where the state’s emissions are coming from, she said the leading sector of emissions comes from buildings, followed by transportation, electricity, waste, industry and agriculture. Metzger then proceeded to break down how New Yorkers can shift to energy efficient technologies and practices in each sector as well as key proposals for each sector as outlined in New York’s Draft Climate Plan.