TCCPI is a multisector collaboration seeking to leverage the climate action commitments made by Cornell University, Ithaca College, Tompkins Cortland Community College, Tompkins County, the City of Ithaca, and the Town of Ithaca to mobilize a countywide energy efficiency effort and accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy. Launched in June 2008 and generously supported by the Park Foundation, TCCPI is a project of the Sustainable Markets Foundation.

New buildings — both residential and commercial — will need to achieve six points to secure a certificate of occupancy. For example, under "efficient electrification," a commercial building can get three points for ground source heat pumps and one more point for electric stoves and ventless heat pump clothes dryers, with a prerequisite being no fossil fuels in the building. Since the August 2019 draft, one awardable point was added for kitchen equipment electrification (vs. gas stoves and the like), and scoring was added for on-site electric vehicle infrastructure.

Public comments at the start of the meeting were mixed and lasted close to an hour. Cornell Facilities expressed concern about impacts on the energy use and needs for its research buildings. Members of the Sunrise Movement pushed for a more stringent green building policy, with quicker ramp-up of the more rigorous standards and no fossil fuel use in new buildings. A petition also advocating for more stringent energy standards was submitted, with about 125 signatures. Hector Chang of Bike Walk Tompkins advocated a strengthening of walkability and greater emphasis on bicycling and mass transit prioritization.

"What was progressive in 2018 maybe isn't as much in 2021...realizing how urgent the fight against climate change is, I would like to speed (that timeline) up," said Murtagh. Councilor Donna Fleming (D-3rd) asked about the current state of New York's electricity grid, which Goldsmith and consulting engineer Ian Shapiro of Taitem contended had become much cleaner in the past ten years and will become even cleaner as multiple large-scale solar and wind projects are brought online in the next several years.

Shapiro, however, cautioned against the immediate adoption of the 2025 standards for new buildings. "It would be easier to keep the existing proposal and accelerate it modestly, rather than take 2025 and do it now," said Shapiro. "I'm sympathetic to that accelerating, but it would take a redesign [of the code] and slow us down."

Councilor Laura Lewis (D-5th) asked whether the 2025 guidelines could be moved up to 2023, when the grid would be cleaner and time for a dry run to make sure the code works as intended could be incorporated. While she was in favor of some acceleration, she was not sure if right away was a good idea due to concerns about affordability and equity.

"I'd be open to advancing it by two or three years. That gives us time as code inspectors and developers to get used to it and prepare for the change. It is more feasible," said Goldsmith. "I support that strategy."

Councilor Cynthia Brock (D-1st Ward) was somewhat more reluctant about the IECS. She supported 2022 or 2023, but was concerned about impacts on commercial buildings. Shapiro said they were expecting costs to come down, but it was a factor in why there was a ramp-up period to 2025. Brock further expressed concern that professional developers might be able to navigate the code more easily than homeowners just looking to expand a kitchen or add something like an in-law apartment.

There was clearly enough support among council for an accelerated timeline to move up the 2025 ramp-up to 2022 or 2023, but not necessarily enough support to carry out an immediate ramp-up. There also didn't seem to be much support for raising the mandatory point minimum.

The PEDC clearly wanted more time to digest its options, given the wide range of public commenters and emails submitted about the IECS. Consequently, it decided to meet as a "Committee of the Whole" with an invitation to the entire Common Council for its March 17th meeting to discuss the IECS further.

Editor's Note: The 2020 New York ISO Annual Grid and Market Report, "The Vision for a Greener Grid," indicates that the Upstate grid in 2019 was 88 percent decarbonized, including nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, and other renewables. See the chart "Tale of Two Grids" on p. 9.

Due to the current pandemic, the monthly TCCPI meetings have moved online. Contact Peter Bardaglio, the TCCPI coordinator, for further details at pbardaglio@gmail.com.

Finger Lakes ReUse signed a six-month lease in August in order to provide much-needed space for materials and immediate paid job training opportunities in direct response to rising community needs due to COVID-19, said Executive Director Diane Cohen. As she explained, when the pandemic first hit in March, all ReUse locations (two at the time) stopped accepting donations, finally resuming in August.

“The material offered to us every year is usually a little more than we can handle, and because we had that pause, … we knew it was going to be just this tsunami of material,” she said. “Within 30 days, we packed that warehouse with usable materials. And it’s really been helpful for us to absorb the shock once we reopened donation drop-off spots.”

As far as the job training side of the new location, the pilot Training Center program — supported by Tompkins County, the Park Foundation, CCE-Tompkins, the Triad Foundation, the Legacy Foundation of Tompkins County, the Community Foundation of Tompkins County and an anonymous donor — was created in large part to help those negatively affected by the pandemic.

“What we were trying to do is create more opportunities for people who were seeing fewer opportunities and sliding deeper into economic distress,” Cohen said. “It’s a training ground that actually generates some revenue. … Our trainees are actually helping put materials on the shelves.”

With this Training Center, ReUse will be able to provide opportunities for skill building and developing career pathways for employment in fields like green energy, according to the press release.

Cohen also expressed gratitude for how much ReUse has been able to grow over the past year, going from almost 50 employees to nearly 80 and from two locations at the start of the year to four now (its second Triphammer Marketplace location, ReUse Community Hardware, opened adjacent to the Triphammer ReUse Center this spring).

Cohen said that ReUse will also be focusing its 2021 efforts on increasing the awareness of the importance of reuse.

“We’re demonstrating that reuse actually works really well for people in both good economic times and more challenging ones,” she said. “And so, there’s a real need for access to affordable materials. I don’t think any of us, even those of us who work in this industry, understand the actual volume of locally potentially available reusable materials that are going into private dumpsters all over the county every day.”

And even farther into the future, ReUse is hoping to lead by example and provide a model that other communities can use.

“I’m hoping that Finger Lakes ReUse can be a strong demonstration project for other communities to consider adopting,” Cohen said. “It’s not rocket science. There are some complexities to it. The good news is that Finger Lakes ReUse is willing to share everything we’ve learned in order to further this emerging reuse industry that I think New York state could be a real leader in.”

Navigators will learn about programs and incentives that can help homeowners and renters cut down on their energy consumption and bills, and reduce their carbon footprint. Topics include understanding utility bills, home energy efficiency, renewable heating, solar energy, transportation alternatives, and more.

Applications are due Friday, March 19 and online training begins on Wednesday, April 14. For more information and to apply, click here, or contact Emily Belle at eb773@cornell.edu or (607) 272-2292 x262.

The U.S. on February 19 officially rejoined the Paris climate agreement, reversing former President Trump's decision in 2017 to withdraw from the international accord at the end of 2020. President Biden signaled this change in direction on his first day in office when he signed an executive order putting the U.S. back on the path to once again become a member of the agreement, which is a multilateral effort to curb the effects of climate change. Nearly 200 member countries have agreed to the treaty.

Adoption of the Paris climate agreement on December 12, 2015. Photo by UNclimatechange licensed under CC-BY-2.0.

The climate agreement was adopted at COP 21 in Paris on December 12, 2015 and entered into force on November 4, 2016 with a goal of limiting global warming to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. In fact, warming beyond 1.5 degrees, scientists have warned, could trigger runaway climate change.

Under the terms of the accord, each nation set its own greenhouse gas emissions targets with a goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050. Countries agreed to establish finance programs and share resources with those countries that needed support. At the signing in 2016, the U.S. announced its target was to reduce emissions by 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

Critics of the agreement have pointed to the lack of mandated standards and the relatively modest goals set by most nations as insufficient to head off the worst of the climate crisis. Needless to say, the exit of the U.S. from the accord — the only country to renounce the treaty after adopting it — increased the probability that climate-driven catastrophes would accelerate across the globe. Now that the U.S. is rejoining the accord, it is expected to establish a new target for 2030. Calls are mounting for at least a 50 percent reduction in emissions by then.

The widespread blackouts in California and Texas serve as a stark reminder of what we could be facing as the climate crisis worsens. Although different in scale and severity, the power outages in these two states underscore the extent to which we are unprepared for extreme weather events and the coming climate chaos. “We’re already seeing the effects of climate change,” observes Sascha von Meier, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. “There will be more of this and it will get worse.”

What happened in California and Texas was not just an environmental disaster; it was a breakdown in security and stability, the capacity to carry on with our day-to-day lives. As Sir David Attenborough recently told a UN meeting, the climate crisis presents the “biggest threat to security that modern humans have ever faced.” The reason why is not hard to understand: we have left the relatively benign climatic period that led to the flourishing of human civilization.

“If we continue on our current path, we will face the collapse of everything that gives us our security: food production, access to fresh water, habitable ambient temperature and ocean food chains," said Attenborough. "And if the natural world can no longer support the most basic of our needs, then much of the rest of civilization will quickly break down."

Another way to think about what's at stake is to put the climate emergency in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. According to Mark Carney, former head of the Bank of England and now UN envoy for climate action and finance, the world is heading for mortality rates equivalent to "a coronavirus crisis every year from the middle of this century, and every year, not just a one-off event" unless climate change is addressed immediately. As he puts it, "you cannot self-isolate from climate" and there is no waiting for climate change to pass; it will only "just get worse."

So, yes, we're back in the Paris Agreement and that's a good thing, but it's far from sufficient. There is much work to be done. That work involves the implementation of new government regulations such as the Ithaca Energy Code Supplement and innovative technology such as heat pumps and electric vehicles. But the even harder work involves meeting the challenges of equity, justice, and accessibility, making sure that every person can lead a decent, healthy, and secure life. To do so, we must recognize at a fundamental level that the threats we face should unite us, not divide us; it is the key to our very survival as a species.

Peter Bardaglio

TCCPI Coordinator

309 N. Aurora St.,

Ithaca, NY 14850

207-229-6183