Climate 411

Chicago Transit Authority has laid off 1,067 workers and has drastically cut service. Photo courtesy of Flickr user: TheeErin

Over the last several months, we’ve written occasionally about the need to solve the impending transit funding crisis. For longer than that, we’ve worked around the country, but especially in California and New York, to find new and innovative ways to advance transit service. Lately, we’ve also implored Congress to provide emergency funding to keep drivers employed as legislators have considered jobs bills. 

So far, our efforts as well as the work of our allies, to keep drivers driving, mechanics working, the transit system available—and ultimately keep some of the worst tailpipe emissions in check—have been frustratingly unsuccessful.   

New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and countless other metropolitan regions are facing a transit disaster. Grappling with huge budget deficits as a result of public funding cuts, transit agencies are slashing service, laying off workers, and raising fares.  

• In New York City, the Metropolitan Transportation Agency, which operates the city’s buses and subways, as well as suburban rail lines, bridges and tunnels, is facing an $800 million deficit as a result of cuts in state aid and low payroll tax revenues. They expect to layoff 1,130 employees (out of their 70,000 person staff), including 500 station agents. The MTA has ended free fares for students and has reduced salaries by 10%.
• In Chicago, the Chicago Transit Authority has laid off 1,067 employees in order to balance a $300 million deficit.
• In San Francisco, the city expects to see a second fare increase in 4 months in order to balance a $12.1 million deficit, with additional service cuts. SFMTA plans to lay off 230 employees, 175 of which are bus and Muni metro drivers. 
• In Washington, D.C., where trains are bursting during rush hour, WMATA plans to lay off 60 employees and eliminate another 90 positions that are not filled. They also expect service cuts and fare increases to fill their $40 million budget gap.
• Just this weekend, in Sacramento, CA, the local newspaper reported that the regional transit agency is planning to put 300 workers on notice that they’ll likely be laid off as the agency grapples with a two-year $25 million deficit. Service after 8pm and on weekends could be cut as well. This deficit has been made worse as a result of state policymakers’ decision last year to shift the state fuel tax, designated for transit operations, to other important state services, which have been jeopardized by the overall state budget crisis.

And here’s an example of how these cuts add up, changing people’s commuting choices. Quoted from the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco resident MPR Howard, who has lived in San Francisco and ridden Muni for 28 years, will now be back behind the wheel:  

I will not be renewing my Muni disabled pass…. I will be putting my 45-year-old car (a 1965 Dodge Dart) back on the road. She may not be pretty or environmentally clean, but at least she gets me from point A to point B in a reasonable amount of time. I’ve given up on Muni. 

Confirmed U.S. Public Transportation Industry Layoffs, 2009-2010

* = Transit Manufacturer

** = Rescinded after passage of 10% provision in supplemental appropriations bill

Projected Upcoming Layoffs

 Prepared by the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Legislative Department. Updated March 1, 2010.  For more information, contact Jeff Rosenberg at jeffr@atu.org, courtesty of Scott Bogren at the Community Transportation Association of America (bogren@ctaa.org).   

Starting this Tuesday, we asked you to call your senators and demand clean energy legislation. We joined up with several other groups and challenged you to get as many calls in as possible within 72 hours.

You have already surpassed our greatest hopes by absolutely flooding the Senate: We believe we’ve collectively, across the whole campaign, sent more than 200,000 calls in to the Senate over the last 48 hours.  And we’re not done yet — the campaign ends tonight.

We’ve been busy here in D.C. working to get strong clean energy legislation passed. Our biggest weapon is your voice, so keep those phones ringing!

(And after you’ve called,  share this link with your friends and family.)

Archimedes said “Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the earth,” when explaining the principle of levers.

Leverage is the big news about Walmart’s announcement today. The company has committed to reducing 20 million metric tons of carbon pollution from its products lifecycle and supply chain over the next five years. That’s equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions from 3.8 million cars.

So is Walmart moving the earth? No, not yet. But this is precisely the kind of innovative approach to reducing carbon pollution that we need right now. Environmental Defense Fund worked closely with Walmart to craft this goal and project that makes the most of what Walmart can uniquely do to cut carbon pollution across the globe.

This commitment is bold because:

• Walmart’s supply chain is where the action is. It’s the biggest possible lever that Walmart could bring to the table. Walmart will work with suppliers to reduce their emissions – which they otherwise might not do – resulting in positive ripple effects around the globe.
• It prioritizes the biggest opportunities. Walmart is looking at the products that create the most carbon emissions across their lifecycles – as well as products that are top sellers – and focusing on those first.
• It gets carbon pollution reductions now. There’s no waiting for the United States or the world to act.
• It will likely reach ten of thousands of companies around the globe – companies that would not be required to reduce emissions by national or international regulatory proposals but will greatly benefit from energy efficiency efforts.
• It adds to a drumbeat of clear messaging to suppliers from Walmart that they need to reduce carbon pollution. This commitment follows the Sustainability Index, Product Innovation work with Private Brands and other initiatives.
• It’s good for business and good for customers. This project is about Walmart and its suppliers working hand-in-hand to find ways to drive carbon and energy – and cost – out of the supply chain. Walmart customers care about America’s energy future. They see tangible value from carbon reductions every time a lower carbon product costs less or uses dramatically less energy once they get it home.

Two kinds of change: Simple but big and transformational
In this project we will look at two different kinds of opportunities. The first opportunities are simple and relatively small changes that, when coupled with Walmart’s scale, become big reductions. The other opportunities are more transformational, where we dive deep and engage an industry or consumers to fundamentally change products or their uses.

DVD packaging is an example of a simple change that adds up because of Walmart’s scale.

A couple of years ago, Walmart asked one of its DVD suppliers – 20th Century Fox – to be a part of a pilot for our project. They made simple changes to make DVD packaging lighter, which cut energy use by 28% and reduced the lifecycle carbon emissions of DVDs sold to Walmart by about 25,000 tons. It had a big multiplier effect, too, because the lighter packages were also used on DVDs sold at other stores, and the change evolved from movies to video games and software too. Small change – big cumulative effect.

One of the other pilot projects Walmart tried was milk. This is an example of a project that falls into the category of industry transformation. Agriculture contributes 8% of the total U.S. carbon footprint, and the dairy industry is a significant contributor. At Walmart’s request, several dairy suppliers analyzed the costs and emissions associated with a gallon of milk, from dairy farm to distribution center. By gathering and looking at the data, we found many opportunities to reduce emissions – at farms through changes in fertilizer and manure management, at dairy processing facilities through improved energy efficiency and even in the product itself, such as making milk shelf-stable.

Some of these changes are now underway at one of Walmart’s suppliers, Dean Foods. We’re estimating that this one supplier alone can reduce CO2 emissions by 300,000 tons overall by 2015. If these changes were adopted throughout the dairy industry, we estimate that we could see over 2 million tons of greenhouse gas reductions in the same period.

Will this be easy? To put it simply: No. Looking deep into the supply chain and across product lifecycles for carbon pollution reduction wins is uncharted territory. The cross-organizational team working on this project has spent months creating a detailed guidance document about what can count towards Walmart’s goal, as well as how reductions should be quantified and confirmed. We’re committed to making this project as transparent as possible and will be publicly releasing the guidance document within a month for anyone who wishes to comment or share ideas.

Walmart’s action today won’t eliminate the need for a national and global cap on carbon pollution. These caps are absolutely necessary. We can’t solve our pollution problems without them. But negotiations take time, and while the clock keeps ticking, carbon pollution keeps building up in our atmosphere. Today, Walmart has shown that is it not waiting to act to reduce global carbon pollution.

Read more about Walmart’s commitment and view the webcast of the announcement.

Originally posted on Environmental Defense Fund’s Innovation Exchange blog.

While Washington was buried under several feet of snow, we all needed some entertainment. Fortunately, leaders of the anti-science movement were happy to provide it.  Sen. DeMint (R-SC) said: “It’s going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries ‘uncle,'” while Sen Inhofe (R-OK) built an igloo dubbed “Al Gore’s New Home.” Sean Hannity reported “it’s the most severe winter storm in years, which would seem to contradict Al Gore’s hysterical global warming theories.”

I suppose it doesn’t matter to them that the National Academy of Science and all major scientific organizations who have studied the question have concluded that pollution is causing changes to our climate.  Or that there is some evidence that climate change could make blizzards like this more common, even as the world continues to warm. According to TIME:

“Hotter air can hold more moisture, so when a storm gathers it can unleash massive amounts of snow. Colder air, by contrast, is drier; if we were in a truly vicious cold snap, like the one that occurred over much of the East Coast during parts of January, we would be unlikely to see heavy snowfall.”

One day’s weather does not define our climate. It’s one slide in the filmstrip — meaningful when strung together, but relatively uninformative on its own. (See our previous post on this.) That is why it is so important to follow the scientists unearthing past weather, recording present weather and modeling future weather — a theme The Colbert Report and the Daily Show picked up in their shows last week.

Unfortunately, some people are attempting to exploit the recent snow to mislead the public about a carbon cap. There’s an ad attacking Congressmen Boucher (D-VA) and Perriello (D-VA) for voting for the House climate bill. Far from “kill[ing] tens of thousands of Virginia jobs,” this bill would bolster the Virginian and American economies. LessCarbonMoreJobs.org shows just shy of 100 Virginian companies — already employing over 16,000 — are poised to grow under a carbon cap. That’s just one snapshot of the United States could achieve with climate legislation.