New England Climate Dispatch

On the evening of Feb. 16 earlier this year, a tractor trailer filled with paints, epoxies, oil filters, and other flammable liquids spontaneously ignited at Clean Harbors, the largest waste disposal site in New England. The fire spread quickly, fully enveloping two other trailers amidst a series of explosions and sending up a large plume of black smoke over the dense cluster of homes and industrial facilities that line the banks of the Fore River.

Welcome back to the New England Climate Dispatch! Despite calls from environmental groups for the strategic decommissioning of the Massachusetts’ gas system over the coming decades, the state’s for-profit gas utilities have been pushing to keep the gas network running indefinitely on a mix of biomethane and green hydrogen.

In the heart of Boston, the 17th floor of the brutalist 1970’s skyscraper that towers over the State House is home to the headquarters of the Gradient Corporation, a company that makes a killing by defending fossil fuels.

While we’ve got plenty of longer pieces in the works, there’s no feature story for this week’s newsletter. But in the meantime, the climate fight never stops, so here’s your weekly roundup of the most important climate stories from across New England.

As gas prices and heating costs skyrocket across Massachusetts, fossil fuel producers and providers are spending hundreds of thousands to promote their political agendas to state legislators and officials. The state’s five for-profit utilities, which function as regulated monopolies responsible for distributing gas and electricity to residents, cumulatively spent over a million dollars on lobbying in 2022. This was a 17 percent increase compared to 2021, and a 25 percent increase compared to 2020.

Welcome back to the New England Climate Dispatch! For this week’s edition, we’re taking a look at the how a domestic supply chain for offshore wind might affect communities in port regions across the Northeast.

In this week’s edition of the New England Climate Dispatch, we’re diving into carbon dioxide removal (CDR), looking at efforts across the globe to remove carbon from the atmosphere. While novel technologies for carbon removal often make big headlines, these are still essentially nonexistent at scale, and the vast majority of carbon sequestered is contained in the biosphere, often in the form of trees or soil.

Welcome back to the New England Climate Dispatch, recharged and ready to go in 2023! For this week’s newsletter, we’re diving into Massachusetts’ greenhouse gas inventory, a key component of the state’s decarbonization planning. This story originally appeared in DigBoston with support from the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, a great local news nonprofit which you can support here.

While most of the crimes, deception, and profiteering that have led to the climate crisis are easily attributed to a handful of large fossil fuel companies and their wealthy executives, many of the groups pedaling misinformation and delay tactics on the clean energy transition are simply small businesses, more concerned about the fate of their business than the fate of the planet.

Welcome to another edition of the New England Climate Dispatch! In this week’s newsletter we’re taking a look at some of the ways that climate change is affecting winter in New England. Share Thanks to ever-increasing fossil fuel emissions, dreams of a snow-white holiday season are drifting away from reality.