Dodging Disaster
Weather disasters inflicted $145 billion in damages in the U.S. last year. The Northeast escaped largely unscathed, but that could change at any moment. More than 40 percent of Americans live in counties hit...
Category: Economics
Hiding in Plain Sight: Another Plastics Problem
The plastic industry could soon surpass coal in greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, its growing climate impact is largely unnoticed. Plastic is ubiquitous, filling stores, overtopping landfills and littering shorelines. It’s even within us,...
A Plug for Electric Vehicles
Our family got an electric car two years ago and I have one major regret: I wish our previous cars could have been electric. Recalling years spent contending with the expense, pollution, noise, mechanical...
Are Maine’s Electric Utilities Prepared for Climate Disruptions?
In the wake of Ida, a hurricane intensified by the warming climate, more than a million electric consumers in Louisiana and hundreds of thousands more households across the eastern U.S. lost power. It was...
Lending Support to Climate Action
In a summer awash with climate catastrophes, stories of creative solutions float like lifeboats. One Maine example is particularly heartening: an unusual partnership between philanthropists and state policy leaders that has directed more than...
Getting to the Grid of the Future
The U.S. electricity grid is a dinosaur, a huge, unwieldy relic of the past. Built with an expected lifespan of 50 years, much of its infrastructure is now more than 60 years old. Its...
Investing in Place
The balance of deposits in Maine’s financial institutions is roughly $45 billion. That figure raises an obvious question to experts in socially responsible investing like Scott Budde, who runs Maine Harvest Federal Credit Union:...
Launching a Sustainability Accelerator
As the Maine Climate Council concluded work on its climate action plan last November, one legislator issued what Sen. Anne Carney (D-Cape Elizabeth) recalled as a “plaintive plea: ‘We have to figure out how...
