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.

The current climate news could hardly be more frightening and depressing, all the more reason not to lose sight of the fact that we can still do much to mitigate the worst consequences of climate change. After all, if we can’t stop global warming from hitting 2 degrees C, keeping it under 2.3 or 2.5 is a lot better than 2.7 or 3.

Since the summer of 2008, the Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative (TCCPI) — a coalition of community activists, leaders and concerned citizens — has been meeting monthly to discuss and share information about what we can do locally to reduce our carbon footprint and help the county meet its ambitious climate goals.

After recognizing the importance of gathering in one place the ongoing efforts of the organizations, institutions and businesses that constitute the coalition, TCCPI began to issue annual reports in 2009 about the accomplishments of members in the previous year. The Park Foundation has provided generous support for the work of TCCPI, including these reports, for 13 years. 

We released our report for 2020 last month. We had a total of 37 submissions (two higher than last year and nearing our record of 40 in 2018), and the level of detail is impressive. Despite the challenges faced during the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, coalition members made sure we were able to share with the community what is being done to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, accelerate our transition to a clean energy economy and bolster our climate resiliency.

Seeing all our work in one place like this is truly inspiring and comes as a welcome relief from the deluge of increasingly bad news about the climate crisis. We are fortunate to live in such a dedicated, action-oriented community, and the 2020 work captured in the report is even more remarkable given the pandemic.

The full, text-only version can be found at www.tccpi.org/tccpi-2020.html. If you’d like a free, pdf copy of the illustrated report, contact us at info@tccpi.org.

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.

The blooms may also be promoted by warmer water temperatures and prolonged periods of direct sunlight. Dr. Hilary Lambert, the executive director of the Cayuga Lake Watershed Network, said the weather this year has been particularly conducive to blooms.

The heavy and frequent rains in July caused runoff into the lake from the shore, including nutrients from farms or sewers, which helped feed the cyanobacteria. Then, when the rain relents and the sun shines, the bacteria bloom.

But some factors at play are a lot bigger than fertilizer and farming fields — climate change is also a cause of the increase in HABs, Launer said.

Lambert noted that the lake has risen a couple degrees in recent years, and at the shallow shelves on either end, volunteers were reporting temperatures of 70 degrees by June, which is “way above what you would expect.”

“These blooms have pretty striking appearances,” Launer said. “It can look like spilled green paint on the water, deep green pea soup, or sometimes it looks like green dots dispersed throughout the water column. They show a streakiness on the water, with parallel streaks almost like an oil appearance.”

Unfortunately, once there’s a bloom, there’s no way to treat it. Lambert said a change in weather can often help, such as rain, wind or a drop in temperature, but admitted sometimes it takes a while for them to dissipate. Launer said a good rule of thumb is to wait until 24 hours after the bloom has disappeared before going in the water.

The blooms have been particularly intense this year, with Launer noting that around the third week of July the lake had widespread blooms on the southern end of the lake with more than 25 reports coming in over a few days. Lambert added that the first widespread bloom of that type occurred in 2017, and that it’s been a problem around the world in recent decades.

“Globally this is a rising problem with warming trends, and we are unfortunate that it’s finally arrived on our beautiful lake,” she said.

Construction and installation will take place this fall. Repayments to NYPA are covered by the cost savings from reduced energy use of LED technology, which is 50% to 65% more efficient than alternative street lighting options. According to a NYPA tweet, “LEDs will reduce Newfield’s #GHG emissions by 26+ tons & their energy use by 47,000+ kWh per year and come equipped with smart nodes & cameras for digital asset management."

The cost for Newfield to convert its 187 fixtures, Allinger said, is $176,980, which covers the purchase of the light fixtures from NYSEG ($60,000 of the total amount), any new hardware that is required for the conversion, LED bulbs, construction costs, administrative fees and design expenses. He said that amount is being financed over 20 years at a rate of 4%.

The estimated annual savings will be $14,896. During the 20-year period of the financing, that savings is estimated to be $297,920, a net savings of $120,940, highlighting the financial incentive to move forward with the conversion.

In addition to upgrading the lighting technology, NYPA helps municipalities consider an array of options to help meet their needs, including the ability to incorporate SMART technology. SMART technology can be used for other functions such as cameras and other safety features, weather sensors, Wi-Fi, and energy meters.

Allinger said there were a lot of questions and concerns during Town Board discussions about the project. Ultimately, though, he said the choice was not hard.

“This is going to cost the town actually nothing because the money we’re saving is going to pay for this conversion. It’s scary to look at 20 years and think, ‘Where am I going to be in 20 years?’” Allinger said. “But it’s the right thing to do because it is better for the environment and is a better lighting system.”

This summer has been full of disaster. James Taylor had no idea what was coming when he first sang the words “I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain” back in 1970. The wildfires in the West, especially in California and Oregon, have been unprecedented, fueled by a drought that has gripped the region for several years. The floods in July in Germany and Belgium as well as China, where rivers overflowing their banks is not at all uncommon, have been record breaking.

And let’s not forget that it rained in mid-August on the summit of the Greenland ice cap, two miles up, for the first time ever. The event was so unexpected that scientists at the research station there didn’t have a gauge to measure the precipitation, which has always come frozen before.

Louisiana National Guardsmen rescue people in LaPlace, Louisiana, in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida. Photo by Louisiana National Guard licensed under CC BY 2.0.

The one element missing from Taylor’s classic song was wind. The catastrophic arrival of Hurricane Ida on the coast of Louisiana this past Sunday – the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 – marked the first time the state had category 4 landfalls in back-to-back hurricane seasons. Intensifying with horrifying rapidity, Ida thrashed southwest Louisiana with 150 mph winds as it crashed ashore. It tied last year’s Hurricane Laura and the Last Island Hurricane of 1856 as the state’s most powerful storm ever.

Ready for some good news? Well, admittedly it’s not a very high bar, but it does appear that media coverage of extreme weather events has improved.

Increasingly, news reports are connecting these events with climate change more effectively than in past years. In part this is because their numbers, scale, and intensity have outpaced the predictions of climate scientists and caught them off balance. The resulting dramatic tension makes for a more suspenseful and engaging narrative.

The striking progress in the field of attribution science has also contributed to the better coverage, making it possible to show how these are not isolated occurrences but instead are linked to global warming trends. As the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes, “On a case-by-case basis, scientists can now quantify the contribution of human influences to the magnitude and probability of many extreme events.” This ability to pinpoint the extent to which human-induced climate change amplifies the weather disasters we’re experiencing represents a major breakthrough.

Make no mistake, though, there's an even more fundamental force at work: the media – at least a large part of it – has finally accepted the scientific consensus on climate change as fact. That may be the biggest change of all.

A study released two weeks ago underscores this shift. It found that 90% of print media coverage now accurately represents what has become indisputable: human activity is driving global warming. The analysis examined thousands of articles from 2005 to 2019 in 17 major newspapers in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

As an excellent article in Grist points out, these findings are a sharp departure from the last comparable study in 2004, which concluded that more than half of the articles it surveyed “treated dissenting opinions as equally valid.” In this earlier investigation, researchers looking at articles from 1988 to 2002 discovered that only 35% of them accurately reflected scientific consensus on climate change. So, at long last, there has been a significant retreat from the “both sides” approach.

The print media, of course, is just one of the places where people find information about climate change, and it's far from the most popular source. Clearly, television (especially Fox News) and social media – where the majority of people get their news – still have a long way to go.

Even in these arenas, however, the tone has changed. As Max Boykoff, director of the Environmental Studies program at the University of Colorado Boulder and co-author of both studies, observes, "The terrain of climate debates has largely shifted in recent years away from mere denial of human contributions to climate change to a more subtle and ongoing undermining of support for specific policies meant to substantially address climate change."

In short, the climate disasters will keep coming, bigger and badder than ever, but at least we’ll be getting the facts straight a lot more than previously about how we’ve helped make them happen. 

Peter Bardaglio

TCCPI Coordinator

309 N. Aurora St.,

Ithaca, NY 14850

207-229-6183