What's New

A new report released by the Environmental Protection Agency details a "fundamental shift" in the development of cities and towns, as increasing amounts of development are focused in denser, more efficient patterns of land use.  Experts are attributing this trend to a realization that smart growth principles lead to more sustainable, livable, and prosperous environments--and thus to higher demand for real estate in those areas.  The Obama Administration's Sustainable Communities Partnership, as well as their nonprofit, philanthropic, and private partners, hope to extend the benefits of this exciting trend to more cities and towns across the country.

 

 

In October 2009, the Surdna Foundation began a new chapter, focusing on just and sustainable communities. Building out of many comprehensive discussions about crafting this new mission for the Foundation, we made the difficult decision to discontinue funding some areas, including our ocean biodiversity and fisheries portfolio.

The Foundation is proud of its investment in a broad range of extremely innovative and successful organizations and initiatives that have made significant accomplishments in this area. We are grateful to our grantees and our longtime funding and community partners for their devotion and hard work. The ocean conservation field has progressed by leaps and bounds due to invaluable efforts at all levels to push for strong, conservation-minded policies.

As we have conveyed to our colleagues in the field, our decision regarding our oceans portfolio does not mean that we feel there still isn’t significant work to be done. In looking back at the growth of the field, and looking forward to its future, we decided to conduct an in-depth assessment of our investment’s impact on the field. We are now releasing the results of that assessment in the enclosed report, Currents of Change: The Story of the Surdna Foundation’s Investment in Oceans.

We believe what we have learned much from funding ocean conservation and sustainable fisheries for 19 years and this learning will give us valuable insights into the work we will now focus on. We hope that these lessons can inform future efforts by our grantees, friends and colleagues. We have every expectation that the field will continue to make important strides as they fight for strong ocean policies and practices.

 

 

 

The Surdna Foundation helped to organize a day in the field for White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) Chair Nancy Sutley to see the models being developed at the city and state level in New York to accelerate energy efficiency, job creation, and household and business cost reduction through large-scale retrofitting.  Chair Sutley, accompanied by CEQ staff, visited New York City on January 15, 2010, to learn from the experiences and successes of practitioners on the ground.  Her day included:

• a tour of the Mason Tenders' Training Center, a green jobs training site in Long Island City that houses the Laborers' International Union of North America's (LIUNA) Weatherization Training Program - a skills-based program that prepares workers for retrofitting homes and helps connect them to jobs in the field;

• a stakeholder lunch conversation that brought together key groups and agencies - community organizations, labor, state energy administrators, financial institutions, city policy makers, and environmental justice organizations - to discuss the collaborations that are already working in New York State and New York City retrofit efforts and the next steps to scaling up retrofits and making them an instrument of economic change nationally;

• a tour of West 135th Street Apartments, a Section 8-assisted complex that recently received the first award announced under the Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD's) new Green Retrofit Program for Multifamily Housing, through American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds - a $3.6-million grant to Jonathan Rose Companies to increase the energy efficiency of the building's 198 units; and

• a conversation on the ways that philanthropy and the Administration can drive large-scale energy efficiency retrofits across the country.

CEQ is interested in this work as part of Chair Sutley's efforts to lead the Administration's work on Recovery through Retrofit, a program that has developed recommendations to expand the market of energy retrofits in American homes and businesses and grow green job opportunities.  With almost 130 million homes in the US, responsible for more than 20 percent of the nation's carbon dioxide emissions, the opportunity to make them up to 40 percent more efficient through retrofits will lower greenhouse gas emissions as well as save Americans money on their power bills.  CEQ brought back valuable models of success from its conversations in New York, which will inform its ongoing exploration of retrofits at a national scale.  During her visit, Chair Sutley discussed the fact that a robust home energy efficiency sector is an important part of realizing President Obama's vision of a clean energy economy.

Chair Sutley views hands-on teaching tools, including a multi-layered residential wall replica, at the Mason Tenders' Training Center in Long Island City.	After describing their training program and classes, two current students at the Training Center present Chair Sutley with an inscribed hard hat - and a second hat to be given to President Obama.
A range of stakeholders from community organizing, environmental justice, labor, finance, philanthropy, and city and state government discuss their lessons learned from experience on the ground with Nancy Sutley and the CEQ team.	CEQ staff views the new HUD-funded energy efficiency retrofit work that Jonathan Rose Companies is beginning at West 135th Street Apartments, a mixed-income housing site in Harlem.

 

 

by David Foster, Executive Director, Blue Green Alliance

Copenhagen, COP 15 ¹, was my fourth United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference and provided quite a contrast from COP 11 in Montreal in 2005. That year I was the only representative of U.S. labor with an interest in supporting the UN process. By comparison, in 2009, the seven Blue Green Alliance union partners sent 28 representatives, including two national presidents, Terry O'Sullivan from the Laborers' International Union of North America, and Mike Langford of the Utility Workers Union of America. The rest of the delegation included ranking officers and high-level staff of the United Steelworkers, Service Employees International Union, American Federation of Teachers, Communications Workers of America, and Amalgamated Transit Union.

From a lonely voice of one in 2005, U.S. labor is now giving its full-throated support to the importance of an international climate treaty that delivers a new generation of clean energy jobs. At COP 15, Blue Green Alliance played a visible role conducting two side events, one, explaining the necessary elements of effective climate legislation in the U.S. and the second, on building long-term labor-environmental partnerships. We also reached out to the U.S. negotiators and congressional staff meeting frequently to share with them the important interests of working families in the Copenhagen negotiations. We concluded our COP activities by hosting an international labor-environmental reception that brought together hundreds of labor and environmental NGO representatives from around the world. The highlight of the evening was the presence of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. House delegation, and Nancy Sutley, Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

So what were the lessons of COP 15? Many of our European labor colleagues were deeply disappointed by the failure of COP 15 to reach binding emissions targets and an enforceable global treaty. But from the perspective of evaluating the trajectory of the international climate debate, COP 15 represented another step forward in our collective effort to transform our global economy.

The U.S. had been essentially absent from the climate debate since the U.S. Senate voted against Kyoto more than a decade ago. I remember the disengaged negotiators who represented the U.S. at Poznan in 2008. And in the absence of the U.S., expectations on how and when the global economy could be transformed became divorced from the reality of what was politically achievable in the U.S. Congress. In much of the rest of the world, and in Europe in particular, inflated expectations accompanied the election of Barack Obama. Having watched the struggle to pass The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) in the U.S. House, I knew better.

Consequently, I left Copenhagen, sobered by the difficulties that lie in front of us to achieve a global agreement, but distinctly proud that President Obama had played a constructive role by bringing together the voices of Brazil, South Africa, China and India with the U.S. to codify the actual state of climate negotiations. Going into 2010 each country can now focus clearly on its own responsibilities to solve the climate crisis instead of obscuring those responsibilities behind the UN process. The economic transformation to a clean energy economy places difficult choices in front of every government. Yes, Europeans were disappointed, but they were also failing to read the political situation for what it was - a relatively conservative U.S. Senate and several powerful developing world economies which were demanding a different seat at the table.

The important lesson from COP 15 is that every country must now step up to the responsibilities that its own emissions create in a global economy. For those of us from the U.S. it means, first and foremost, passage of comprehensive climate change legislation in the U.S. Senate that commits us to reducing our carbon emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050 regardless of the status of a global treaty.

Some would argue that we can't take such a step and need to wait until we reach global consensus. But waiting in these circumstances condemns us to perpetual inaction. Passage of domestic legislation by the U.S. would break the international logjam.

Others argue that unilateral action would leave U.S. businesses at a competitive disadvantage. But the U.S. House ACES bill provides us with the answer to that argument. Under its provisions, the U.S. would initiate its own cap on carbon emissions and, if other countries refused to take similar actions, would implement a series of border adjustments on the products of energy-intensive industries to prevent carbon leakage - the migration of those industries to countries without similar costs.

COP 15 may have closed the door on one chapter of our pursuit of a clean energy economy, but it also opened the next one and put the responsibility directly on our shoulders. While the threats of climate change are significant to our economy, the opportunities to create a whole new generation of jobs are just as great.

That's why steelworkers look to climate change solutions to put them back to work making steel for wind turbine towers and aluminum cable for new transmission lines.

That's why laborers look forward to working in a new high-wage weatherization industry, employing a million workers, weatherizing every home in America.

That's why transit workers expect to move millions of Americans from home to work and back again on thousands of miles of new light rail systems.

And it's why labor showed up in force at COP 15.

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¹COP 15 is the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Copenhagen in December 2009.

 

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David Foster is the Executive Director of the Blue Green Alliance, a national partnership between labor unions and environmental organizations dedicated to expanding the number and quality of jobs in the green economy. Click here for David's bio.

 

Statements and opinions expressed in these articles are solely those of the author or authors and may or may not be shared by the Surdna Foundation.