Every time your air conditioner or furnace rumbles on, greenhouses gases spew into the air. All those volts —about 10,900 kilowatt-hours per person — used to charge laptops and phones, light rooms, and keep the refrigerator running don’t come without an environmental cost. American electricity generation contributed 2.04 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2014, clouding the earth’s atmosphere with emissions and worsening climate change.
A hot new trend in architecture may offer one of our best hopes for significantly diminishing that pollution. “Passive house” construction — usually built without central heating or cooling systems — can reduce energy usage to net-zero or even net-positive, meaning a building generates more energy than it consumes. Applicable to both commercial and residential properties, passive construction centers on five key design elements: heavily insulated walls (sometimes up to 15 inches thick), an extremely tight envelope, triple-paned windows and doors that are outfitted with high-performance locks, high-tech ventilation and moisture-recovery systems filter the air and solar panels on rooftops.
“There are no drafts in the winter. And in the summer, it stays cool without strong air conditioning blowing on you,” Jane Sanders, a Brooklyn architect, tells the New York Post about her home. “This morning, there was jackhammering two doors down from me, but I could barely hear it. It’s so quiet that I feel like I live in the country.”
Some homeowners will take objection with the boxy design; others will balk at the price tag. But as more passive homes are built, architects are experimenting with chic design and developing cheaper construction methods. NationSwell looked into five of the most interesting passive houses in America today. Cheap land helped determine the location of the Smith House.
The Smith House, Urbana, Ill.
American designers first pioneered passive construction — then known as “superinsulation” in the early 1970s — after the oil embargo caused wild swings in energy prices. When conservation fell out of fashion during the Reagan years, the idea caught on among Germans in 1988, but it took until 2002, for the idea to return across the Atlantic. Katrin Klingenberg, a young German architect, and her now-deceased husband Nic Smith broke ground on the first American passive house prototype in Urbana, in part, because they could test the house against the harsh Midwestern climate. “I believe that climate crisis is real and that buildings need to do their part of reducing carbon emissions. The good news is that buildings have a lot of potential to do just that,” Klingenberg tells the Chicago Tribune. “We have to work a bit harder to get those reductions and invest a bit more upfront. But the reward is huge with long-lasting payback.” Window detail, Kiln Apartments.
Kiln Apartments, Portland, Ore.
Portland is undeniably at the center of the American passive house movement, with more than 100 certified buildings in its metro area, according to some counts. The Kiln Apartments, in North Portland, are one of the largest mixed-use buildings — 19 apartments above ground-floor retail — to meet passive house standards.
The Oregon city already has one of the strictest building codes in the nation, but these units save up to 75 percent more energy than equivalent ones. With many south-facing windows, the buildings is heated largely by the sun during the winter. Thick metal sunshades that look like modernist awnings block the sunlight during hotter months, when the summer sun rises higher in the sky. The four-story building does have an elevator, but because everything is about energy efficiency, residents are encouraged to take the stairs. Dedication ceremony for the Empowerment House, a 2-unit townhouse.
Habitat for Humanity Townhomes, Washington, D.C.
Demonstrating that passive house principles can be readily implemented, volunteers in the nation’s capital are building six townhouses for poor homeowners. Located in Ivy City, a portion of the structure was originally designed for the U.S. Solar Decathlon, a competition for college students to build the most energy-efficient home. Students from The New School and Stevens Institute of Technology put the one-bedroom together on the National Mall for under $230,000. After being moved northeast in 2012, a second story was added and Habitat for Humanity built a copy next door. Now, as the neighborhood gentrifies, the families in the six brick rowhouses have affordable rent and a a minimal utility bill. “I just remember thinking, we did it: a non-profit, affordable house developer can do this, even using volunteers with no construction experience,” Orlando Velez, manager of housing services at Habitat for Humanity’s D.C. chapter, tells ThinkProgress. “I started thinking, what’s everyone else waiting for?” The north building of the Uptown Lofts.
Uptown Lofts, Pittsburgh, Penn.
This 47-unit housing affordable project, provides greener living spaces to those who can’t afford a market-rate home. Split into two buildings across the street from each other, 18- to 23-year-olds who aged out of the foster care system live in the northern building’s 24 one-bedroom apartments; to the south, 23 affordable units go to people who make less than 60 percent of Pittsburgh’s median income. The $12 million project was also notable for being the first time any state subsidized a passive house with tax benefits.
At the ribbon-cutting ceremony this February, the project was praised for realizing its ambitious goals with limited dollars. “How proud we are to help bring these buildings to reality,” said Stan Salwocki, manager at the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “This project shows how cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, energy-efficient affordable housing can be done.” The central utility plant at Cornell Tech is currently under construction.
Cornell Tech, Roosevelt Island, N.Y.
Still in the works, the world’s tallest and largest passive house began construction this June. Rising 26 stories above Roosevelt Island, a sliver of land between the boroughs of Manhattan and Queens, the apartment tower will house about 530 grad students, professors and staff for Cornell University’s new 12-acre applied sciences campus. Since nearly three quarters of the carbon emissions in New York City’s come from heating and cooling its skyscrapers, school administrators hope this project will set a new standard for energy efficiency and gain the attention of engineers and designers across the Queensboro Bridge in midtown.
The construction “is a clear signal that in today’s era of climate change, it’s not enough to simply build tallest. To lead the market, your tall building will need to be a passive house,” Ken Levenson, president of NY Passive House, an advocacy group, tells The New York Times. The $115 million project is expected to open in 2017 and will save 882 tons of carbon dioxide annually — the equivalent of planting 5,300 trees, according to the university.
Twenty-six centuries ago, a Greek physician urged his medical colleagues to remember that a doctor does “not treat a fever chart [or] a cancerous growth, but a sick human being” who has a life and responsibilities outside of a hospital wing. That level of care — a tenet of the Hippocratic Oath — is already difficult to realize, but Gary Cohen, a travel writer turned healthcare advocate, is pushing medical centers to think even bigger, realizing the connections between a patient’s sickness and its roots in an unhealthy community.
Cohen, one of this year’s recipients of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” fellowships, co-founded the global nonprofit Healthcare Without Harm (HWH), which is headquartered in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Reston, Va., in 1996. As the organization campaigned to eradicate toxic chemicals from medical equipment — mercury in thermometers, dioxins in incinerated plastic IV bags and tubes — Cohen argued that healthcare providers shouldn’t be making people sick. After significant victories, Cohen recently decided to broaden the focus of HWH from “do no harm” (another classical dictum) to actively bettering community health. With more than 500 partner organizations in 53 countries, including three of the largest nonprofit hospital systems in the U.S.: Catholic Health Initiatives, Kaiser Permanente and Dignity Health, Cohen’s raison d’être is to help doctors heal their profession.
“When we started, we were trying to get hospitals to take the Hippocratic Oath internally, applying the same set of values to their environmental footprint: to reduce the use of fossil fuels, detox the supply chain, get rid of sugar-sweetened junk food,” Cohen says. “But the bigger questions are, ‘How can you be an anchor for community and planetary health? How can you move from being these cathedrals of chronic disease to being centers of community wellness and sustainability? How can you leverage your incredible moral authority, your mission and economic clout to support healthier communities?'”
Cohen’s first job after college was writing guidebooks for top tourist destinations — London, Paris, New York — until a friend asked if he would write a primer on toxic chemicals. Not knowing anything about the topic, Cohen conducted interviews to learn more. “I sat around kitchen tables with mothers and fathers. They had no political power, no money, no technical expertise, but they were fighting for their family’s lives,” he recalls. “Their kids were sick. ‘Why does my daughter have this rare form of cancer? Why does my son wake up in the middle of the night choking for air? Why does the water taste so bad?’” The political organizing manual Cohen subsequently wrote, “Fighting Toxics,” launched what has turned into a lifelong fight for environmental safety. In 1986, he helped pass the first national right-to-know law, alerting consumers about possible chemical exposure.
A decade later, a report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that warned of on-site medical incinerators (which burn a portion of the 26 pounds of waste generated daily by each patient in a staffed hospital bed) turned Cohen’s attention to hospitals. Incineration removes one biohazard by burning pathogens, but the burning plastic sends other dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere. Tests found dioxin in children’s body fat and traces of mercury in infants’ blood. “The healthcare system is a major polluter,” Cohen says, realizing that, “the very institution devoted to healing people is poisoning them.”
Starting with a team of 28 organizers, Cohen’s advocacy has helped reduce the number of on-site medical waste incinerators in the U.S. from a high of 5,600 to just 70 a decade later. And those hazardous measuring devices containing mercury? HWH’s work has resulted in them, for all practical purposes, being eliminated from hospitals and pharmacies.
What’s unique about HWH’s approach is that these reforms went into effect “without basically any legislation at the federal level,” Cohen says. “We started, you might say, in the basement,” talking with the facility managers and architects. As the cause gained momentum and sustainability worked its way into hospital chains’ strategic priorities, Cohen now has access to meet with vice presidents and CEOs.
Recently, HWH worked with hospitals to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, convincing medical facilities not only to buy solar panels for hospital rooftops, but also to subsidize them for employees’ homes. The organization has also helped school systems and hospitals partner to generate demand for local, sustainably produced food. And it’s demonstrated that the construction of new hospital wings can strategically promote economic development in poorer parts of a city.
HWH has also been bolstered by President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare legislation, the Affordable Care Act, which requires hospitals to conduct community health needs assessments (essentially tabulating why people come to the emergency room). “What conditions in the community are contributing to diseases? Is there food insecurity? Is there pollution? Is there poor housing, violence and poverty? These are the things that are making people sick in the first place,” Cohen says. He adds that the same principles apply to climate change. After witnessing Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, doctors can’t avoid seeing that global warming’s added risk of flooding or extreme heat as essential to their work. “If you’re a person in Cleveland and you think climate change is all about polar bears and melting ice caps, then you’ve got other stuff to worry about. But when you understand that it has to do with [a patient’s] asthma, the spread of West Nile virus or dengue fever, that reality can no longer be ignored. Now I’m paying attention.”
Cohen’s larger hope is that changes in the healthcare profession, which accounts for $2.9 trillion in spending, resonates throughout the broader economy. Because hospitals must prioritize a patient’s wellbeing, they can invest the extra dollars needed to drive innovation and scale greener practices. Once they prove the business model is viable, other corporations might take notice.
If you ask American citizens which profession they trust most, as Gallup has since 1976, doctors and nurses consistently rank among the most honest and ethical. Eighty percent report high trust in nurses; compared to just 7 percent for members of Congress. Cohen believes medical professionals must live up to this respect by watching out for our health — even when we ourselves don’t want to. Not just whether we’re running a high temperature or have a cough, but the broad influences on the health of our cities.
“I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required,” doctors pledge in the Hippocratic Oath. “I remain a member of society,” they add, “with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.” Cohen will be holding them to their word.
On a 30-acre orchard in Lovingston, Va., an experiment in Edenic coexistence is taking place: where commercially grown (and chemically sprayed) apples once grew, a herd of 120 goats now wanders between rows of trees, chomping on weeds, thistles and fallen Ginger Gold, Gala and Fuji apples.
Known as silvopasture — the symbiotic integration of livestock and trees — ForeverView Farms’ model prizes “regenerative farm management,” which Brett Nadrich, the farm’s director of business operations, defines as “leaving the soil and ecosystem better than we found them.” Ending pesticide use and providing locally raised meat free of growth hormone and antibiotics, this practice is sustainability taken to the extreme. And there’s the additional environmental benefits of protecting the soil from erosion, boosting water quality and ensuring biodiversity, as well.
“We’re taking our first harvest to market in the next few weeks. This is an active process for us. Part of generating consumer demand is raising awareness about the challenges we face and grounding those challenges in local ecosystems, local culture and the local economy,” Nadrich tells NationSwell.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 179 million acres of land are primed for silvopasture like ForeverView’s model, but between 2008 and 2012, the federal agency assisted in preparing only 2,000 acres. In total, according to the last agricultural census, only 2,725 farms (out of 2.1 million nationwide) graze livestock under forested areas or employ alley cropping, another environmentally-friendly practice, which involves planting crops and trees side-by-side on the same land.
Why have so few American farmers signed up for this forward-thinking style of farming? For one, most probably haven’t heard of agroforestry or silvopasture’s benefits for grazers like cows and sheep and browsers like goats. ForeverView Farms is using its proximity to Washington, D.C., to boost the farm’s exposure and people’s knowledge of sustainable agriculture. Nadrich can count off 10 food policy issues on which he has advised policy groups about. Foremost among them, he wants to see more support for workforce development to inspire young people to join agriculture and train them to be successful. He references George Atlee Goodling, ForeverView’s director of farm operations, who’s lived in Nelson County his entire life. “Atlee has a passion for farming, but without the founding of ForeverView Farms…, there wouldn’t necessarily be this type of job available,” Nadrich says. “If we want folks to have access to this type of high-quality food, we need to create jobs for the people who raise it.”
Nadrich, who works in the district, says he’s advocating his positions to policymakers, as well as to chefs to serve the farm’s goat meat and duck eggs. One of the most common refrains he hears is, “I didn’t know you could eat goat.” But once the conversation moves beyond that point and he’s able to explain ForeverView Farms’ overarching mission, customers are usually eager to offer their support.
“The general public has a lot of the same questions about broader benefits: ‘Why should we be interested in your product as opposed to some other goat meat or duck egg?’” they ask him. “It’s a broader environmental and nutritional benefit,” he says. “Allowing our goats to browse rather than having them cooped up allows the animals themselves to be healthier. That not only produces an end product that is healthier for the human consumer, but also more delicious.”
Ask people for their opinion, and they’ll usually give you an honest response. Which is exactly what we wanted when we asked government officials, legislators, environmental experts, scientists and historians what President Barack Obama’s environmental legacy would be. Read on for their judgments.
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“I think and hope President Obama will establish a legacy as one of the most consequential Presidents dealing with the environment, particularly with regard to climate change, which is the greatest threat we face today.” — Former Rep. Harry Waxman, a 20-term California Democrat who chaired the House Energy and Commerce Committee until 2011 and authored the amendments that strengthened the Clean Air Act in 1990 “President Obama hasdogmatically used energy as a political tool rather than a building block of renewed economic vibrancy…The innovation of independent producers and the scale of larger companies has combined to make the United States a world economic leader in clean energy — one of our few areas of industrial domination. Yet the President has chosen to brand oil and gas as evil forces and essentially shut down federal lands as source of production.” — Former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, a Republican who implemented higher standards for ozone and other air pollutants and spearheaded a federal cleanup of the Great Lakes while serving as EPA administrator from 2003 to 2005.
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“While President Obama has taken significant steps to address climate change — establishing the first-ever carbon emissions limits for power plants and new fuel economy standards for cars — his administration continues to lease massive amounts of publicly-owned fossil fuels…It’s clear that President Obama is serious about cementing his climate legacy, but until he takes steps to ensure the vast majority of fossil fuels remain in the ground, his legacy is as vulnerable as an Arctic ice sheet.” — Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA
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“Barack Obama is destined to go down as the greatest climate change-fighting president in history. By the time he leaves office some 15 months from now, he will have instituted game-changing programs to slash carbon pollution from our vehicles and trucks, and from our power plants – together accounting for two-thirds of all U.S. greenhouse gases, the primary driver of dangerous climate change.” — Ed Chen, national communications director for the National Resources Defense Council
“Even as Obama has talked an increasingly tough game on climate change and the need for dramatic reductions [in emissions], he has also pursued policies that have exacerbated the environmental impacts of domestic energy development — and have increasingly exported our dirty energy sources even as we embrace clean renewables. His environmental achievements, then, have been hamstrung by politics — both the unyielding political opposition as well as his own sense of what’s politic in a nation craving economic growth and energy independence.” — Paul Sutter, professor of modern U.S. history at the University of Colorado in Boulder
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“Looking at individual policy accomplishments doesn’t do justice to President Obama’s legacy on climate change…The component parts of his actions — from making cars and power plants cleaner to preserving major swaths of land and sea for future generations to leading on global ocean policy to beginning to take on industrial methane pollution — tell a story about how he and his administration addressed the problem. But the story is larger than that. I’d say the president’s legacy on climate change lies in his success in making climate change a central policy obligation, getting millions of Americans to care about it, bringing along industry and other stakeholders, and tackling the problem in the face of withering opposition from Congress. So I wouldn’t say that setting fuel efficiency standards is a legacy, I’d say that achieving the cooperation and buy-in of all the stakeholders is the legacy accomplishment. This president, more than others, has had to build those coalitions to overcome the legislative obstruction of climate action and he’s changed how climate policy is developed and implemented.” — Carol M. Browner, former EPA adminstrator during the Clinton administration and director of the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy from 2009 to 2011
[ph] “As soon as Obama took office, [the] EPA began moving vigorously to regulate greenhouse gas emissions…Obama strongly advocated environmental protection and took several highly publicized trips to advance concern about environmental issues and to promote renewable energy. After his first two years, he was confronted with the most anti-environmental Congress in history, so new legislation was challenging, to say the least. However, he pushed against the limits of his authority under existing laws, especially on climate change.” — Michael B. Gerrard, professor at Columbia Law School in New York City who teaches courses on environmental regulation and climate change policy
“Obama has ignored not only bipartisan solutions but Congress itself after it rejected his approach on climate change even when Democrats controlled that body. He was the president who deepened the partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats over these crucial intersecting issues. His partisanship has been destructive of any consensus on major enviro-energy issues…Meanwhile, the huge energy event that happened during his watch – the shale oil and gas revolution – flourished not thanks to his administration, but in spite of it.” — Luke Popovich, spokesman for the National Mining Association
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“Mr. Obama is the most radical president in terms of environmental policy in the history of the U.S. It is as if the spirit of Rachel Carson – author of “Silent Spring” – is occupying the Oval Office. Every imagined environmental threat takes on the utmost urgency in this president’s mind, no matter how weak the scientific evidence…He leaves behind a legacy of narcissism, grandiosity and political correctness that will be hard for anyone to match, though Mrs. Clinton, should she survive the FBI probe of her national security lapses, might be able to come close.” — Gene Koprowski, director of marketing for the Heartland Institute, a conservative public policy think tank
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“The stimulus package gave President Obama a chance to invest in renewables early in his first term, allowing him to make progress on the issues unlike most other recent presidents, who have been forced for political reasons to leave critical environmental issues to their second terms. In 2009 and 2010, there was an apparent window of opportunity to promote a carbon cap and trade bill in Congress, but the administration was eager for a quick victory and opted for health care. Whether with Obama’s support this could have happened is a good question, but there is no question that the decision to back off was demoralizing to the environment and climate change community.” — D. James Baker, former administrator of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and current director of the Global Carbon Measurement Program at the William J. Clinton Foundation
[ph] “President Obama will be remembered for strong leadership on climate change. He implemented two key policies in the United States that will substantially cut the emissions of heat trapping gases — fuel economy standards for vehicles, and limits on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. He also brokered a deal with China to cut emissions from that country, which is critical to the success of a worldwide agreement expected to emerge in Paris this year. The missing piece of his legacy is national climate change legislation, which he and congress failed to pass.” — Kenneth Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit MORE:Which Presidents Are the Greenest in U.S. History?
“Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals,” Theodore Roosevelt presciently wrote in a popular magazine in 1913, as he watched the western frontier vanish four years after he’d left the White House. “But at last it looks as if our people were awakening.”
Roosevelt, the hunter from New York whose name became synonymous with conservation, initiated our country’s long-overdue reconciliation with the environment. Because of him, we can still admire the ancient sequoias and redwoods and visit the Grand Canyon. Nearly every modern president who signs major environmental legislation follows his trailblazing footsteps, but few outshine him.
As Barack Obama’s presidency draws to a close, NationSwell surveyed dozens of experts for their evaluation of how his environmental record measures up to those of former presidents. Of course, comparing presidents against each other over the last century is “tricky,” says Paul Sutter, who teaches modern U.S. history at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “For the first two thirds of the 20th century, conservation and then environmentalism were quite bipartisan, with Republicans often showing substantial leadership on environmental issues,” he notes. “The two Roosevelts, perhaps our most important environmental presidents during the first half of the century, embody that lesson (one a Republican, the other a Democrat).” Today, with the country split across a partisan divide, even environmental preservation and industrial regulation draw controversy.
Confronted with an unbudging Congress and a citizenry that is “remarkably hostile to science,” in Sutter’s words, Obama staked his legacy on strong Environmental Protection Agency regulations and international treaties. How do his accomplishments stack up to contemporary presidents, who each had their own circumstances to navigate? Since Rachel Carson first warned of “a strange blight … silencing the voices of spring in countless towns” back in 1962, who has done the most to purify America’s land and waters? From best to worst, here’s how historians rank our country’s recent leaders. Jimmy Carter holds a press conference on the roof of the West Wing in 1979 to announce his alternative energy initiative; the solar panels installed on the roof heated water for the Navy Mess.
1. Jimmy Carter
Because of his handling of the Iran hostage crisis, Carter has the bad rap of being a weak commander-in-chief. On environmental protection, however, Carter is our greatest modern president. A dedicated idealist, Carter pushed the Democratic-controlled Congress to support a seven-point plan in early 1977 until his last days in office in 1981. Raised on a farm, Carter traces some of his concern for stewardship back to his experiences with Georgia soil and Southern Baptist soul: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof,” he learned at Bible study. Stewardship of the earth, not exploitation, was our role, he believed. That’s why Carter installed solar panels atop the White House, pledged to lower the thermostat and wear sweaters instead and turned off the Christmas tree lights on the lawn.
“Americans long thought that nature could take care of itself — or that if it did not, the consequences were someone else’s problem. As we know now, that assumption was wrong; none of us is a stranger to environmental problems. Industrial workers, for example, are exposed to disproportionate risks from toxic substances in their surroundings. The urban poor, many of whom have never had the chance to canoe a river or hike a mountain trail, must nevertheless endure each day the hazardous effects of lead and other pollutants in the air,” Carter explained in a May 1977 address. “Intelligent stewardship of the environment on behalf of all Americans is a prime responsibility of government. Congress has in the past carried out its share of this duty well. … Environmental protection is no longer just a legislative job, but one that requires — and will now receive — firm and unsparing support from the Executive Branch.”
The first Democratic president since the creation of the EPA, Carter focused on strengthening the agency that would implement his predecessors’ environmental legislation. Even as the economy faltered, the EPA’s coffers enlarged to confront disasters like Love Canal (1978) and Three Mile Island (1979). In 1977, Carter consolidated agencies to form the U.S. Department of Energy. (Three and a half decades later, Obama’s green tech stimulus dollars would revive the agency.) In the last days of his presidency, during a lame duck session, Carter finally pushed through two major bills: one protected 104 million acres of land in the Alaskan wilderness; the other created the Superfund program, which has cleaned up close to 400 toxic sites.
Despite Carter’s strong convictions, conservative Republicans later reversed much of his agenda. In their minds, his “doomsday” predictions about environmental catastrophe were hindering economic growth. In one of his first orders as president, Reagan tore down the solar panels from the roof and shipped them to a college in Maine.
2. Barack Obama
Experts agree that our current president faced unprecedented challenges in advancing his environmental agenda. “President Obama has had the first ‘climate changed presidency’ and by that I mean that climate impacts are being felt, seen, and survived, as he has been president and that has changed the presidency, permanently,” explains Carol M. Browner, an EPA administrator under Clinton who advised Obama on energy and climate change policy from 2009 to 2011. No president had yet been presented with the incontrovertible evidence of global warming, and no leader had dealt with a Congress that so boldly obstructed conservation efforts. “As a result, I think his achievements to date have been important but relatively modest, in part because [Obama] has found it difficult to do much more and in part because he has been worried about or been scared of the political implications of doing much more,” Sutter argues. “I think Carter was a stronger leader [than Obama], though he suffered for it,” Sutter argues, and that suffering “has likely never been far from Obama’s mind.”
Still, Obama built on the legacy of his predecessors, “bringing a personal interest and knowledgeable appointments,” says D. James Baker, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under Clinton from 1993 to 2001. When legislative accomplishments escaped him, he invested his energy in stricter regulations that will curb emissions from automobiles and power plants.
What will Obama’s legacy be? As expected, the answers are mixed. “Aside from Theodore Roosevelt (who is in a category of his own), I think that Obama will be regarded as the most pro-environmental president to date,” says Michael Gerrard, who teaches environmental law and energy regulation at Columbia Law School. “Obama is the most radical president in terms of environmental policy in the history of the U.S.,” says Gene Koprowski, a spokesperson for the Heartland Institute, a think tank. “It is as if the spirit of Rachel Carson – author of “Silent Spring” – is occupying the Oval Office.”
Perhaps most realistically, Sutter believes that it’s still to be determined. “We have seen the President becoming much more aggressive as a leader on climate change…I am guessing that he will decide that, now that Obamacare seems safe, he will stake much of his remaining legacy-making on positioning the United States to both meaningfully respond to climate change and to become a global leader on the issue. He has perhaps awoke to the realization that, a quarter century from now, we likely will all be measured by our remarkable incapacity to deal with a huge global threat,” Sutter concludes. The 37th President of the United States of America, Richard Nixon, who won presidential elections in 1968 and 1972, making a speech.
3. Richard Nixon
It seems counterintuitive, but the disgraced commander-in-chief deserves a spot among the strongest environmental champions “because his administration ushered in the fundamental environmental laws of the nation,” says Luke Popovich, spokesman for the National Mining Association. A few months before the first Earth Day celebration in 1970, Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act, which mandates that federal agencies file environmental impact statements.
As the modern environmental movement rolled ahead, the Clean Air Act in late 1970 and the Clean Water Act in 1972 quickly came into effect. (Nixon, it should be noted, initially proposed a clean water bill to Congress but vetoed the eventual, more comprehensive legislation because of budget reasons.) With executive orders, Nixon established both the EPA and NOAA. “The fight against pollution,” Nixon said in a 1970 speech to Congress, “is not a search for villains. For the most part, the damage done to our environment has not been the work of evil men, nor has it been the inevitable by-product either of advancing technology or of growing population. It results not so much from choices made, as from choices neglected; not from malign intention, but from failure to take into account the full consequences of our actions.”
With a strong record like that, why isn’t Nixon higher on the list? “Though most of the major environmental laws were signed by Nixon and Ford, they weren’t the leaders,” says Steven Cohen, executive director of the Earth Institute at New York City’s Columbia University. “They went along with a Congressional wave.” Spurred by images of the burning Cuyahoga River and Carson’s ominous words, environmentalism had support from Democrats and Republicans alike, “albeit mostly from the sorts of moderate Republicans that have themselves become an endangered species,” Sutter notes. Still, that’s why Popovich believes Nixon should top the list. “Unlike Obama, Nixon accomplished this in bipartisan fashion, reaching across the aisle to secure strong, lasting legislation,” he says.
4. Bill Clinton
“President Bill Clinton preserved land and ocean areas, set stronger standards for air and water quality and brought on Al Gore as Vice President, giving environmental and climate change issues a strong bully pulpit,” argues Baker. The 42nd President, who’d later be impeached, “faced a hostile congress” like Obama did, Baker says, and he “consistently beat them back with vetoes.” Without Clinton’s strong stances, the Republican congress led by Rep. Newt Gingrich and Sen. Bob Dole threatened to open the 1.5 million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska for oil drilling, place a radioactive waste dump in California’s Mojave Desert, sell protected national forests to western ski resorts, eliminate tax incentives for renewable energy and undermine the Endangered Species Act — all within just one 1995 bill.
Though his legislative record is noteworthy, Clinton missed a chance to respond to early alerts about global warming. “Clinton said the right things and supported the EPA but he never assigned the environment a top priority, and he did not push through action on climate change,” says Gerrard.
5. George H.W. Bush
This Republican leader’s strong environmental record, which set the groundwork for many of Obama’s accomplishments, may seem anachronistic in today’s divisive era. Bush 41 found common ground between corporate and environmental interests. With more than half of America’s floodplains, estuaries, peat bogs and fens drained and built over as residential communities or farmland, he declared a new policy on wetlands in 1989: “No net loss.” Bush’s policy, an update to Carter’s 1977 executive order on wetlands, didn’t prevent industries from impacting the important wildlife habitat; instead, for every acre infringed on by development, an acre of wetlands elsewhere had to be restored.
The following year, Bush, an avid outdoorsman, commenced the first market-based cap-and-trade program — not for carbon, as Obama’s administration focused on, but sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide that were causing acid rain to fall from the skies. With “emissions trading,” as it was known then, the government didn’t force one solution on power plants; instead, it created an economic incentive to scrub dirty byproducts from the system. As of 2013, the program was still improving air quality: sulfur dioxide emissions were 69 percent below 2005 levels. Rounding out his green accomplishments, Bush “signed the Clean Air Act Amendments” — the statutory authority that led to Obama’s Clean Power Plan — “the Oil Pollution Act (the most recent federal environmental statutes) and also the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,” which Obama may update in Paris this December, Gerrard notes.
6. Gerald Ford
Building on Nixon’s legacy after the Watergate scandal forced Tricky Dick out of office, Ford approved some crucial environmental legislation — particularly the nation’s first fuel efficiency standards, which doubled the requirement for passenger vehicles to 27.5 miles per gallon, after the oil crisis in the early 1970s. He also advocated for allowing drivers to turn right on red lights, not for convenience, but to reduce the time cars idled at intersections, puffing out exhaust.
While Ford also boosted funding for water treatment facilities through the Safe Drinking Water Act, the eco-friendly news pretty much ends there. Instead, Ford is more likely be remembered for how he “consistently reduced pollution enforcement and vetoed coal-mining restrictions,” Baker says. In 1974, Congress tried to restrict strip mining — the process by which companies chop off mountaintops to access coal underneath — but Ford pocket vetoed the bill. Second only to the Nixon pardon, it’s remembered as his most controversial executive action.
7. Ronald Reagan
In the lone debate with Carter, Reagan, then California’s governor, took aim at “literally thousands of unnecessary regulations” promulgated by the EPA. Immediately after his landslide victory in 1980, the Gipper slashed through Carter’s work. “Reagan moved in the opposite direction, but Congress stopped him going as far as he wanted,” says Gerrard. Reagan’s first appointee at the EPA, Anne Gorsuch, promised “to get out better environmental results with fewer people and less money.” But the pared-down agency, which lost a quarter of its workforce, became notorious for letting polluters off the hook. During Reagan’s first year in office, enforcement cases sent from regional offices to headquarters declined by 79 percent. One crisis after another, including the firing of the Superfund chief, led to a mass exodus from the agency in 1983. Gorsuch resigned. Reagan seemed to back off, but his budget team still crippled the agency by withholding vital funds.
Three years later, in November 1986, Reagan declined to sign the renewal of the Clean Water Act, citing its costly price tag; in a new session, the following February, the House overrode a second veto by a vote of 401 to 26. The Great Communicator, in an early act of denial, also dismissed acid rain proposals that wouldn’t get resolved until Bush 41. A Pennzenergy Company oil exploration drilling rig in the Gulf Of Mexico during sunset.
8. George W. Bush
At the bottom of the list is George W. Bush, a Texas oilman who beat back environmental regulations, showing little interest in protecting the planet during his two terms. “George W. Bush seemed to delegate this policy area to Dick Cheney, who was a great friend of the fossil fuel industry,” says Gerrard. Like Reagan’s first administrator, Bush 43’s appointees at the EPA deliberately avoided statutory deadlines for implementation of new environmental safeguards. In 2007, “the Supreme Court decided that greenhouse gasses were an air pollutant that the federal government was required to regulate under the Clean Air Act,” says Cohen. “Bush moved slowly to comply with that ruling,” creating a backlog that kicked the can down the road. (Perhaps luckily, under Obama, the agency drafted the Clean Power Plan in response, “using his authority to require states to reduce their carbon footprints,” Cohen adds.)
He also scuttled global efforts to deal with global warming. The Kyoto Protocol would have “wrecked” the American economy, Bush maintained, in refusing to participate in the international agreement to cut greenhouse gases. For halting research on climate change, lifting drilling moratoriums for his industry pals and weakening regulations, Bush gets the worst spot.
“This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” That’s what Barack Obama promised in 2008 upon winning the Democratic nomination. Seven years later, he’s returning to his pledge as he ponders his legacy and his final 500 days in office.
Was this really the moment when climate change reversed course? NationSwell asked dozens of scientists, historians, jurists, former EPA administrators, legislators and presidential candidates a simple question: How will future generations judge Barack Obama’s record on energy and the environment? Not surprisingly, the responses vary. Some were glowing (“Barack Obama is destined to go down as the greatest climate change-fighting president in history,” says Ed Chen, national communications director for the Natural Resources Defense Council), while others were hesitant to issue a verdict: “It’s a very unfinished climate legacy, full of steps forwards, sideways, and back,” says Bill McKibben, former staff writer at The New Yorker and founder of 350.org, a grassroots climate change movement.
Indeed, the 44th president faltered on environmental legislation in his first term, preferring to expend his political capital on the Affordable Care Act. But Obama’s use of regulatory authority and his agreement with China likely ensure his place in the pantheon of modern environmental champions.
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It’s taken nearly two full terms to bring his labors to fruition. Shortly after defeating Sen. John McCain in the race for the Oval Office, Obama set two bills in motion on which he would stake his legacy: the health care law in the upper chamber, and in the lower, a comprehensive environmental bill that included a market-based carbon cap-and-trade system and renewable energy standards, co-authored by Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat whose amendments strengthened the Clean Air Act in 1990.
In June 2009, Waxman’s bill narrowly passed the House by a vote of 219-212. “There was an apparent window of opportunity” in that moment, says D. James Baker, a scientist who headed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under Bill Clinton, but by December, “the administration was eager for a quick victory and opted for health care.” The climate change bill became Obama’s “stepchild,” a senior official told The New Yorker.
Offering concessions to earn goodwill from the Republican caucus, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) agreed to delay implementation of carbon regulations for another year. Soon after, the president announced huge sections of U.S. waters along the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico open for drilling and withdrew support for the versions of Waxman’s cap-and-trade bill being negotiated in the Democratic-led Senate.
“Whether with Obama’s support [a nationwide cap-and-trade law] could have happened is a good question,” says Baker, “but there is no question that the decision to back off was demoralizing to the environment and climate change community.” Days later, as oil bubbled up from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Democrats hung their heads in defeat. “The missing piece of his legacy is national climate change legislation, which he and Congress failed to pass,” says Kenneth Kimmel, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. MAKING USE OF REGULATION, NOT LEGISLATION
That’s not to say Obama failed completely during his first term. The 2009 stimulus bill designated $90 billion for a bevy of green initiatives: retrofitting homes for energy efficiency, fueling development in wind and solar power, modernizing the grid, training employees for green jobs, building high-speed rail, researching carbon capture for coal-burning plants and manufacturing cleaner cars.
“The stimulus package gave President Obama a chance to invest in renewables early in his first term, allowing him to make progress on the issues unlike most other recent presidents, who have been forced for political reasons to leave critical environmental issues to their second terms,” says Baker. If anything, the president’s preference for working outside the legislature set the standard for his later environmental accomplishments. After the bruising battle over healthcare and the Republican sweep of the 2010 midterm elections, Obama took the path of least resistance.
Waxman retired last year after 20 terms, but you can still sense his frustration with the gridlock that killed his legislation. In an email, he tells NationSwell that Congress “refuses to learn from the overwhelming scientific consensus on the dangers we are facing.” He applauded President Obama for circumventing the increasingly partisan legislature by using “the power to act domestically and internationally based on existing laws on the books, even without Congress passing new laws.” Bolstered by a Supreme Court ruling in 2007 that George W. Bush’s administration had shirked their duties, Waxman’s Clean Air Act amendments provided all the authority Obama needed.
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In the past month, much of the focus has been on the Clean Power Plan, which will reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants 32 percent by 2030. But that’s only the latest in a long series of administrative actions. During Obama’s first term, the EPA and the Department of Transportation set new fuel efficiency standards: All cars built after 2025 must get at least 54.5 miles per gallon. This summer, those same agencies proposed raising standards for medium-duty and heavy-duty vehicles as well. Despite litigation that’s made its way all the way to the Supreme Court, the EPA slashed the acceptable levels of ozone that clouds city skylines, mercury released by coal-fired plants and methane billowing from oil fields, landfills and farms. When it comes to conservation, Obama’s designated more land and water as national monuments under the Antiquities Act — 260 million acres total — than any other president.
In creating “the first-ever framework for the United States to achieve long-term emissions reductions,” says Richard Revesz, former dean of New York University School of Law, these achievements will outlast Obama’s two terms — regardless of whom the next president is. “Even if the Democrats lose the White House in 2017, the new greenhouse gas regulations will still need to be implemented,” says Steven Cohen, executive director of Columbia’s Earth Institute. Those guidelines, along with states’ actions, “will probably end the use of coal as a source of energy in the U.S.”
Despite the likely positive outcomes, several Republicans interviewed chastised the president for his reliance on regulations, instead of legislation. “It will be seen as a failure that he wasn’t able to get anything through that is enforceable,” says Christine Todd Whitman, the former New Jersey governor who was George W. Bush’s first appointee as EPA administrator. She argues that using the “heavy-handed tool” of the EPA “will make things more difficult for the agency going forward.”
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Others had even harsher words. “President Obama has dogmatically used energy as a political tool rather than a building block of renewed economic vibrancy,” says Mike Leavitt, former governor of Utah and Whitman’s successor as EPA administrator. Luke Popovich, spokesman for the National Mining Association, agrees. “He was the president who deepened the partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats over these crucial intersecting issues” of energy and the environment. CONFRONTING CLIMATE CHANGE HEAD ON
Perhaps because the president has been “hamstrung by politics,” as one historian phrased it, he’s not staking his legacy on any one bill or rule. Instead, as his recent photo-ops in Alaska demonstrates, Obama seems to be focusing on perceptions. His prominence on the global stage — including his role in negotiating the limited Copenhagen Accord in 2010 and the recent deal with China to curb their emissions by 2030 — “helped move the issue of global environmental sustainability to the center of the American and international political agenda,” says Cohen.
As the commander-in-chief prepares to convene with leaders from 196 countries to sign a treaty at the United Nations Climate Change Conference this December, his legacy on climate change “lies in his success in making climate change a central policy obligation,” says Carol M. Browner, Obama’s advisor who directed the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy from 2009 to 2011, when Waxman’s cap-and-trade bill foundered. If the president can get millions of Americans, industry and other stakeholders to think about it while also facing opposition from Congress, he’ll be remembered for changing how climate policy is developed and implemented.
As the effects of climate change become more visible, the challenges facing Obama aren’t disappearing like glaciers are. Perhaps surprisingly, some of the president’s loudest critics are on the left. They’re fuming over the Keystone XL pipeline and off-shore oil and gas exploration in the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans.
“With the president’s permission, Shell is now drilling for oil in the Alaskan Arctic, and his administration has authorized the future sale of 10.2 billion tons of coal,” says Annie Leonard, Greenpeace USA’s executive director. “It’s clear that President Obama is serious about cementing his climate legacy, but until he takes steps to ensure the vast majority of fossil fuels remain in the ground, his legacy is as vulnerable as an Arctic ice sheet.”
Contrary to what you hear from political candidates, cap and trade isn’t just a theory anymore. Its implementation won’t cause rolling blackouts or “catastrophic” spikes on energy bills, as naysayers like Sen. Marco Rubio warn, nor will it “throw countless people out of work,” as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush predicts; in fact, it will probably lower your electric bill.
Coast to coast, from California to New England, several states have already established working cap and trade models that successfully cut pollution without stifling economic growth. As the Environmental Protection Agency rolls out its final Clean Power Plan, which requires a 30 percent reduction in a state’s carbon footprint by 2030, even more parts of the country may join.
Back in 2009, a group of 10 Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states joined together in the first regional, market-based program to reduce large power plant carbon emissions. Known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (or RGGI, pronounced “Reggie”), the states account for one-sixth of America’s population and one-fifth of its gross domestic product. The consortium sets a limit on the carbon dioxide that can be emitted into the atmosphere — the “cap” — then auctions off the rights to pollute — the “trade.” It’s the same model brokered between conservationists and fiscal conservatives to deal with acid rain under President George H. W. Bush.
How has RGGI fared? Far better than expected. Over the past six years, emissions from electricity usage are down 40 percent from 2005 levels. According a third-party report (funded by four private foundations advocating sustainable energy), RGGI created $1.3 billion in economic benefits just in the last three years, primarily from customer rebates, efficiency improvements and 14,000 new jobs.
Not everyone is sharing the wealth, however. Power plant owners are expected to lose $500 million in revenue through 2025 from lower demand and the price of buying carbon allowances. These effects are partly attributable to a nationwide pivot toward renewable energy, shale gas replacing coal and general mindfulness about waste, but RGGI’s decline in emissions far outpaces the rest of the country, says Katie Dykes, a deputy commissioner for Connecticut’s Department of Energy & Environmental Protection.
“The centerpiece of RGGI’s program design, we auction the majority of our allowances for carbon. The proceeds from those allowance auctions are distributed among all nine states” — one dropped out — “then each state can invest the proceeds in a variety of programs that benefit customers,” Dykes tells NationSwell. “It accelerates this virtuous cycle. Taking these caps, we are generating proceeds and reinvesting in projects that are going to further reduce carbon emissions.”
Historically, economic growth was tied increased emissions: smoggy skies meant wider wallets. But RGGI’s proved those don’t need to be linked. In the Nutmeg State, for example, the Calabro Cheese Corp., a family-owned mozzarella, ricotta and grated parmesan manufacturer in East Haven, got a cut of the allowance proceeds for its 74,000-square-foot facility. Retrofitted lighting, replacement refrigeration motors and evaporator fans, repairs and better insulation all led to an annual reduction of 149,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity — enough power for about 13 homes — and monetary savings of $96,000 every year.
Trading within a larger regional market increases efficiency, Dykes adds. Plus, it’s a more accurate reflection of the way climate change works. Pollution from a coal-burning plant doesn’t hover above one building’s smokestacks; it diffuses into the atmosphere and alters the temperature of the entire globe.
Politics still prove to be an obstacle. Just look at Chris Christie, the Republican governor and presidential candidate from New Jersey, who withdrew his state from the program in late 2011. “RGGI amounted to nothing more than a tax on business that failed to achieve its goals,” a spokesperson for Christie tells NJ Advance Media. Critics “may look at that failed program as a missed opportunity to tax our state’s job creators and yearn to spend more of their money, but that’s simply not acceptable to this governor.”
Christie’s opponents are still furious that the state missed out on millions in savings. But with the EPA’s rules set for implementation, the Garden State and others may have a second chance at improving the air and their economies.
America’s most futuristic neighborhood is being built, perhaps surprisingly, in Texas.
Under construction in Austin, the Lone Star State’s liberal enclave, is a residential development boasting rooftop solar panels, electric vehicle charging stations and meters to measure the electricity usage of every appliance. Known as the Mueller neighborhood, the community is “smart grid experiment” where the Pecan Street research consortium brought together experts from universities and utilities alike to provide real-world data for one of the most important ecological questions of our time: How can we reduce our energy and water consumption?
“There was virtually no data available on appliance-level electric use. We were trying to determine if testing certain things out, like electric cars or home energy-management systems would affect people compared to how they used electricity before they got access to this stuff,” says Brewster McCracker, Pecan Street’s president and CEO. “There was not only no data on that but nothing on the market that would measure that. We spent a long time working with suppliers and configuring things to measure appliance use every minute 365 days a year.”
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Energy usage by homeowners and businesses fluctuates wildly, accounting for 41 percent of all consumption. To be more environmentally friendly, McCracken says, we need to think about reducing our use during peak times, as well as what will use less total energy. That’s why Pecan Street’s live data is so important for measuring exactly what appliances are putting heavy demands on the system. Its analytics can tell you that an electric vehicle charger puts the same load on the grid as a clothes dryer — both far less than an air conditioner. Previously, no one tested the kind of impact that a dozen electric vehicles on one block, let alone an entire neighborhood.
Through a mobile app, the research team informs customers of specific ways to reduce energy like, say, unplugging the microwave. Those suggestions have led to a 10 percent reduction in electricity use, McCracken, a former two-term member of the Austin city council, says. Overall, the Mueller neighborhood uses 38 percent less electricity on heating and cooling than their less green neighbors.
The stats help plan better infrastructure for an entire region. Conventional wisdom, for instance, holds that south-facing solar panels will absorb the most sunlight. Which is true generally, McCracken says, but energy companies should know that west-facing photovoltaic panels will absorb more energy during late summer afternoons when need is greatest, his team found.
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Additionally, Pecan Street can detect when something seems amiss on an individual home. “We found that people who have solar panels have minor maintenance issues, but they didn’t have any way to learn about them,” McCracken says. “By having that data, we were able to isolate the solar panels that are turned off. Other things could be more subtle. A single fuse that’s blown could produce at a reduced level. We have the data analytics running to detect that. It’s not something that you could stare at a rooftop or look at the electricity bill to see that happened, but better data helps.”
The research institute’s data collection has been so unique that other energy companies throughout the country have invited it to study their neighborhoods. Pecan Street now gathers stats from more than 1,200 homes, primarily clustered in Texas, Colorado and California, and ships the data out to 138 universities in 37 countries.
“We have strong reason to believe that access to better data and better information enhances our ability to solve problems,” McCracken says. “If we have better data on weather patterns, we can help people be safe in storms. If we have better data on car performance, we can make cars that work better.” With a hotter planet, drought in the West and superstorms along the East Coast, this Texan neighborhood couldn’t have arrived at a more opportune time.
“The first plant that changed my life was a tomato,” says Karen Washington, a black urban farmer in the Bronx. “It was the one fruit that I used to hate.” But after watching one that she’d grown shift in hue from green to yellow to red and taking a bite of it, she was instantly hooked. “When I tasted that tomato, when it was red and it was ripe, and I picked it off the vine, [it]…changed my world because I never tasted anything so good, so sweet. I wanted to grow everything.”
For a quarter century, all manner of trees and flowers, fruits and vegetables, have thrived across abandoned lots in the Bronx because of Washington. Deemed “the queen of urban farming,” she’s an African-American woman who’s dedicated her life to greening New York City’s poorest borough. Since 1985, Washington has assisted dozens of neighborhoods build their own community gardens, taught workshops on farming and promoted racial diversity in agriculture.
Your food “is not from a grocery store, it’s not from a supermarket. It’s grown in the ground,” she says. “You have to understand where your food comes from. It gives you power.”
A lifelong New Yorker, Washington grew up in a public housing project on the Lower East Side. She moved up to the Bronx in 1985 and bought herself a newly built home, which she viewed as, “an opportunity, as a single parent with two children, to live the American dream.” While some gentrification occurred, other parts of the low-income neighborhood looked “like a warzone,” dotted with abandoned buildings. Some of Washington’s windows looked onto an empty lot filled with garbage and rusting cars.
One day, she noticed a man walking by with a shovel and a pick — an unusual sight in Gotham’s concrete jungle. “What are you doing here?” Washington asked. He told her he was thinking about creating a community garden. “I said, ‘Can I help?’”
“I had no idea about gardening. I didn’t have a green thumb,” she recalls. Despite that, a city program that leased undeveloped lots for $1 gave Washington and her neighbors lumber, dirt and seeds, “and we gave them power — muscle power — and hopes and dreams to turn something that was devastating and ugly into something that was beautiful.” Within days, the first seeds of the Garden of Happiness and Washington’s lifelong activism were beginning to sprout.
Ever since, Washington has helped others in the Bronx locate empty neighborhood spaces that are prime real estate for something to blossom and led volunteers through the process of opening a community garden — earning her respect throughout the Big Apple and beyond. She holds positions on almost every board imaginable, including the New York Community Gardening Coalition, Just Food and the New York Botanical Garden. “Can you imagine, a little girl from the projects on the board of the New York Botanical Garden?” she asks in disbelief, her smiling face framed by her dreadlocks.
And then there was the time she met First Lady Michelle Obama. Washington describes feeling, “the elation of the spirits of my ancestors. I just felt them clapping and cheering, because here I was, a black woman, standing in the presence of the First Lady.”
Blooming with daffodils, tulips and hyacinth, the original purpose of Washington’s first community garden — the Garden of Happiness — and others like it was “beautification,” Washington says, “about taking away the garbage” from a disadvantaged minority community. Only later did she start to think about greenery beyond being decoration or as a food source. “When I first started initially in the food movement, I was focused on growing food. It wasn’t until I was in that community garden that I started hearing social issues like low employment, poor health, people who couldn’t afford rents,” Washington says. She learned she had to “feed people’s body and mind.”
To promote equity and fairness, she’s recently been focusing on boosting the number of African Americans in agriculture through BUGs — or Black Urban Growers. The most recent agricultural census figures show 55,346 farmers in the Empire State are white and only 113 are black.
It’s always been a dream of Washington’s to purchase land upstate for a farm, but every time she counted all the zeros in the real estate listings, it seemed impossible. Drawing on her connections, Washington met a businessman interested in launching a farming co-operative in Chester, N.Y. They started growing veggies on three acres of black dirt in January. Located just an hour from the city, Washington hopes the rural-urban relationship will help African-Americans have a better understanding of how food systems work and have a chance to participate.
“Farming’s in our DNA, but [we] never have that conversation, always being pushed to the side as the consumer or the person with their hand out, never the type with their hand in the conversation,” Washington says. “There’s no agriculture without culture, so having people understand that slavery was part of our life, it doesn’t define who we are. … [We’re] trying to have people understand that. Don’t be afraid to put your hands in the soil, don’t be afraid to garden or farm because that’s who you are.”
They’ve been called an “unholy alliance” and “strange bedfellows,” and it’s partly true: Debbie Dooley, a Tea Party firebrand, is solar power’s most unlikely ally.
A lifetime campaign operative for the Republican Party and an organizer of the first nationwide Tea Party protests in 2009, Dooley is making some very persuasive arguments for why conservatives should support renewable energy. She’s reached across the aisle to form the Green Tea Coalition, breaking with Republican candidates she says are in the energy sector’s pocket. By teaming up with progressive groups like the Sierra Club, Dooley is taking on a utility and fighting to bring solar power to the Sunshine State.
Dooley’s reasons for selecting clean energy as her pet project may sound somewhat trite — her baby grandson became an in-the-flesh reminder of the urgent necessity of conserving the planet for future generations — but her reason for supporting solar power is fresh. Unlike liberals who tout the environmental benefits of solar’s clean technology, Dooley makes her argument based on Tea Party mainstays like free market economics and self-sufficiency.
A New Orleans native and a preacher’s daughter, Dooley’s always been involved in politics, usually of the right-wing brand. Fifty miles north of The Big Easy, her grandfather ran a popular gas station and became well-known in political circles as a “power broker,” she says. “When someone ran for political office, they always paid him a visit.” Dooley spent much of her childhood at political events, accompanying him to rallies and town hall meetings.
She got involved in her first serious campaign as a high school senior in Montgomery, Ala., staffing the phone bank and canvassing door-to-door during Ronald Reagan’s first attempt at the presidency. When she moved to Georgia at the tail end of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, she became an active member of the state’s Republican party.
But it’s policy, not party, that matters to Dooley. She’s unafraid to call out politicians on both sides when they shy away from their principles. Her interest in founding the Tea Party — when the “teapot started boiling,” she says — was prompted by disappointment with President George W. Bush’s policies, particularly the Wall Street bailouts. “I began to feel like the Republican Party had lost its way. They began to be the party of big spenders,” she explains. She co-founded of the Atlanta Tea Party, and she’s still on the board of directors for the national Tea Party Patriots.
“Debbie is somebody that has a lot of integrity in the positions that she takes,” says Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), a nonpartisan energy watchdog group, since 1993. “She will point out inconsistencies where there are conservatives that are on the financial take from utilities and fossil fuel companies. Debbie is an absolute watchdog on the political right when conservatives start taking positions that aren’t true to conservative values.”
In 2012, Dooley won her first victories for solar power before the Georgia Public Service Commission, the regulatory authority for the energy utility. Competition is virtually nonexistent in the utility business because there’s no need to construct multiple overlapping grids (a neighborhood only needs one set of power lines), and shakeups are rare. To ensure there’s no blackouts and that customers get a fair price, utilities are monitored — and often protected — by government. In Georgia, the state had a number of laws on the books that stifled better technology. Essentially, “If I purchase electricity, I must purchase it from this government-created monopoly,” Dooley explains. She promised that expanding access to solar would create “competition and choice,” two values that persuaded the commission to open the market.
In Florida, Dooley faces a similar battle, but against an even stronger opponent. Florida Power & Light has huge influence over legislators, killing some bills before they ever reach the floor for a debate and, along with three other utilities, spending $12 million on Florida’s legislative races since 2010. The Sunshine State is one of only five states that forces consumers to buy electricity from a utility, meaning a resident can’t install a solar array and sell the excess power to neighbors or lease panels from a solar company to reduce up-front costs. That power — Dooley calls it “corruption” — is why she’s asking voters to pass a constitutional amendment tearing down barriers to supplying local solar power. (NationSwell reached out to Florida Power & Light for comment, but did not receive a response.)
“It shall be the policy of the state to encourage and promote local small-scale solar-generated electricity production and to enhance the availability of solar power to customers,” the measure reads. “This section is intended to accomplish this purpose by limiting and preventing regulatory and economic barriers that discourage the supply of electricity generated from solar.”
In an early telephone poll of 600 registered voters in Florida (commissioned by SACE and executed by North Star Opinion Research), nearly three quarters of voters said they would support a proposal to amend the current law to allow solar companies to install panels at no up-front cost and sell the power to the resident. More than half — 54 percent — believed their average monthly electricity bill was too high.
Dooley’s “been a very strong voice from the beginning. She recognized the tremendous national significance of opening the Sunshine State to solar. There, the utilities have an absolute stranglehold on the market. It has enormous potential but it continues to underperform,” says Smith, who also serves on the board of Floridians for Solar Choice. “There’s a lot of issues that Debbie and I disagree on, but on opening markets for solar power, we’re in lockstep. There’s no daylight between our positions there.”
Her campaign has already collected over 100,000 signatures in the first five weeks, Dooley says, but it needs several hundred thousand more to qualify for the election and the Florida Supreme Court’s approval of the ballot text, which the utility has promised to challenge.
Dooley couldn’t have chosen a better proving ground to test her ideas. The fourth largest state, Florida has a huge energy market powering homes for 19.9 million residents. But unlike other massive states — California, New York and Texas — Florida is a swing state. Her proposition will likely appear on the November 2016 ballot, downticket from the race that will decide Obama’s successor. If she’s successful, the Sunshine State’s expansion of solar power would be a beacon of bipartisan unity, potentially igniting a movement across the nation.
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