Coalition Going Broke

After an uncomfortable silence, Meehan did a quick update on the Coalition’s fundraising efforts for the cause. Two months ago the Executive Committee sent out word to all of its member towns and Villages to send cash to help pay for the effort to force the EPA to reverse its decision to allow the City of New York a ten year waiver from filtering its water instead of the five year waiver that was proposed.
Leafing through papers, he found that only a couple of communities have responded to the call, including Olive, which pledged $2000. Shandaken has not pledged anything, but earlier this month Supervisor Robert Cross Jr. suggested the town could only afford to give $500, even though the town board never entertained the matter.
“The money’s really rolling in,” Meehan said sarcastically.
All eyes shifted to Treasurer Len Utter, the crewcut Middletown supervisor, who was looking over the Coalitions financial records.
“We have enough to pay it, barely,” he said.
To dilute the Coalition’s gloomy financial fix, Meehan described a recent meeting he had with Emily Lloyd, the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. At breakfast in Newburgh, Meehan said, he and Lloyd discussed several issues surrounding the lawsuit. While he refused to reveal specifics, Meehan suggested that the session was a fruitful one.
He noted that a prime topic was the idea of agreeing that the City should agree to fund watershed programs for 10 years, to match the new 10-year Filtration Avoidance Determination being granted it by the federal EPA, and what the amount of funding should be. While preparing for the five year waiver last year, the Coalition developed a funding schedule for a five year period because that was the timeframe proposed. A last minute announcement that the waiver would be ten years blindsided the advocacy group, Meehan said.
The Executive Committee then went into Executive Session to discuss the lawsuit after Meehan claimed the details of his negotiations should not be made public.
Another issue is that the Coalition believes the EPA is allowing the City to buy too much land in the watershed region over the agreed-on 10 year period. Also, the Coalition believes, the Federal EPA was supposed to hand off the decision making to the New York State Department of Health, but EPA has instead maintained control over the issue.
In the lawsuit the Coalition seeks the following: Incorporation of comments made by municipalities within the watershed with respect to those municipalities; The holding of hearings on flooding within the watershed and in adjoining areas; A requirement that the City of New York open up its lands within the watershed for recreational purposes on par with the lands owned by the State of New York, except for land that should be protected as a result of legitimate security public safety concerns; the requirement that the City of New York create voids within its reservoirs to take into account the effects of rain and melting snow: and requiring the City of New York to fund the Coalition of Watershed Towns in an amount adequate to establish an ombudsmen program run by the Coalition to advocate for municipal needs... and keep it from going broke.

Cataclysmic Changes

“Confronting Climate Change in the U.S. Northeast,” officially released on July 11, is plain-spoken in its doomsday message, with its only lightness coming in a choice between a “Higher-Emissions Scenario,” as seems currently likely, and a “Lower-Emissions Scenario” alternative should mitigation efforts start in the immediate future on a wide-scale basis. Those choices, the report points out, focus on ways we utilize energy, transportation, and overall land-use as a tool to tempering the extent and severity of climate changes the scientific community is currently seeing as inevitable.
. “Global warming represents an enormous challenge, but we can meet it if we act swiftly,” said Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at UCS and chair of the NECIA team, in a press release accompanying the new report’s release last Wednesday. “Our response to global warming in the next few years will shape the climate our children and grandchildren inherit.”
The Union of Concerned Scientists began as a collaboration between students and faculty members at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969 and is now an alliance of more than 200,000 citizens and scientists generally respected, in its own words, as “the reliable source for independent scientific analysis… in both Washington, DC, and state capitals.”
Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment is overseen by leading scientists working at Harvard University, the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, and the University of Illinois.
Their new report looks at general effects throughout the Northeast along with state-by-state analyses of current trends and mitigation scenarios. A series of dramatic graphics accompanying the report show maps of the region shifting down the eastern seaboard as climate changes, with our area taking on the weather patterns of Maryland, then Virginia, and eventually central Georgia should things not change.
“Winters in the Northeast could warm by 8°F to 12°F and summers by 6°F to 14°F above historic levels by late this century,” the report notes. “But under the lower-emission scenario, temperatures during Northeast winters are projected to warm only 5°F to 8°F above historic levels by late-century, and summers by just 3°F to 7°F. Similarly, with global sea level conservatively projected to rise 10 to 23 inches under the higher-emissions scenario and 7 to 14 inches under the lower-emissions scenario, new flooding patterns are expected all the way up the Hudson to Albany, not to forget major impacts in the New York City area.
Other key impacts outlined include major cuts in what remains of the region’s dairy industry, based on losses in cow’s milk production due to increased heat; major losses to fruit harvests and maple syrup production, as well as major weed and pest problems; retreating shorelines on Long Island and Cape Cod, and a possible lock of the Island of Nantucket; and a collapse of the greater region’s fishing industry.
Droughts of one to three are pegged to become more normal each summer in the Catskills, with corresponding flooding from increased rain on top of snowfall each winter.
Key to economic considerations for our own region are projected impacts on the winter sports industry that currently supports tourism in the Catskills, as well as those traveling up and down the Thruway.
“Under the higher-emissions scenario, only western Maine is projected to retain a reliable ski season by the end of the century, and only northern New Hampshire would support a snowmobiling season longer than two months,” reads the report. “Under the lower-emissions scenario, reliable ski seasons can be expected through this century in the North Country of New York and parts of Vermont and New Hampshire, in addition to western Maine.”
As evidence of the climate changes it is predicting, and hoping governmental and business entities start taking note of in their future planning processes, the report notes that temperatures have been warming half a degree Fahrenheit per decade since 1970, with winter temperatures going up 1.3 degrees F over that same period. In addiotion, they point out significant hikes in the number of days with temperatures over 90 degrees F in recent years, longer growing seasons, “less winter precipitation falling as snow and more as rain,” earlier breakup of winter ice on lakes and rivers, earlier spring snowmelt, and rising sea surface temperatures and sea levels.
The scenarios the report outlines “represent strikingly different emissions choices that societies may make,” while simultaneously noting that refusals to change patterns on a global basis could result in scenarios even worse than those outlined.
A simultaneous report issued early this week noted the failure of our nation’s southern states, for example, to start looking at alternative fuels for its energy consumption, as well as continuing delay on the part of the Bush administration to work wityh other countries on the acknowledged problems.
“This report accentuates information that’s been coming into public consciousness more and more and demonstrates that there are going to be serious economic repercussions, as well as ecological and lifestyle impacts, from what is occurring,” said Ned Sullivan, Eceutive Director of Scenic Hudson in regards to the new report this week. “It’s critical that government and organizations and individuals identify strategies to both head it off and begin to adapt to these impacts.”
Sullivan noted that much of the current information was brought up at a Hudson Valley Climate Change conference hosted by the state Department of Environmental Conservation and other organizations in Poughkeepsie last December, as well as new Governor Spitzer’s recently announced creation of an expanded 12-person DEC Division on Climate Change headed by former American Lung Association executive Peter Iwanowicz as signs of changing perceptions.
Yet he added that much more needed to be done, oat all levels.
“We are looking at each of our program areas to see how we can better work to effect major changes,” said Sullivan, pointing out how all waterfront development needs closer scrutiny in terms of Climate Change now. What is currently shoreline, or estuary wetlands serving a buffer function, neededs to be reimagined at a higher altitude, he said. Similarly, infrastructure such as wastewater treatment plants, docks, and fuel storage tanks will eventually need to be moved… along with our rail lines, most probably.
“The trains have a very challenging time ahead of them,” he said, raising an issue not even touched upon much in the new Climate Change reports.
Calls to local ski resort owners and managers throughout the region last winter, when warm temperatures pushed the industry’s number of active skiing days below the 100 day mark most see as the cutoff for profitability, saw most saying it was a problem they’d deal with… eventually.
90-year old Hunter Mountain owner Orville Slutsky spoke about the problems lying as much with perception as snowmaking ability. If people don’t think they’re in a winter area, and start thinking like folks in the south, they’ll stop thinking of heading out for the region’s day-use-oriented ski areas. Worse, if people aren’t even headed up the Thruway to Vermont, and only flying to their ski destinations, the entire winter tourism bubble is likely to be burst, he added last winter.
State-owned Belleayre Mountain manager Tony Lanza, meanwhile, said he didn’t want to even discuss Climate Change, seeing it as “a political issue” that he wished would just go away.
This past week, when asked about the new report, longtime Bvelleayre supporter Joe Kelly – a Long Islander in the news of late as Greene County’s ski areas, and politicians, started requesting that the state stop competing with their private businesses for dwindling ski industry dollars – said, simply, “That report should put Hunter and Windham at ease about competition from Belleayre...”
Yet all is not quite so dire, even though the impacts discussed in the new report have not yet entered local political debate outside the Town of Woodstock, which recently passed a referendum promising to make itself “Carbon Neutral” within the coming decade.
“Although the task of reducing emissions may seem daunting, the nation achieved a similarly rapid energy transformation only a century ago as it shifted from gaslights and buggies to electricity and cars over a few short decades,” the new report concludes. Decision makers can help the region adapt through policies and management actions that reduce our exposure to climate risks such as catastrophic flooding and also increase the ability of vulnerable sectors and communities to cope with ongoing changes and recover from extreme events or disasters. For each adaptation measure considered, policy makers and managers must carefully assess the potential barriers, costs, and unintended social and environmental consequences.”
A big order, in other words. But doable.
“The very character of the Northeast is at stake,” it wraps up. “The time to act is now.”
For more on what’s predicted, as well as what’s being proscribed, the new report and a complete list of collaborating scientists and economists are available at www.climatechoices.org/ne/resources_ne/nereport.html.