The state of Rhode Island is on track to make climate progress through new legislation. We talk with an expert on what is going on in the Ocean State. Note the upcoming opportunity to get involved on March 8.

Buildings like your home emit significant greenhouse gases. Better building codes could make new homes green, with #netzero carbon emissions. The new state roadmap for 2030 and 2050 calls for aggressive building codes, but MA DOER recently proposed revisions that fall short of mark

ISO-NE (whoever they are) extended the life of the obsolete MOPR rule (whatever that stands for.) The decision makes it harder for renewable energy systems to get on the grid for several more years- thru 2025 and 2026. Why and how was this decision made?  Follow our guest down the rabbit hole of the FERC Docket E22-391. Instead of the Mad Hatter, we encounter the Internal Market Monitor and the External Market Monitor who collectively monitor…stuff.  

The people who manage New England’s electrical grid seem to have rigged important auctions to favor fossil fuel interests.  The alphabet soup of committees and commissions make it hard to understand, but ISO-NE should rescind the MOPR, and FERC should make them. Listen to hear an expert de-mystify that jargon. You can email FERC at customer@ferc.gov

A new peer reviewed study shows that methane leaks in environmental justice communities take longer to repair than in other communities. What can be done to lessen this inequity? Listen to the report’s authors discuss some pragmatic recommendations.

Gas leaks at the distribution level (that is, under your street) are related to overlapping issues.  Activists recognize methane as a greenhouse gas leaking from long-lived infrastructure, but real people live with immediate impacts. By matching leak location data to a community’s population characteristics, a recent paper provides new facts. The observations are not surprising- environmental justice communities live with larger leaks that wait longer for repair. We speak to the authors of the paper to learn more.

Massachusetts released two revised climate policies recently. They are each meaningful even if somewhat imperfect steps forward. They should be viewed in light of the decade long process of making the 2030 climate roadmap a success. Climate activists need to pay attention to the proposals and provide good feedback to the state as it tries to follow the roadmap to a clean future.

Here in Massachusetts, the fossil fuel lobby is pursuing its annual scare campaign about methane supplies, conjuring up images of Texas style blackouts. If you look past the hyperbole, there is an industry desperate to maintain its profits at the expense of people and planet.  On the other hand, a recent study confirmed a truly scary, if common sense, expectation: the gas stove in your kitchen is leaking, at least in the moment you turn on the burner if not continuously from loose piping connections. Pollution in your kitchen is more real and frightening than the freeze-in-the-dark scenarios painted by gas apologists. 

Putin’s saber rattling on the Ukrainian border is tied up with climate issues like the use of methane gas. 

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) recently issued a statement saying that they “likely erred in siting the Weymouth Compressor Station” but that there was no  “legal basis to prevent the Weymouth Compressor Station from entering service.” Wut? How did we get here? And what comes next? We talk to a longtime activist for the full story.