Left In Lowell

A constant priority of Lt. Governor Tim Murray, today I got a little announcement from the administration that the first of several replacement commuter rail trains that are efficient diesel-electric have been put into service in the commuter rail system:

Lieutenant Governor Timothy Murray today joined commuter rail riders and state officials aboard a new diesel-electric locomotive on its inaugural ride from Worcester to Boston. The state-of-the-art diesel-electric locomotive is one of two new trains purchased from the Utah Transit Authority, and marks the first time in more than two decades that new locomotives will join the MBTA’s commuter rail fleet.

[…]

By employing new technology that makes the engines more fuel efficient and prevents unnecessary idling, the new locomotives will reduce nitrogen oxide levels by 20 tons per engine annually. Each locomotive in the existing fleet burns 228,000 gallons of fuel per year, resulting in the release of 241 tons of nitrogen oxide. These new locomotives will burn about 36,500 fewer gallons while generating more horsepower. The energy savings will be about $78,000 a year per locomotive.

In June 2010, the MassDOT Board of Directors approved the purchase of an additional 20 new diesel-electric locomotives from Motive Power, Inc. of Boise, Idaho at a cost of $114 million. The 20 new locomotives will be brought into service in 2013 to replace the 20 oldest units in the fleet.

Since the Mr. takes the commuter rail daily, which is not only great for avoiding traffic snarls, but keeps our personal gas consumption fairly low, commuter rail news like this is music to my ears…we can realize great savings and lower our dependence on foreign oil, as well as reduce the impact of global warming, AND create jobs in our nation, by continuing to do this. Win all around.

A pretty predictable but still disturbing outcome of the mishandling of the Gulf spill crisis by BP (via dkos):

Scientists have found signs of an oil-and-dispersant mix under the shells of tiny blue crab larvae in the Gulf of Mexico, the first clear indication that the unprecedented use of dispersants in the BP oil spill has broken up the oil into toxic droplets so tiny that they can easily enter the foodchain.

Marine biologists started finding orange blobs under the translucent shells of crab larvae in May, and have continued to find them “in almost all” of the larvae they collect, all the way from Grand Isle, Louisiana, to Pensacola, Fla. — more than 300 miles of coastline — said Harriet Perry, a biologist with the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.

Good god. What have we done to our planet?? We need renewable replacements for oil and coal right now. Of course, our do-nothing Senate (thanks to Senator Brown and the Nelson/Landreu wing of the Dems) will produce no useful energy policy bill in the foreseeable future.

This, on top of the news that over a million acres of the high-altitude pine trees in the region of Yellowstone are dying from an infestation of beetle, likely due to climate change.

Sometimes, I am so glad I do not have any kids whose future I have to worry about.

Hey, wicked. Excerpts of the official press release:

PATRICK-MURRAY ADMINISTRATION DESIGNATES COMMONWEALTH’S FIRST OFFICIAL “GREEN COMMUNITIES”
35 cities and towns across the state are ranked as clean energy leaders, eligible for municipal renewable power and energy efficiency grants

HOPKINTON – Tuesday, May 25, 2010 – Governor Deval Patrick today designated 35 cities and towns from the Berkshires to Cape Cod as the Commonwealth’s first official “Green Communities” - a status that makes them eligible for $8.1 million in grants for local renewable power and energy efficiency projects. The projects promise to create green jobs and advance both municipal and state clean energy goals.
[…]
The signature program of the landmark Green Communities Act of 2008, the Department of Energy Resources’ (DOER) Green Communities Grant Program uses funding from auctions of carbon emissions permits under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to reward communities that win Green Communities designation by meeting five clean energy benchmarks:

• Adopting local zoning bylaw or ordinance that allows “as-of-right-siting” of renewable energy projects;
• Adopting an expedited permitting process related to the as-of-right facilities;
• Establishing a municipal energy use baseline and a program designed to reduce use by 20 percent within five years;
• Purchasing only fuel-efficient vehicles for municipal use, whenever such vehicles are commercially available and practicable; and
• Requiring all new residential construction over 3,000 square feet and all new commercial and industrial real estate construction to reduce lifecycle energy costs (i.e., adoption of an energy-saving building “stretch code”).

May 14 was the deadline for municipalities to apply for Green Community designation in order to qualify for the first round of $8.1 million in Green Communities grants. Today’s Green Communities designees - Acton, Arlington, Athol, Andover, Becket, Belchertown, Cambridge, Chelmsford, Easthampton, Greenfield, Hamilton, Hanover, Holyoke, Hopkinton, Kingston, Lancaster, Lenox, Lexington, Lincoln, Lowell, Mashpee, Medford, Melrose, Montague, Natick, Newton, Northampton, Palmer, Pittsfield, Salem, Springfield, Sudbury, Tyngsboro, Wenham, and Worcester - have until June 4 to submit applications for grants that will be awarded in late June.

Also pretty knifty:

In addition to grant eligibility, each Green Community designated today will receive a Big Belly solar waste compactor, to be delivered by June 30 in time for the summer parks and beaches season. Purchased with DOER energy efficiency funding, Big Belly compactors can hold several times more trash and litter than similarly sized regular trash receptacles - thereby reducing the number of garbage truck trips required to empty them. Each municipality will also receive a certificate from the Commonwealth congratulating it on becoming an official Green Community.

Congrats Lowell and other upper Merrimack Valley communities for getting the win!

Holy crap! David’s headline says it all. “US awards $106 million for energy research; MA gets over 20% of it.”

We got 1/5th of the grants for this? Whoa! Now, tell me again whether or not you think the green energy initiatives by the lege and Governor are working or not?

David also quotes the whole list of awarded projects. Those grants will produce new jobs, and create the green tech of the future. I don’t know if I’ve said this lately but, I do so love living in Massachusetts. We rock.

OK, can we just build the damn things already?? LOL. Yay for Dems in state and federal government. Obama’s Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has approved Cape Wind in what I think is the final hurdle for the project. Amen and let’s get some renewable energy!

I also found some of the commentary on where other candidates have stood on Cape Wind ’til now (when you can be sure they’ll be for it).

Out of curiosity, I tried to figure out where Charlie Baker stands on Cape Wind.  Couldn’t for the life of me figure it out.  There’s nothing I could find on his website, so no help there.  Here are a couple of nuggets I picked up via the Google.

Baker, former CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare, tiptoed around the topic and refused to outright state whether he supported or opposed the Cape Wind project. He said a decision will already be finalized at the federal level before he enters office, if elected governor, therefore “the state doesn’t really matter at this point.”

Ah, a real profile in courage right there.  That one’s from last September.  Here’s a more recent one, from March:

Baker said Massachusetts residents pay the fourth-highest rates for electricity in the country, and he blasted Cape Wind for failing to say exactly how much ratepayers would save from the proposed wind energy project.
“The whole thing looks like a no-bid contract,” Baker said.

Uh, OK - so you’re against it?  But wait - MA residents pay high electricity rates.  So you’re for it?  I’m still confused.

And we also get an outline of Senator Brown’s um, interesting take from stomv in comments:

“With unemployment hovering near ten percent in Massachusetts, the Cape Wind project will jeopardize industries that are vital to the Cape’s economy, such as tourism and fishing, and will also impact aviation safety and the rights of the Native American tribes in the area. I am also skeptical about the cost-savings and job number predictions we have heard from proponents of the project,” Brown said in a statement.

So, to recap:
* Despite the fact that Cape Wind will create 1,000 construction jobs, Brown leads with 10 percent unemployment in MA.
* He’s worried about the impact on tourism, but not at all worried about the impact oil spills have on tourism?
* He’s completely ignored the reality that these will have zero impact on fishing. Good grief — if a fisherman can navigate his boat in a port, he can certainly steer clear of monopoles which are each 1/3 to 1/2 mile apart.
* Aviation safety? The studies are done — no negative impact on RADAR.
* Native American tribes? Really? I look forward to Senator Brown’s insistence of funding the Bureau of Indian Affairs to drive education, health, and employment numbers closer to the national average. I won’t hold my breath.
* He’s skeptical of the numbers which show the project will have a favorable impact. Of course he is. I’m skeptical that Scott Brown has any ability to be critical of those reports, because I’m skeptical the man has any idea of which he speaks when it comes to the economics or engineering of wind power.

*Smacks head* Are ANY of the Republicans/pseudo-independent candidates/recently elected more than empty suits?? Or do any of them care more about good policy rather than scoring political points with misdirection and lies, at least?

Oh the hits keep on coming with Charlie Baker! He admits to being “absolutely am not smart enough.” The reason? He doesn’t want to give us an answer on where he stands in regards to tackling global climate change. This was his clarification, mind you, on a comment given at the Suffolk Law School.

Said Baker, “I can get eight professors from MIT on both sides of this issue and no one in this room will walk away understanding what they said about climate change.”

Um, sadly, no, Mr. Baker. The professors at MIT are too smart not to look at the scientific evidence and conclude we are, by burning up carbon once locked away for millions of years, changing our planet’s climate. There’s a consensus in the science community, and if you can’t get even a layperson’s understanding of this issue, how the hell can we trust you’ll do so for any other complex issue facing the Commonwealth? We don’t need that kind of nonleadership.

The Lion of the Senate has written a letter to ask that the legislature allow Gov Patrick to fill his Senate seat when, eventually, we lose our senior Senator.

The bill he seeks isn’t a complete repeal of the special election process; rather, he is asking for a short-term, temporary appointment to fill the seat for the five months that such a special election takes place, and asks that the Governor extract a promise from the appointee that they will not seek the seat.

I give the Senator credit for wanting to adhere and retain the special election rules for vacancies - if it was fair for circumstances under Romney, it’s still fair now. I also see why the urgency for Massachusetts to keep two Senators in the meantime, particularly on health care reform. We need all the votes in the Senate we can get - particularly a vote similar to Kennedy’s. The lies and smear tactics in the health care from some quarters on the right have been nothing short of spectacularly disgusting. I know I haven’t written about health care reform like I would normally do (given that we’re so mired in an important local election season here) but I have been following it.

By the way, this is how you fight fire - or rather morons - with fire. Can’t we have a real honest debate without this sort of crazy stupid bullshit? (By the way, watch the full video here - she’s actually worse than you think.)

I wonder if the Senator’s influence will have any affect on the legislature.

I haven’t given much time to write about my experiences with the Getting to Zero contest like I intended, so I thought I would pen some of my impressions and what it has entailed so far.

First of course I got my National Grid energy audit, which was good but not as thorough as the audit I would get later on. A couple weeks ago, a team of four students from UMass Lowell and their professor showed up for a couple of hours of testing, measuring, and surveying.

They were very professional and courteous and had quite a lot of questions for us, as well as perusing our energy use from some of our latest bills. By and far the best physical test they performed is what is called the door blower test.

They set up a contraption made of plastic panels with seals into one of our doors, where one panel had a powerful fan built in. The process blows air out of your house at a rapid rate, lowering the air pressure in your home as compared to the outside. Because the day was fairly cold, the air outside, now at a higher pressure, comes into every crack and crevice of your home and is quite easily felt with your hands. So you are able to find all the worst air leaks so to seal them and prevent less heat from escaping your home in winter.

Our blower test surprised me in several ways. First, we had always assumed our myriad oversized windows were a point of major heat loss. All windows to some extent are, and though ours are vinyl, they looked to me quite old and outdated. However, the windows must have been carefully installed, because when they were properly locked and sealed, most of the windows felt pretty good. With no major leaks in the casings and having vinyl windows everywhere in the house, we could be confident that the last place we should be spending money to go green was on our windows.

Our funky front door, however, left a lot to be desired. It leaked like a sieve! But some inexpensive weather stripping will take care of that. We also found other odd places that leaked: the cut-off pipe-holes in our floors where old radiators had been taken out leaked pretty hard, as did our cellar, from which a wooshing breeze could be felt standing in the doorway to the stairs. One bad leak was where our heating system vents, and there are alternatives for these, but it’s also likely that where our foundation meets the frame there’s places open to the elements. Being a finished basement, it’s hard to know for sure. Of course, if we sealed the door to the cellar with stripping and/or a door cozy or whatever they are called at the bottom, at least in the meantime we can avoid some of the cooling issue we have with the basement (which in the winter we do not heat, finished or not).

We also talked to the evaluation team about the possibility of PVs, photovoltaics (aka solar electric panels) on our almost-due-south-facing second floor roof. In the report from the team, which is pages and pages of information, they outlined what such a system would look like, what it might cost (before and after rebates and incentives). Very useful.

In the report, there’s also information on better home insulation (estimated cost of stripping the siding, putting in 3 inch extruded foam, and residing). Obviously this is a huge expense, although it could reduce total energy usage by quite a lot.

With report in hand, I headed today into the offices at DPD to go over my application with Aaron and Sandy, who spent quite a lot of time with me, going over the students’ report and discussing my application and proposal with me. Since the contest does not require the finalists to spend the money up front (which we really cannot do), I’m definitely going forward and putting my second phase application in. It’ll take some work to finalize our proposal, as I’ll need quotes from some contractors to get a real sense of the total cost, and I have some homework to do (Sandy suggested I get more certain as to whether or not our finished basement is actually insulated, I’m guessing not), but there’s no real reason not to do this.

Even if we don’t win, the process was still worth it because now we will have a blueprint with which to go forward, for making many of the improvements ourselves over time. And given the incentives now coming available with the stimulus and other new grants, that could be sooner rather than later. It’s better to be prepared!

OMG awesome. I’m all tingly!

Elections have consequences! Tomorrow, President Obama’s EPA will be hearing the case from California, Massachusetts, and other states who are interested in raising auto emission standards in an effort to combat the global climate crisis. This can be done under the existing Clean Air Act, which gives CA the right to tougher rules and for other states to adopt CA’s standards after, but the Bush administration denied CA a waiver in 2005 when they passed the new standards.

From the press release of Environment Massachusetts:

Giving a green light to Massachusetts’ clean cars program would reduce global warming pollution from cars by 26.1 million metric tons by 2020. And from reduced gasoline consumption, Bay Staters would save $5 Billion by 2020 at the pump, according to Environment Massachusetts’ analysis.
[…]
In 2005, California adopted first-of-their-kind standards requiring cars and light-duty trucks to limit emissions that contribute to global warming. The standards would cut global warming emissions from passenger vehicles by 30 percent by 2016. A total of 13 other states—Arizona, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, plus the District of Columbia —have adopted the tailpipe standards. Several additional states are actively considering adopting the standards.

Finally, we have an Environmental Protection Agency poised to actually protect the environment.