TCCPI is a multisector collaboration seeking to leverage the climate action commitments made by Cornell University, Ithaca College, Tompkins Cortland Community College, Tompkins County, the City of Ithaca, and the Town of Ithaca to mobilize a countywide energy efficiency effort and accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy. Launched in June 2008 and generously supported by the Park Foundation, TCCPI is a project of the Sustainable Markets Foundation.

We are committed to helping Tompkins County achieve a dynamic economy, healthy environment, and resilient community through a focus on energy efficiency and renewable energy. 

New Emphasis on Climate Adaptation

The decision, she said in an interview with WSKG, does not change the goals of the Green New Deal, but instead reframes the city’s approach of how it will achieve its commitments. Evans said that rather than prioritizing reducing emissions, the new plan will prioritize helping residents adapt to living in a warming world, while also working towards the city’s emissions-reduction goals. That could include providing residents with better access to social services, like housing and job training, and improving the city's emergency response and electricity reliability.

“We have not gone back on anything we said we were going to do,” said Evans. “If anything, we're just making it more complicated for ourselves.”

Evans said she had been working on a draft of the previous climate action plan for the past several months. But she decided to scrap that version in part because of some conversations with residents, who said they were more concerned with housing and job security. She said she believed that the Green New Deal had lost support and relatability as it became more removed from most residents’ daily lives.

When it passed, the Green New Deal resolution included a commitment to ensure that benefits from Ithaca’s environmental investments are shared among communities “to reduce historical social and economic inequities.” The new framing, Evans said, is a return to that intention.

“Decarbonizing a building became more important than providing housing, and that does not feel worth it to me,” said Evans. “Housing should always be the most important thing that we're providing, and providing decarbonized housing is the ideal.”

The city has faced several barriers to meeting its target Green New Deal timeline, including funding challenges and pandemic interruptions. Evans said the city is committed to its emissions-reduction goals, but acknowledged that it may not meet its deadline of 2030.

“We're very much still building the plane as we're flying it,” she said. “As we always have with the Green New Deal.”

New Plan in Its Early Stages

The new plan is now in its early stages. Evans said she intends to present it to the city’s sustainability and climate justice commission and host listening sessions to receive feedback.

The reassessment appears aligned with the Green New Deal’s intent, said Diane Stefani, co-chair of the Finger Lakes chapter of The Climate Reality Project. The group runs the Ithaca Green New Deal Scorecard, which tracks the city’s progress towards its climate commitments.

“Four of the 10 goals in the scorecard are climate justice goals, they’re community goals, people-focused goals,” said Stefani. “This almost feels like kind of a return to center.”

Ithaca has faced a learning curve as it set out to accomplish the commitments of the Green New Deal, said Thomas Hirasuna, who also co-chairs the local chapter of The Climate Reality Project. Rewriting the climate action plan could represent a step in the right direction, he added.

“If it's a better plan, there's nothing wrong with that,” said Hirasuna. “In my opinion, it's better to do it right than to rush it through.”

The news comes as BlocPower, the company Ithaca contracted with to manage its electrification efforts, faces new uncertainty. The company’s chief executive, Donnel Baird, stepped down last month amid concern over the slow rollout of its electrification and job training programs in several cities, including Ithaca. BlocPower electrified no buildings in all of 2022 in Ithaca and only one in the second quarter of 2023, Bloomberg reported last week. Earlier this year, the city of Ithaca announced it had worked with BlocPower to finalize a first group of 10 commercial buildings to electrify.

BlocPower spokesperson Siobhan Johnson said in a statement to WSKG that the company supports Ithaca's reassessment of its approach to its Green New Deal.

“BlocPower remains dedicated to supporting Ithaca's building electrification goals within this new framework,” said Johnson. “We look forward to continuing our partnership and contributing to solutions, particularly those that create green job opportunities for local residents."

Next TCCPI Meeting

Friday, December 13, 2024

9 to 11 am

TCCPI meetings have moved online. Contact Peter Bardaglio, the TCCPI coordinator, for further details at pbardaglio@gmail.com.

Induction cooktops are easy to use and keep clean, and they offer great cooking control. Photo courtesy of Cornell Cooperative Extension - Tompkins County.

A new initiative from Tompkins County will offer free induction cooktops, a pot, and a pan to residents with gas stoves in hopes of reducing indoor air pollution and curbing fossil fuels. 

The initiative is a collaborative effort between the county’s Department of Planning and Sustainability and Tompkins County Whole Health. The new stove tops and cookware will be offered through the county’s Healthy Neighborhoods Program, a state-funded effort to reduce housing-related injuries.  

INHS Promotes Intergenerational Approach

The project also includes a new facility for the Trumansburg Community Nursery School. Ithaca’s HOLT Architects is responsible for the architectural designs here.

The apartment building will include a community lounge, laundry facilities for use by residents, and management and maintenance offices. The goal of Village Grove is to create an intergenerational, mixed-income community where seniors can age in place and young families can purchase homes in the competitive local housing market.

INHS has contracted with Purcell Construction to handle the buildout of the 46 lower-income rental units, as well as the new nursery school.

The residential buildings are largely finished from the outside, while the new school has been sheathed and fitted with windows, but has yet to receive its exterior fiber cement façade. Sidewalks and fresh paving are in place, as are EV chargers and a new playground. The first phase’s construction cost is about $27 million, with completion of the first units anticipated by the end of this year.

The apartment building has been designed with a number of green energy features. It features all electric systems including triple pane windows and doors, geothermal heat pumps for heating, cooling, and hot water systems, advanced insulation to meet Passive House standards, and off-site solar production from a Renovus solar farm to achieve net-zero energy.

The rental application for the apartments was posted in late July, with units ranging from $775 for a one-bedroom to $1,260 for a three-bedroom for income-qualified applicants. As these units typically see high demand, those deemed eligible will be selected via lottery, with the first tenants moving in during December. The affordable for-sale homes are slated for construction at a later date.

Meanwhile, the market-rate lots are available for acquisition from architect Claudia Brenner’s Sundial Development company. The for-sale homes will be built on lots that will host a range of housing options, from higher-priced single-family home lots to more affordable pairs of triplex townhouse strings with a shared courtyard.

There’s no need at this stage to press the point that the coming U.S. election will be pivotal, not just in terms of whether our constitutional republic will survive, but also whether we can manage to avoid catastrophic, runaway climate change. Regular readers of this column readily grasp what’s at stake with both of these issues.

A report just released by World Weather Attribution (WWA), an international research group, closely examines how the 10 deadliest weather disasters since 2004, including three tropical cyclones, four heatwaves, two floods and a drought, killed an estimated half million people, and probably many more. It makes for sobering reading and, on the eve of Tuesday’s election, is a reminder that our choices at the ballot box will affect not just this nation but the entire planet.

Flooding in Valencia, Spain. Photo by Eidursson - Own Work licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Role of Fossil Fuels

The WWA study investigates how all of these events were intensified by global warming, which was, in turn, caused by the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. The main finding is simply put: “with every ton of coal, oil and gas burned, all heatwaves get hotter, and the overwhelming majority of heavy rainfall events, droughts, and tropical cyclones get more intense.” In other words, there is no such thing as a “natural” disaster anymore.

Polluters Must Pay

As if to underscore the truth of this observation, horrific flooding in Spain that claimed at least 158 deaths took place just as the WWA analysis was issued. According to Spain’s national weather service, it rained more in eight hours in Valencia, the hardest hit region, than it had in the preceding 20 months. Imperial College climate scientist Friederike Otto, who helps run the WWA, said it was “very clear that climate change did play a role.”

The flooding in Europe and across the U.S. Southeast this fall also underscores why the effort to hold the fossil fuel industry responsible for the havoc that it has caused is so critical, especially in light of the overwhelming evidence that Big Oil was aware of the potential consequences.

At the federal level, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), and Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) have recently introduced bills in Congress to do so. The Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act would assess companies based on their global carbon dioxide emissions, and it authorizes the U.S. Treasury Department to charge the largest polluters in proportion to their past carbon emissions, in excess of 1 billion metric tons, an estimated $100 billion each for ten years.

Closer to home, the New York Climate Change Superfund Act, still sits on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk, awaiting her signature to become state law. Both the General Assembly and State Senate passed the legislation during the last session. Public pressure has mounted on the governor to act, and it’s a certainty that this pressure will increase exponentially after the election.

Under the bill passed by lawmakers, New York would seek to collect about $3 billion a year for the next 25 years, for a total of $75 billion. The state Department of Environmental Conservation would be tasked with identifying the oil and gas companies that should be held responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and it would investigate how much they should each pay the state.

Regardless of the outcome of these events, one thing is for sure: the days of reckoning are upon us, and we each have the obligation as democratic citizens to make our voices heard. If there ever was a time to make sure that we become subjects in history and are not just objects of history, it is now.

Peter Bardaglio

TCCPI Coordinator