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Inflation Reduction Act Needs Our Support Good news! An agreement was reached between Senator Joe Manchin and Majority Leader Schumer that may make it possible to pass the (newly renamed) Inflation Reduction Act. The Senate is expected to vote on this bill this week. This bill is a reduced and modified version of the Reconciliation Bill, also sometimes called the Build Back Better Bill. Let’s get this bill over the finish line. Please call Senator Casey this week! Notice that this action involves only Democrats. If your Representative is a Republican, do not call them. Instead, pass the information on to your friends and relatives who live in districts with a Democratic member of Congress. This is a big deal. Although this bill is less ambitious than last year’s version, some estimates say it would reduce greenhouse gasses by 40% by 2030 from the levels of 2005. The passage of this bill is something that we can all look forward to celebrating. National CCL Events Dana Nuccitelli, a climate researcher with CCL and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, will be presenting a webinar on “The Climate Benefits in the Inflation Reduction Act” on Thursday, August 4, from 8 to 9 pm. Here is information on how to access the presentation. All CCL members in the Appalachia region are invited to a special virtual meeting with CCL executive director Madeleine Para on Wednesday, August 10, from 7:30 to 8:30 pm. She will make a few remarks, then answer any questions you may have. You will receive an email a few days before the event with more information. Each month, CCL holds a national call with invited speakers to focus on a particular topic and to share news from DC. This month’s call on August 13 at 1 pm will feature Bob Inglis of RepublicEN and Princella Talley of the OpEd Project on communicating with diverse groups. Click here for how to access this call or the recording. Monthly Chapter Meeting – August 16 We have lots to discuss this month as we digest the national developments and make plans for the fall. What can we do as CCL members to support the actions being taken in Congress and at the state and local levels? Our chapter will be contributing to presentations to help businesses and families make the transition to the clean energy economy. What else so you think we should be doing? Monthly Meeting Tuesday, August 16, 2022 5:30pm – 7pm This will be a hybrid meeting. You can join either by Zoom or in person at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in downtown State College. In Person Room 325 at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church 208 West Foster Avenue, State College, PA For directions and parking information, click here. Masks will be required Via Zoom Write PaStateCollege@citizensclimatelobby.org for more information. CCL members in action Tabling at Arts Fest How nice it was to be able to table at the Arts Festival once again!! Thank you to St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church for permitting us to set up our tent on their lawn so that we could greet the festival goers as they went by. Thank you to all of our members who took a turn at the tent on Friday and Saturday: Lisa Richardson, Diane Mills, Ben Goldman, Grace Oram, Kathy Pollard, Dan Kottlowski, Mike Edwards, Michael McCann, Sylvia Neely, and Bob Carline.  Kathy Pollard and Grace Oram at the CCL tent at the Arts Fest on the lawn of St. Andrew’s. We also had two special volunteers: Chiew Ee Kwong from Malaysia and Anh Thu (Tess) Phan from Vietnam who were in State College as part of an international exchange with a focus on climate change. Their visit was hosted by the Centre County Council of Governments (COG). Their experience while in our area was described in an article in the Centre Daily Times, with photographs of them and a video taken at our CCL tent.  OpEd by Dick Jones Dick Jones wrote an excellent OpEd on “The Supreme Court’s ruling and future climate action,” which appeared in the Centre Daily Times on Sunday, July 10. It was picked up and retweeted by national CCL and others as well. Social Event in July Instead of our regular monthly meeting, we invited members and friends of our CCL chapter to come to a special gathering at JL Farm and Cidery on the afternoon of July 24. Despite predictions of extreme heat and storms, the weather turned out to be warm and beautiful, and we all had a great time sharing interests and getting acquainted. We plan to do it again soon. .   Environmental Voter Project If you want to make a difference in the midterm elections, the Environmental Voter Project could use your help. They will be conducting phonebanks on August 16, 22, and 23 to call unlikely-to-vote environmentalists in Florida, and the August 25 phonebank will call Massachusetts. You can register to phone bank here: environmentalvoter.org/get-involved ICYMI – In Case You Missed It The CIPHER newsletter (associated with Breakthrough Energy) published a thoughtful piece by Grayson Zulauf on the difficult choices that we may face when environmental concerns and action on climate come into conflict: “Saving rivers and fighting climate change: a personal conflict.” Canary Media published an article on ways to shift electricity use in order to avoid overload of the grid and save money for homeowners by using smart electric panels. “Smart electric panels in homes could prevent overtaxing the grid.” Book Review by Mark Neely Eugene Linden, Fire and Flood: A People’s History of Climate Change, from 1979 to the Present (New York: Penguin Press, 2022) Eugene Linden’s Fire and Flood is a history of the problem of climate change over the last forty-odd years– must reading for members of CCL. Linden captures the essence of developments decade by decade, the eighties, the nineties, and so forth, from four standpoints: the reality of climate changes in the period, the scientists’ increasing understanding of them, public opinion of the changing situation, and finally the reactions of business and finance. For example, Linden summarizes the status of business and finance vis-à-vis climate change in the 2010s this way: “The 2010s saw the business community begin a momentous shift toward weighting the costs of climate change over the costs of efforts to moderate its effects. It also saw the moneyed interests increase their investments in clean tech and other opportunities climate change might offer. In this sense, the clock of business and finance, which used to lag the public, the scientific community, and reality, is now running ahead of the public and just behind the scientific community” (p. 242). Linden’s historical perspective enables him to explain things that we may well have missed at the time. His judgment is icily cool. He can now see that the battle “was lost in the 1990s . . . when the big emerging nations [China and India most notably] chose a path to industrialization that locked in massive future emissions” (p. 89). Such is not necessarily the common wisdom on the subject. Click here for the rest of the review. |
| If you have ideas, comments, or just want to talk about climate, please feel free to contact Sylvia Neely (PaStateCollege@citizensclimatelobby.org) or Lisa Richardson (twitter@statecollegeccl.org). We would love to hear from you. |