"BerkShares community currency has a new digital app. Customers can connect their back account and use the app for purchases at participating businesses. The goal of BerkShares is to keep money circulating within the local economy. The app is being rolled out over the never few weeks, and will eventually be accepted at all of the more than 400 BerkShares businesses." Read More

"A community development nonprofit has launched a new solar lending program in Massachusetts and Rhode Island aimed at making it possible for more homeowners to invest in solar panels. The DoubleGreen Solar Loan is designed to serve households regularly marginalized by existing financing options by offering lower interest rates, longer loan lengths, transparent terms, and more flexible underwriting standards. This year, the fund aims to close $10 million in solar loans, with 60% of the funds going to low-income households and homeowners of color. The program works with a network of trusted solar installers to ensure buyers are treated fairly and transparently and not charged hidden fees. [...] Both Rhode Island and Massachusetts have programs aimed at easing the way for aspiring solar owners, but there are still barriers to adoption, particularly among the lowest-income homeowners. [...] The Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target incentive pays the owners of solar panels a fixed rate per kilowatt-hour of power generated. The rate goes up for low-income households. In both states, however, affording the system in the first place remains a challenge for low-income households that don’t have enough savings to pay upfront or have credit scores too low to qualify for a favorable loan from a bank." Read More

"...Across North America and the world, cities have bulldozed their waterways into submission. Seattle was as guilty as any until 1999, when the U.S. Department of the Interior listed Chinook salmon as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. That legally obligated the city to help the salmon when undertaking any new capital project that would affect the fish. Engineers trying to improve Seattle’s ailing streams began to reintroduce some curves, and insert boulders and tree trunks, to create more natural habitat, yet by and large, salmon did not return. Flooding also remained a hazard because rain rushed off the hardened cityscape into the still mostly inflexible channels, which overflowed. In 2004 biologist Katherine Lynch was sitting through yet another meeting on how to solve these problems—this one held by her employer, Seattle Public Utilities—when she had an epiphany. Maybe restoration projects were failing because they were overlooking a little-known feature damaged by urbanization: the stream’s 'gut.' A stream is a system. It includes not just the water coursing between the banks but the earth, life and water around and under it. Lynch had been tracking discoveries about a layer of wet sediment, small stones and tiny creatures just below the streambed called the hyporheic zone—a term from the Greek hypo, meaning 'under,' and rheos, meaning 'flow.' Stream water filters down into this dynamic layer, mixing with the groundwater pushing up. Water in the hyporheic zone flows downstream like the surface water above it but orders of magnitude more slowly. For a large river, the hyporheic zone can be dozens of feet deep and can extend up to a mile laterally beyond the banks. It keeps the waterway healthy by regulating critical physical, biological and chemical processes, including riverbed aeration, water oxygenation, temperature moderation, pollution cleanup, and food creation. Some biologists compare the hyporheic zone to the human gut, complete with a microbiome. Others call it the liver of the river." Read More

"Lake Powell, the country’s second-largest reservoir, is drying up. The situation is critical: if water levels at the lake were to drop another 32 feet, all hydroelectricity production would be halted at the reservoir’s Glen Canyon Dam. The West’s climate change-induced water crisis is now triggering a potential energy crisis for millions of people in the Southwest who rely on the dam as a power source. Over the past several years, the Glen Canyon Dam has lost about 16 percent of its capacity to generate power. The water levels at Lake Powell have dropped around 100 feet in the last three years. [...] As water levels decline, so does hydropower production. The dam harnesses the gravitational force of the Colorado River’s water to generate power for as many as 5.8 million homes and businesses in seven states, including Nevada and New Mexico. [...] Forty percent of Page’s power comes from the Glen Canyon Dam. Without it, they’ll be forced to make up that electricity with fossil fuels like natural gas, which emits planet-warming gases and will exacerbate the West’s water crisis. Loss of power at the dam would also mean higher energy costs for customers as the price of fossil fuels skyrockets. [...] In a letter to seven Western states this month, the Interior Department recommended releasing less water from Lake Powell to downstream states this year. The proposal calls for holding back the equivalent of 42.6 billion gallons of water in Lake Powell, which will mean deeper cuts to the amount of water people can use in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. More than 110 billion gallons of water have already been held back so far this year. [...] The climate crisis is forcing both federal and state governments to make tough choices and take drastic measures just to keep both power and water flowing to Americans in the Southwest. The Interior Department is expected to make a final decision on how to handle the dire situation at the dam by early May." Read More

"Rules finalized by the Energy Department will require manufacturers to sell energy-efficient light bulbs, accelerating a longtime industry practice to use compact fluorescent and LED bulbs that last 25 to 50 times longer than incandescent bulbs. The Trump administration had slowed an earlier phaseout of incandescents, saying it was targeting rules that burden businesses. Once the new rules are fully in place next year, consumers should save nearly $3 billion per year on their utility bills, the Energy Department said. The rules are projected to cut planet-warming carbon emissions by 222 million metric tons over the next 30 years, an amount equivalent to emissions generated by 28 million homes in one year, officials said. [...] The new rules expand energy-efficiency requirements to more types of light bulbs and ban the sale of bulbs that produce less than 45 lumens per watt — a measure of how much light is emitted for each unit of electricity." Read More

"As Massachusetts races to wean utilities off fossil fuels in order to hit its climate targets, the municipal light companies that provide electricity to some 50 communities collectively have far less clean energy in their portfolios than the major for-profit utilities. That’s the upshot of a new report from the Massachusetts Climate Action Network, which found, for example, 33 of the municipal providers had less than 1 percent of clean energy sources such as wind and solar in 2020. While some communities are far ahead of others, particularly Concord, Belmont, and Wellesley, overall just 2.43 percent of the total energy mix at the 40 municipal light companies assessed in the report are from clean energy. Known as municipal light plants, the community utilities combined had about 420,000 customers as of 2019, and provide roughly 14 percent of the state’s energy supply, said Logan Malik, lead author of the report and clean energy director for MCAN, a climate advocacy organization.[...] The report found that despite the slow progress on cleaning their energy mix, many municipal light plants are technically on track to reach emission goals set for them in the state’s most recent climate law passed in 2021, thanks to a special standard that allows them to include nuclear energy in their calculations, while investor-owned utilities like Eversource or National Grid cannot. [...] Massachusetts has long required investor-owned utilities to hit annual benchmarks for renewable energy, starting at 1 percent in 2003 and growing to 20 percent this year. But municipal light plants are exempt, and until last year were allowed to meet their energy demands by focusing solely on affordability and reliability." Read More

"Across Massachusetts, spring is the season of movement. Hibernating animals emerge from their winter resting areas in search of food and mates. Turtles are no exception. From mid-May to early July, thousands of turtles throughout Massachusetts travel to new areas to find food and nest. You may find turtles on roadways, in your backyard, or other unexpected locations as they move across the landscape to find resources they need to survive. Even if it’s not apparent to you where they’re headed, turtles have a keen sense of direction and may be on their way to wetlands or open, upland sites such as lawns, gravel pits, or roadsides for nesting. If you find a turtle, do not move it far away. 'Adult turtles can live past 80 years. Young turtles and eggs, on the other hand, have a variety of predators and a low chance of reaching adulthood,' says Dr. Mike Jones, MassWildlife State Herpetologist. 'This is why it's especially important to protect older adult turtles from cars, especially during this time of year when turtles are crossing roads more frequently.' Losing any adult turtles, particularly adult females, is a serious problem that can lead to the eventual local extinction of a population." Read More

"The oil and gas industry has a new battle to fight with California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s first-of-its-kind investigation into their role in the global plastics crisis—and it looks a lot like one they’ve been fighting over climate change. Bonta on Thursday announced his investigation and said that his office had issued a subpoena to ExxonMobil over its role in the plastics crisis. [...] Judith Enck, president of the environmental group Beyond Plastics and a former EPA regional administrator, called the investigation 'very significant' because it has 'the potential to finally hold plastic producers accountable for the immense environmental damage caused by plastics.' It will also 'address the ongoing deception of claiming that plastics are recyclable when, in fact, less than 10 percent are actually recycled,' she said. [...] ExxonMobil responded to Bonta’s announcement with a denial. 'We reject the allegations made by the Attorney General’s office in its press release,' the company said in a written statement. 'We share society’s concerns and are collaborating with governments, including the State of California, communities, and other industries to support projects around the world to improve waste management and circularity.' The industry uses the term circularity to describe its vision of recycling and reusing plastics. The American Chemistry Council, a leading pro-plastics lobby, also fought back. 'We strongly disagree with the portrayal of our industry by Attorney General Bonta,' said Joshua Baca, vice president of plastics for the council, in a written statement. 'As we’ve repeatedly emphasized, plastics belong in our economy, not our environment. Rather than losing time and resources responding to misleading portrayals of our industry and misguided initiatives that delay real progress, we want to remain focused on ongoing efforts to improve plastics recycling and provide meaningful results.' In the 1980s, Bonta said, the plastics industry, including major fossil fuel and petrochemical companies, began “an aggressive and deceptive campaign that we could recycle our way out of the plastics waste problem that was emerging at that time. The fact is, it was all a big ruse. 'The truth is,' he said, 'the vast majority of plastics cannot be recycled.'" Read More

"In ongoing litigation over the greenwashing of plastic recycling, the bottled water company BlueTriton made a revealing argument: its claims of being environmentally friendly aren’t violations of the law, because they are 'aspirational.' BlueTriton — which owns Poland Spring, Pure Life, Splash, Ozarka, and Arrowhead, among many other brands — is estimated to contribute hundreds of millions of pounds of plastic to U.S. landfills each year. BlueTriton used to be known as Nestlé Waters North America, which was bought by the private equity firm One Rock Capital Partners in March 2021. The company, which has a history of draining aquifers to get the water that it encases in polluting plastic, owns about a third of bottled water brands in the U.S. Yet with sleek, green — and blue — PR materials, BlueTriton markets itself as a solution to the problems of plastic waste and water. 'Water is at the very core of our sustainable efforts to meet the needs of future generations,' BlueTriton declares on its website, spelling out its promise for sustainable stewardship over a picture of pine trees, pristine water, and clouds. [...] The claims were a bridge too far for the environmental group Earth Island Institute, which sued BlueTriton in August, arguing that its misleading sustainability claims violate a local Washington, D.C., law known as the Consumer Protection Procedures Act, which is designed to prevent 'deceptive trade practices.' In response, the company defended its green self-promotion by explaining that everyone should realize that the claims are meaningless nonsense. 'Many of the statements at issue here constitute non-actionable puffery,' BlueTriton’s attorneys wrote in a motion to dismiss the case submitted to a D.C. court in March. [...] As the complaint notes, plastic pollution is now so widespread that the average person is drinking more than 1,700 tiny bits of plastic in a week’s worth of drinking water — the equivalent of an entire credit card. Microplastics are found in 94.4 percent of tap water samples in the U.S. and may be an even bigger problem in bottled water, despite bottled water companies marketing their product as pollution-free. One BlueTriton brand, Pure Life, had twice the level of plastic fibers as tap water. Meanwhile, as BlueTriton touts itself as a solution to America’s water problems, it has been caught extracting water from the national forest without authorization. The practice of tapping into natural water supplies has been shown to drain aquifers and rivers, taking water from plants and animals as well as public drinking water reserves." Read More