CHPE breaks ground, a new home for the Kanien’kehá:ka Mohawk, and 7,002 green jobs
This week's Digest, a roundup of climate news from the rural Catskills and the rest of New York.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Got news tips? Stories we should be discussing in class? Thoughts on what would make this newsletter more useful to you? Talk to me: empireofdirt@substack.com.
GETTIN’ CHIPPY: Construction officially began on the Champlain Hudson Power Express on Wednesday, in the little Canadian town of Whitehall. When complete, CHPE will serve as a 339-mile-long extension cord running underground and along the bottom of the Hudson River, bringing Canadian hydropower into New York City.
With few transmission lines connecting it to clean power sources, and little space to build new renewables, New York is deeply dependent on gas-powered electricity, and even more so in the wake of the recent shutdown of the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Westchester County. CHPE (pronounced “chippy”) is one of three main approaches currently underway to clean up the city’s power supply, along with the upstate Clean Path transmission project and offshore wind.
The project has a long and fraught history in the Hudson Valley region. Riverkeeper, an important local environmental nonprofit, switched sides recently to fight the project — but not before landing a board seat on a $117 million trust fund set up to address the environmental impacts of construction. I wrote about CHPE’s tradeoffs, and the fierce infighting it has sparked among environment and climate advocates, in a story for The River this spring. Here’s a good one from the Huffington Post’s Alex Kaufmann, too.
(Shoutout to the CHPE source who asked why my editor didn’t send me to the groundbreaking ceremony eight hours away in rural Canada. Bless, it’s so cute that you guys think newspapers have money. I don’t even get a free subscription. —Ed.)
NICE TIMING: There’s a new paper out in Environmental Science and Technology that estimates the social costs and benefits of the CHPE project. Bottom line: Researchers found that the project decreases social costs by about $13.2 billion between now and 2050. About a third of that comes from decreases in early deaths in downstate areas with greater proportions of Hispanic and Black residents, which currently bear much of the burden of air pollution from gas-fueled power plants in New York City.
The relationship between rates of local air pollution and rates of premature death in communities is pretty tight, as study after study has found since Harvard’s Six Cities report upended the environmental health world in 1993. Researchers on the CHPE study were able to use that tight correlation to come up with an estimate for how many early deaths the project will prevent: 306.
MUST READ: Have you heard of John Droz, Jr.? He’s a real estate developer who literally wrote the playbook on how to stop the building of solar and wind energy in little rural communities across America, and he has the ear of people at Heartland and the Cato Institute.
Reporter Michael Thomas has been digging into Droz’s work as part of an ongoing project on the dark-money campaigns, fossil-industry FUD, and viral propaganda efforts that are flowing into fighting renewable energy development at the community level. Another banger from Thomas’s new newsletter, Distilled: A co-reported story with Emily Atkin on the deep-pocketed fossil fuel interest group that’s using the Endangered Species Act to try to stop offshore wind projects.
GRID IN TROUBLE: CHPE had better stay on schedule, New York’s power grid operators at NYISO warned in a report that put “thinning reliability margins” in the spotlight. Extreme weather driven by climate change is hammering the state’s power infrastructure and driving spikes in power demand, even as the huge task looms of rebuilding the grid to stop pumping out climate-wrecking emissions. If New York City gets hit with a bad heat wave in 2025, before CHPE’s already-once-delayed start date of spring 2026, there could be trouble, NYISO warns.
GREEN GROWTH: New York State’s clean energy sector added more than 7,000 jobs in 2021, according to a state report issued last week.
TWO MORE GREEN JOBS: Ulster County executive-elect Jen Metzger, a longtime climate and clean energy advocate, is looking for a deputy county executive to focus on the green economy, workforce development, and local climate resilience. More info on the county’s website. Also: Cornell scientist and state Climate Action Council member Robert Howarth needs help in his lab measuring methane emissions.
LET THEM BUY CARS: New York State loves to give out consumer incentives for EVs, but New Yorkers have been slow to buy them — lagging far behind Florida, which is pretty damning. The problem? There’s nowhere to buy them, except a dealership franchise that would much rather sell you a gas-fueled SUV. A 2014 state law prohibits all automakers from selling directly to New York buyers, except for five Tesla dealerships that were already established before the law was passed. In an op-ed for Empire Report, NRDC’s Rich Schrader rips the state’s car dealership protection racket, and calls for the return of direct auto sales to New York.
NERD ALERT: The International Renewable Energy Agency just dropped a big report on heat pumps, with a bunch of data on costs, international market trends, and their use in retrofits as well as new construction. Have at it.
READING ALL THE LITTLE WEEKLY PAPERS SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO: What’s up in the rural Catskills.
LAND BACK: In 2015, a group of Kanien’kehá:ka Mohawk people from the Akwesasne reservation, on the border of New York and Canada, came to the Mohawk Valley in Schoharie County to take a stand with local residents against the Constitution Pipeline. They won — and they stayed. Now they’re building a home in West Fulton.
On Nov. 17, the nonprofit Waterfall Unity Alliance closed on the Bohringer’s Fruit Farm property, a 60-acre U-Pick berry farm on Route 30 that sits atop the remains of a Mohawk village. They plan to maintain the property as a working berry farm with organic and regenerative practices, and are building a traditional Haudenosaunee longhouse to serve as a hub for a growing community. “The prophecies all say that to survive, we have to return to original ways," says WUA board member Kawenniiosta Jock. “I want to come with my children back to the Schoharie Valley. It’s time for us to plant the seeds of return."
DUMPSTER DIVING: At the River Reporter in Sullivan County, local gumshoe Liam Mayo is on the trash beat, with another story about Hughes Energy’s proposed trash-cooking facility at the county landfill. In this one, Mayo documents Hughes’ repeated efforts to court skeptical local governments, none of which has yet resulted in a working project. Will the ever-accumulating trash of the rural Catskills get pressure-cooked and turned into allegedly useful pellets? Will Hughes find a community that wants it for a neighbor? Stay tuned.
OVERHEARD: “I bring it up in calls and get laughed at, because nobody wants to be responsible for their next door neighbor's hot water and heat.” —Zach Fink, president of Long Island’s ZBF Geothermal, talking to state regulators at a Dec. 1 conference about thermal utility networks. Like a lot of things in climate world, community geothermal heat is very technologically possible, but faces some daunting challenges in the boring old realm of logistics and regulatory frameworks.
COMING UP: Climate stuff on the calendar.
12/5 The New York State Climate Action Council holds another long, long meeting, as they race to finish their work on the state’s climate plan by the end of the year. What will the final plan include? Will it pave the way for the DEC to enact a statewide “cap-and-invest” program without any help from the state legislature? Will the CAC keep fighting about cow farts renewable natural gas right up to the very last minute? Tune in via webcast at 1pm to find out.
TWO CENTS: Spare change from the couch cushions of social media.
Lissa, again, incredible work. That study on CHPE and other build out scenarios is really interesting. And definitely the most sobering part of it is that all the CLCPA targets for solar and wind only add up to the same annual energy of CHPE? And that the closure of Indian Point has the net impact of 600 premature deaths in NYC over 30 years. 20 people a year....