"Earth Day since the 70s: A founder's tale"

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient America has published this history of Earth Day.

April 17, 2019
By Kate Doughty

In 1970, headbands were in, Simon & Garfunkel topped the charts, and Denis Hayes, a graduate student at Harvard, read about a fledgling environmental movement. Determined to volunteer, he flew to Washington, DC, with the intention of organizing Earth Day at Harvard. Instead, he became the organizer for Earth Day across the entire United States.

Inspired by the role of teach-ins in anti-war and civil rights protests, US Senator Gaylord Nelson started the Earth Day movement as a “national teach-in on the environment.” The movement swiftly gained popularity, and today Earth Day is celebrated in more than 190 countries.

We sat down with Denis Hayes to discuss the first 49 years of Earth Day, the evolution of the movement, and how energy—and efficiency—play a huge role in climate action and a sustainable future.

What was it like to be the national coordinator of the first Earth Day?

It was like riding a Tesla with the pedal to the floor. The acceleration was from zero to 1,000 in a matter of months. Early community meetings often had fewer than a dozen people. But April 22, we had 20 million participants, with more than one million in Manhattan alone!

My hope—in some large measure realized—was that Americans would come to see that they had a “right” to a clean, healthy environment, and that the law would guarantee that. The first Earth Day was passionate and intense, and it led directly to a wave of change. Clean Air Act. Clean Water Act. Endangered Species Act. Marine Mammal Protection Act. EPA and NOAA. Superfund. On and on.

What role have energy and energy efficiency played in Earth Day over the past 49 years?

Energy has been at the core of much of what Earth Day has sought to achieve over the decades. (The Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 was one of the fuses that set off Earth Day.) By seeking to internalize the real costs of acid rain in the price of electricity and steel, through CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) regulations of automobile fuel efficiency, by promotion of LED lights and super-efficient refrigerators and high-efficiency heat pumps, etc., we’ve tried to envision a comfortable life requiring vastly less energy. We have made clear that a healthy environment does not involve living in caves and reading by candle light.

In the Carter Administration, I headed SERI (since renamed NREL [National Renewable Energy Laboratory]), which housed the most advanced renewable energy research effort on the planet. SERI’s Assistant Director for Policy, ACEEE champion Henry Kelly, was responsible for compiling the strategy to reach President Jimmy Carter’s goal of obtaining 20% of the nation’s energy from solar by the year 2000. Although this was definitely a challenge, it was plausible only because the heart of the proposal was radical improvements to the nation’s energy efficiency.

Had we stayed on that path, we could have avoided the climate crisis comparatively cheaply and painlessly. Henry’s team included Art Rosenfeld, Bob Williams, Jeff Harris, David Goldstein, Frank von Hippel, Charles Gray, and many others who have played prominent roles at ACEEE over the years.

How would you describe the diversity, or lack thereof, of the environmental movement since 1970?

The first Earth Day, and the environmental movement in general, has been largely powered by women. Women constitute most of the members of local, state, and national environmental groups.

Racial and ethnic diversity has historically been more iffy. On that first Earth Day, we had African-American groups protesting plans to plow freeways through their dynamic inner-city neighborhoods. But the big crowds were overwhelmingly white and middle class. If you were a poor person of color, you had a lot of other problems and not a lot of extra time. So although the poor have always suffered the worst environmental conditions, only in times of true crisis have they tended to include the environment near the top of their priorities.

The environmental groups themselves were part of the problem. They all raised most of their money through direct mail. Poor people tended to respond to personal requests, not direct mail, so they weren’t on the mailing lists that were traded and sold. Groups tended to emphasize the issues that got the great mail response, so they wound up emphasizing issues that appealed to middle-class, college-educated white people. This is despite the fact that black and Latinx people and Asian & Pacific Islanders often respond very affirmatively to various environmental issues and are consistent sources of support for parks and other environmental ballot issues.

This is improving. There are strong, young environmental justice and climate justice groups carving out their own space. And mainstream groups have, for a couple of decades, been diversifying their boards, their staffs, and memberships. But there remains a long way to go.

Are recent dire reports about climate change adding an urgency to Earth Day?

It is already far too late to avoid many of the ravages of climate change—intense storms, forest fires, droughts, etc. The question today is whether we—and the entire rest of the world—can make a swift enough transition to the ultra-efficient use of 100% renewables to avoid tipping points where climate cycles produce feedback loops that are self-reinforcing, like wide-scale emissions from warming methane hydrates. That will be an enormously heavy lift; some would say it is highly improbable, if not impossible. If we are to stand a chance, the Earth Day campaign for 2020 must recapture all the intensity of those first few years.

Renewable Fuel Standard Reduces GHG Emissions 600-million Tons

The Renewable Fuels Association announced a new study on the effects of RFS2.

A new study released [in February 2019] finds that the expanded Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2) has been a tremendous success in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with nearly 600 million metric tons of GHG reduction since 2007. Actual GHG reductions under the RFS2 have far surpassed the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) original expectations of 422 million metric tons, according to the study. The analysis was conducted by Life Cycle Associates, a California-based scientific consulting firm, and commissioned by the Renewable Fuels Foundation (RFF).

The findings, which come as two House committees hold climate change hearings this morning, highlight the important role that ethanol and other biofuels can play in efforts to fight climate change and reduce GHG emissions.

“The RFS2 has resulted in significant GHG reductions, with cumulative CO2 savings of 600 million metric tonnes over the period of implementation,” according to the study. “The GHG reductions are due to the greater than expected savings from ethanol and other biofuels. These emissions savings occur even though cellulosic biofuels have not met the RFS2 production targets. Biofuels have achieved and exceeded the GHG reductions estimated by EPA.”

As outlined in the report, the larger-than-expected GHG reductions are due to:

• The adoption of technology improvements in the production of corn-based ethanol, resulting in far greater GHG reductions than originally estimated by EPA;
• The GHG emissions of petroleum are higher than the baseline estimates originally projected by EPA; and
• Advanced biofuels like biodiesel, renewable diesel, and renewable natural gas have contributed additional GHG reductions, even though actual cellulosic biofuel production has been lower than initially projected.

Using the latest available data and modeling tools, the study found that the conventional ethanol consumed in 2018 reduced GHG emissions by 43 percent compared to petroleum, even when hypothetical “land use change” are included. That compares to EPA’s initial projections that conventional ethanol would achieve only a 20 percent GHG reduction versus petroleum.

“As this study demonstrates, renewable fuels like ethanol are an incredibly effective tool for reducing GHG emissions,” said Geoff Cooper, President and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA). “And with renewable fuels, we don’t need to cross our fingers and wait for the development and commercialization of a new technology. Ethanol is available here and now to help our nation decarbonize our transportation fuels in a cost effective manner. As the new Congress turns its focus to climate change and efforts to reduce GHG emissions, we encourage lawmakers to recognize and build upon the incredible success of the RFS.”

The 600 million metric tons of GHG reduction achieved under the RFS is equivalent to the GHG savings that would result from removing roughly half of the nation’s automobiles from the road for a full year or shutting down 154 coal-fired power plants for a year, according to EPA.

A copy of the study is available here.

AFLEET

AFLEET is Alternative Fuel Life-Cycle Environmental and Economic Transportation tool.

The Department of Energy's Technology Integration Program has enlisted the expertise of Argonne to develop a tool to examine both the environmental and economic costs and benefits of alternative fuel and advanced vehicles (AFVs). Argonne developed the Alternative Fuel Life-Cycle Environmental and Economic Transportation (AFLEET) Tool to help stakeholders estimate petroleum use, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, air pollutant emissions, and cost of ownership of light-duty and heavy-duty vehicles.

AFLEET includes...

• The AFLEET spreadsheet that provides detailed energy, emission, and cost data for light- and heavy-duty AFVs. It has the following 4 calculators depending on the users goals:
  • Simple Payback
  • Total Cost of Ownership
  • Idle Reduction
• AFLEET Online, which replicates the spreadsheet’s Simple Payback Calculator with a user-friendly interface and analyzes the following metrics:
  • Petroleum use
  • Greenhouse gas emissions
  • Air pollutant emissions
  • Simple payback
• The Heavy Duty Vehicle Emissions Calculator (HDVEC), which is an AFLEET-based online tool that compares NOx, PM, GHGs and funding cost-effectiveness of environmental mitigation projects for the following fuel types:
  • Diesel
  • Electric
  • Natural Gas
  • Propane

Alberta's Tar Sands

The National Geographic presents an article on the tar sands operations in Alberta, the "world's largest industrial project."

“Canada wants to be a climate champion,” says Kevin Taft, author and former leader of the Liberal Party in Alberta. “At the same time, it wants to increase its oil exports.”

The fact that Canada, with a progressive Liberal Party government and Alberta’s quasi-socialist New Democratic Party government, are both desperate to have it both ways reveals the immense power of the oil industry, says Taft, whose most recent book is titled Oil’s Deep State: How the Petroleum Industry Undermines Democracy and Stops Action on Global Warming—in Alberta, and in Ottawa.

"The first picture of a black hole opens a new era of astrophysics"

Science News reports on the first photograph of a black hole.

“We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole,” Sheperd Doeleman, EHT Director and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., said April 10 in Washington, D.C., at one of seven concurrent news conferences. The results were also published in six papers in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“We’ve been studying black holes so long, sometimes it’s easy to forget that none of us have actually seen one,” France Córdova, director of the National Science Foundation, said in the Washington, D.C., news conference. Seeing one “is a Herculean task,” she said.