New Report Outlines Failures of Gas Industry Climate “Fixes”
***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE***: Wednesday, February 24, 2021
Contact: Arielle Swernoff | (646) 450-5461 | arielle@nyrenews.org
Web: @NYRenews | www.nyrenews.org
New Report Outlines Failures of Gas Industry Climate “Fixes”
Report shows how technologies such as Renewable Natural Gas, Waste-to-Energy, and Biofuels fail to reduce emissions while continuing to burden Environmental Justice communities
Albany, NY — NY Renews today released a report on “False Solutions” that have been raised before the Climate Action Council and the legislature in these bodies’ consideration of New York’s energy future. These false solutions are industry-supported techno “fixes” that promise to reduce emissions, despite their questionable legality under the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. Meanwhile, research shows they often do the opposite, and often don’t reduce pollution burden on environmental justice communities. The full report can be found here or at http://bit.ly/falsesolutions.
The report covers five “false solutions”: Waste-to-Energy, Renewable Natural Gas, Biofuels, Biomass, and Green Hydrogen. Some of these fake fixes, such as biofuels, have been recently promoted by groups in the Clean Fuels New York coalition. Others, such as renewable natural gas, have been raised by fossil fuel industry representatives before New York State’s Climate Action Council.
“These false solutions are simply the fossil fuel industry trying to protect their shareholders and ill-advised investments. In reality, these fuel technologies do little to reduce emissions, create perverse land and water incentives, and continue to overburden environmental justice communities already suffering the most from pollution and the climate crisis. These are all technologies that distract from the vital core goal of decarbonizing our economy and moving to a clean, renewable, and just energy future. They have no place in New York’s Just Transition. Enough is enough,” said Maritza Silva-Farrell, Executive Director of ALIGN - Alliance for a Greater New York and NY Renews Steering Committee member.
The report outlines several key problems with these alternative fuel sources. First, they are often carbon-intensive: some of them literally add more greenhouse gases than would be reduced by switching from fossil fuels. Second, many of them must be combusted to produce energy, leading to more local pollution, which is concentrated in environmental justice communities. Third, some of these fuels are not economically viable to replace even marginal amounts of our energy footprint. Fourth, reliance on bioenergy sources diverts land use from food to energy, depletes the earth’s ability to reduce carbon, and contributes to water pollution. Finally, some of these alternative fuel sources require intensive water use to produce, and could contribute to severe water stress.
“New York must rise and meet the deadly threat of fossil fuel pollution with bold action towards a simple solution: we need to stop burning things. Period. Unfortunately, we are at risk of embracing an incrementalism designed to perpetuate our reliance on a dirty and dangerous system. We must reject this path of false solutions and instead move as fast as possible to truly clean, renewable energy,” said Conor Bambrick, Director of Climate Policy for Environmental Advocates NY.
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