The proposed Central Maine Power (CMP) Corridor would carry enough hydroelectric power from Canada to power a million Massachusetts homes. But is it worth it if large swaths of Maine’s forests would be irreparably damaged? 

The threat to Maine’s Northern Woods has dominated the debate in Maine over whether or not to approve the 145-mile transmission line. While the contract company–Hydro-Québec–would rake in $7.8 billion USD over the next 20 years, important areas of Maine’s economy that rely on the health of the forest could take a severe hit. The logging and forest products sectors brings $7.7 billion to Maine’s economy annually and would be compromised by the clearcutting and changes in forest management that come with a powerline project of this scale. Recreational tourism, including hunting and fishing, could also be damaged. The proposed Corridor would fragment essential habitat for species such as moose and lynx and an increase in river sedimentation would do a number on the wild brook trout population.

What is really driving the push for the CMP Corridor? Expanding renewable energy production is essential, but certain groups are voicing concerns that the Hydro-Québec project is motivated more by the desire to make money from the Massachusetts renewable energy market than by the prospect of helping Mainers or reducing the demand for non-renewable energy in New England. 

In contrast, the companies involved with the project are arguing that Mainers are being prioritized. They highlight the numerous and well-paying jobs that the $1 billion project would create and stress that hosting the Corridor would also make Maine’s power grid more sustainable. 

Many Mainers have already made up their minds on their “yea” or “nay” vote for the November 2nd ballot question. However, in an effort to sway the remaining undecided voters, Hydro-Quebec and the Natural Resources Council of Maine have been plastering media platforms with competing advertisements and attempting to outdo one another. 

Hydro-Quebec is projected to pour $24.5 million into campaign advertising before the vote. This shows just how high the company feels the stakes are and possibly indicates the opposition they expect to face. 

This semester, I will cover the CMP Corridor controversy to explore the bigger issues related to implementing clean energy projects. From advertising wars, to resource competition, to the growing political divide between rural and urban communities, Maine is experiencing issues that renewable energy projects anywhere are likely to stir up. Could Maine provide the case study we need to learn how to better navigate the clean energy transition?

The shift towards clean energy is gaining momentum, but how this shift occurs and what values will be prioritized is still very much in our hands.

I took a sip and was immediately surprised.

There was not a single trace of bitterness. It tasted like tea… maybe jasmine? Not quite though… it was richer, and the texture felt more bodied.

Intrigued, I picked up the coffee bag, on which descriptors like “peach”, “jasmine”, “lemon peel” filled the front.

It seemed to me that the Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel, an infographic developed by the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) used to assess flavors, with words like “herb-like” and “raspberry”,  was more capable of spiraling me through confusion, at least on firsthand.

The Flavor Wheel poster can often be found hanging on the walls of coffee shops and was first released in 1995. In recent years, efforts have been devoted to adopting more inclusive vocabulary such that people from different places who are accustomed to and exposed to other aromas or flavors can better relate to the descriptors on the flavor wheel. This certainly signals the global influence that coffee has but also returns focus to the roots of where coffee production originated.

But behind all these wonderful flavors are even more stories.

Coffee is consumed globally and embodies a multibillion-dollar industry. Farming takes place across continents, including Africa, South and Central America, and Asia, with local terrain and weather patterns yielding unique flavors. In many places, coffee export is a substantial portion of a country or region’s economic productivity, and millions of small producers rely on it for income.

The majority of coffee production comes from small farms in developing countries. When the price of coffee dropped below US$1 per pound in 2018, most farmers could not sustainably produce coffee at this price point. Upon coming across this news, I wondered if the specialty coffee that I regularly enjoyed was the product of unjust trading. Fairtrade certified coffee then caught my attention because they promised a higher price relative to market price for coffee producers.

Approaching climate and environmental challenges also mean producers must embrace new methods and solutions. Fortunately, new scientific advances have made it possible to sequence the genes of many organisms, including coffee plants. Identification of genes via sequencing allow scientists and producers to better understand coffee plants’ traits and making selection decisions accordingly (e.g., drought tolerance) before devoting resources to growing or breeding these plants.

I’m now more eager to dive into more stories surrounding coffee that are as rich as the wide-ranging flavors they feature now.

A beach near my house on Cape Cod (picture taken by me)

How can the “Green New Deal” be the pinnacle of climate policy if it leaves out over 70% of our planet?

The Green New Deal was unveiled in February 2019. It addressed and emphasized the clear link between environmental, economic, racial, and social justice, with the main goal being to achieve a 100-percent clean energy future in a way that is “fair and just” to all communities. The congressional resolution itself was striking, but it had one enormous gap:

The Green New Deal only mentions the oceans once.

To fully address the threat of climate change, we need a complementary policy that centers oceans and coastal communities. 

Senator Elizabeth Warren has offered such a plan.  She included the “Blue New Deal” in  her 2020 Presidential campaign platform. It calls for an inclusion of the oceans in the policy agenda of the Green New Deal, both by focusing on the need to protect it and nearby communities as well as centering how much our oceans can help us reach our goal of a net-zero emissions future.

Forty percent of the United States population lives on the coast. As climate change progresses, these communities will face more coastal flooding, erosion, sea-level rise, and intensifying storms. Many of these communities are poor, making them especially vulnerable to the severe impacts of a warming planet. 

The oceans themselves are at risk too. Between ocean acidification, coral bleaching, changes to fish migration and breeding patterns, and loss of biodiversity, we cannot forget to protect our oceans in our vision of a sustainable future. 

Omitting the oceans from the Green New Deal means failing to protect a large number of people and a large percentage of our planet. This, however, is not the only issue with excluding oceans and coastlines from our climate-friendly future.

In the year 2018, coastal counties provided 58.3 million jobs and over $9.5 trillion worth of goods and services for the U.S. economy. If the coastal counties were their own country, the GDP of that country would be the third-largest in the world behind only the United States and China. Coastal environments can also be places that naturally absorb carbon, allocate space for clean energy efforts, and provide good-paying jobs in a number of industries.

I was born and raised on Cape Cod, MA. The beach is my home. I have been privileged to witness the ocean’s beauty, its power, and the contributions that  coastal communities can make toward a more just, clean-energy future.

The Green New Deal cannot stand alone. We need a Blue New Deal too.

So—what exactly is the Blue New Deal? Why did oceans get forgotten in the first place? What is the best way to combine efforts of the Green New Deal and the Blue New Deal? What are the most effective ways oceans and coastal communities can contribute to climate solutions? Who is hard at work on this already and how can we help? These are some of the questions I hope to explore in the coming months as I cover the Blue New Deal.

Chronic kidney disease, Zika, and premature births. What do they have in common? The answer is simple but not widely discussed: each is being exacerbated by climate change.

Doctors are keenly aware of the threat, however.  Recently,  200 medical journals recently issued a joint statement declaring climate change as the leading public health emergency. Yes, even more pressing than COVID-19.  They urged world leaders to cut greenhouse gas emissions to protect the health of our planet and its people. 

The science is clear: an increase in the globe’s average temperature has led to a drastic rise in premature deaths and hospitalizations. The effects are far-reaching, including everything from worsening allergies to more cardiovascular disease. In fact, according to the World Health Organization, air pollution alone causes 7 million premature deaths a year.

In short, climate change isn’t just affecting the health of our planet, it’s affecting the health of our people as well. When we think of climate change, however, often the images are of melting glaciers and stranded polar bears. We should also be thinking about urban mothers miscarrying at higher rates due to their exposure to air pollution, patients being rushed to the hospital for a stroke triggered by fossil fuel pollution, or people losing their lives to kidney failure during a heatwave. 

Climate change is no longer a distant and far removed problem. Climate change is a public health emergency and it’s time we treated it as such. 

Medical professionals– physicians, nurses, and public health researchers — are leading the way and the consensus is clear. The single most important tool we have to protect the health of our communities is the protection of our planet. 

The problem? Our climate-changed induced health crisis.

The solution? Climate action.

Although the dangers of climate change are immense, our abilities to take action are equally so. By understanding the many and often invisible effects that climate change has on our health we can grow our collective understanding of how to fix them. We owe it to ourselves, our friends, family, neighbors, patients, and classmates, to begin this important work.

Close your eyes, for a heartbeat, and conceptualize 2021: 

The planet teeters eight years away from an irreversibly altered climate, and in affluent colleges across the country, students adjust their Birkenstocks while scrolling through the depths of Amazon on glossy-screened MacBooks. Last July was the warmest month ever recorded. Reality morphs into a perverse form of dystopian fiction, but no — we’re not in the Matrix, we’re in America, where lavish spending comes at the expense of global ecological degradation, contributing to the UN’s recently declared ‘Code Red for Humanity.’ 

Open your eyes, blink once — twice. Make sure to keep them open. 

 In the present day, particularly in western society, material items equate to some perceived level of ‘success.’ What if we could shift societal emphasis from material acquisition to more sustainable pathways to fulfillment? The concept of economic degrowth promotes shrinking the economy while human progress continues, revising present day technologies to render them more efficient and impactful. 

As water overtakes Bavaria, Germany, Nike touts the Air Zoom SuperRep 2 Nike Next Nature shoe. Apple boasts carbon neutrality while simultaneously goading customers to purchase a commodified version of their once-shiny iPhone 99x+™. Gaudy advertisements lead onlookers to believe that sustainability amounts to Teslas and $40 compost bins, a green drink slurped through a mason jar’s metallic straw. The way “eco-friendly” has become commodified by the money-hungry corporate Powers That Be, making the concept of ‘sustainability’ itself seem like an aesthetic rather than a set of values. Can ethical consumption under capitalism exist? 

By drawing on the scholarship of ecological economist Georgios Kallis, I plan to critically examine the capitalist corruption rooted in westernized notions of success. I’ll outline the way corporations have profited off a culture of fear, presenting sustainability as a trendy way to accrue more internet followers. Recognizing that I’m a white, able-bodied environmental studies major, I’ll interrogate my own complicity in systems that wreak havoc on surrounding ecologies — How might my own lifestyle, values, and habits shift if I were to begin embracing economic degrowth? How do we engage in meaningful, ethically sound climate activism, fighting for a more sustainable future within the boundaries of present-day capitalism? 

I’d like my capstone to culminate in an acknowledgement of the dangers of feel good environmentalism, or the misplaced notion that driving a Prius will meaningful ebb the (literally) rising tides of climate change. No, your shiny new Toyota won’t Save The Earth, and neither will occasionally turning out the lights. While acknowledging that the impetus of altering the deteriorating earth lies at the bureaucratic level, I hope to inspire readers to take a red pill, to realize their own cyborg-like subservience to larger corporate greed, embracing the possibility of economic degrowth as a means to combat rampant consumerist culture.

If you ever drive through Iowa you might see a lot of… corn. Big Surprise, I know.

But Nearly half of all the corn grown in Iowa goes into ethanol, an additive that is blended into the gasoline used to power our cars every day. That means corn does not just power our vehicles,  it also drives local, regional, and national debates between politicians, farmers, oil CEOs, and environmentalists on what a clean energy future looks like in the United States. 

Relying on plants for energy seems like a big step toward a renewable energy solution/future: they take in CO2, rather than emitting it. 

The case for ethanol is not so straightforward. 

The corn planted today does not offset the CO2 emitted when manufacturers turn corn into ethanol. Further, even though most corn goes toward food for livestock, creating more cornfields directly impacts our environment and food prices. 

So why is ethanol still an important component of the United States’ energy portfolio?

To states in the Midwest’s “corn belt” ethanol holds enormous political and economic value. In 2019, ethanol supported over 349,000 jobs and generated $43 billion towards the national gross domestic product. In Iowa specifically, the ethanol industry created 37,000 jobs and generated $1.8 billion for residents.

For lawmakers representing these rural areas, ethanol is not just about corn but what it provides: economic stability and rural vitality. To win votes in this region, politicians from all parties make sure they support federal blending mandates (provisions that require a certain volume of ethanol to be blended into gasoline), or federal subsidies that give oil refiners a tax break for blending ethanol into their final product. When Congress and the President have attempted to adjust blending mandates or subsidies, they are met with harsh criticism from rural blocks of voters. 

Despite the science telling us — back then and now — that the ethanol hype of the early 2000s was a mirage, politicians continue to support ethanol provisions in order to appeal to their rural constituents. 

Ethanol’s political power has deep roots in today’s clean energy economy. But looking at how different stakeholders criticize ethanol today can also help us understand its future in the renewable energy portfolio. 

What are they saying, how are they saying it, and why should we care? The stakes are high not just for farmers or ethanol refiners (this is a multi-billion-dollar industry after all) but for us: if the United States continues to support policies and provisions that provide space for debatable green energy solutions, we might continue to avoid directly addressing the climate change crisis.

In the next few weeks, I will dive into the politics of biofuels and unpack why those Midwestern cornfields might be more interesting than we think. 

There’s a new gold rush happening globally. Instead of miners migrating west and breaking stones, “Bitcoin miners” build extensive computer systems in the race to strike it rich. 

Bitcoin is the first successful cryptocurrency, a digital peer-to-peer currency that cuts out third parties like banks. Interest in cryptocurrency has skyrocketed since Bitcoin’s founding in 2008. So has its value.  In July 2015, a Bitcoin was worth $280. In April 2021, the value peaked at $64,899. 

Participation in the Bitcoin market has increased too. 13% of Americans traded in Bitcoin in the last year versus 24% who did so in stocks. Interestingly, Bitcoin traders are more diverse than their stock investor peers. Women, People Of Color, and poorer Americans accounted for a larger proportion of those trading in cryptocurrency than in stocks. 

Yet, despite its potential, Bitcoin has a major problem.

Bitcoin is now a leading energy consumer, with an outsized environmental impact. There are two main ways Bitcoin impacts the environment: energy usage and e-waste. Bitcoin “mining” is when miners use computers to solve intensive computational puzzles to validate the legitimacy of Bitcoin transactions. 

The logic driving Bitcoin mining is simple: the better your computer, the more Bitcoin you can potentially mine. As a result, waste is embedded in the structure of Bitcoin. 

The race to mine Bitcoin drives consumption of electricity and computers. Bitcoin mining consumes more electricity annually than the nation of Finland, a tenfold increase since 2016. It also has hefty CO2 emissions, producing 22-22.9 million metric tons of emissions annually, about the same as the Dominican Republic. 

Even if Bitcoin used only renewable energy, e-waste is still a problem. Every 18 months, the computational power of mining hardware doubles, and Bitcoin miners are quick to replace their fleets to keep up with their peers.

There are other issues to explore, such as whether these resources could instead be used for something better for society? 

All of this is to say that Bitcoin is a fundamentally wasteful system. To alleviate the environmental impacts, the foundations of its currency would need to change.

The promise of striking it rich draws many people into Bitcoin, but there is little attention paid to environmental consequences. If this issue is important enough to current and potential investors, they must push for change. 

This semester, there are multiple avenues I will explore from rare earth mineral extraction to environmental justice-related consequences (such as the draws for underrepresented groups and what environmental consequences mean to them), to what influence “environmentally friendly” companies promoting cryptocurrencies (i.e. Tesla and Elon Musk) means for public understanding. Also, how can we change Bitcoin – whether that be through legislation or public demand – to limit its damages?