Interview w/ Jacob Stern from Mass Sierra Club

About the Green New Deal, Decarbonization, & Democratization

Jacob Stern has been with Sierra club for 4 years as the Deputy Director for the Massachusetts Chapter. His work with the Sierra Club mostly deals with legislative work on clean energy and engages in policy work for electoral campaigns. This interview took place via phone on February 12th, 2021, and has been edited for length and clarity.

CH: How long have you been following The Green New Deal? What can you tell us about it?

JS: It would help me answer this question if you could give me the context that you are writing?

CH: I’m piggybacking off the energy of the last month or two in Mass that has been disappointing to everybody. I decided something had to be done about it. Then everyone has been talking about the GND which is what we have for the moment in terms of progressive climate policy. I'm trying to break down for our readers what that looks like.

JS: Very cool that helps a lot. Are you talking about Mass or more national?

CH: I do it from all three levels. I know policy can be confusing so I tend to go local to national.

JS: That's helpful to answer this question. The GND was first announced in 2019 as something tasked at the federal level. The concept has been around a lot longer than that. I think it goes as far back as the '60s. I'll tell you how I think about it, and how the Sierra Club and our allies think about it.

The GND is a framework and a concept. It is not an explicit policy. It is a mandate for advocates and people who care about the climate and a better future to think about what policies fit underneath the framework of the GND and fight for those policies. So that doesn't just include reducing carbon emissions but it also means thinking about the impacts our economic system has on vulnerable communities. Thinking about the types of jobs that are available to people as well as thinking about the types of benefits and pay workers can receive. And also some historic and systemic problems in our system around race and class et cetera.

I would say for my end I think a lot about what GND policies would look like at the state and local level because that is the kind of gradient size I work in. There is a lot at the federal level, that is where I am at [at the state and local level].

CH: A lot of cities just announced that they would be carbon neutral by 2030 or 2050. What is the importance of that compared to something on the federal level?

JS: In 2018, the UN released a climate report that set the basis for a lot of recent policy that said that we have to significantly reduce our emissions by 2030 if we want to avoid risking some of the worst impacts of climate change. So, I think that is where a lot of these goals come from. But these goals are most significant at the national level because those emissions are most significant. But until up a month ago, we weren't sure if that was even going to be possible. And even now there are still some questions. That has changed really quickly just over the last month. The theory of change that I've had for a lot of this is that as an activist our voices are most impactful at the local level.

Take for example a separate initiative that we have, trying to reduce plastic pollution, which is also worthwhile.  We've seen a lot of cities and towns pass ordinances and bylaws reducing plastic bags and Styrofoam containers, getting rid of needless waste. And that has contributed to momentum for a statewide bill to reduce that pollution statewide. It is the same idea with carbon emissions, if we have these measures passed at the state level, it will make it much more possible at the national level.

Cities like Boston have a huge role to play. It is the biggest city in the region, what Boston does, a lot of other cities will follow.

CH: This question has been bouncing around in my head for a while. It is a very loaded question. How is carbon tallied? For example, is it the building emissions, the cars on the road?

JS: I can talk about Boston specifically. I think Boston's commitment is just a municipal commitment.  So any emissions that are produced by the cities-owned buildings, public offices, and any city-owned vehicles. That is the equivalent of NIKE sayin we are going to make all of our factories and offices carbon neutral by 2030.

If I was a Boston resident, it would not encompass any emissions that I would produce. And as an advocate, I believe we need to be carbon neutral across the board, not just corporations and governments, but we need to find ways to help residents reduce their footprint as well.

To your question about how it is tallied, I have seen it vary a little bit by state to state, city to city. I have seen different metrics. Typically you look at emissions that are produced in the locality, so any tailpipe emissions , any building emissions, and if you are consuming energy. You use a calculation to say this electricity is generated by these fuel sources, we are going to approximate what those emissions are. What is not included, like I have a car, the tailpipe emissions are counted, but how and where the car was manufactured, those emissions are not counted. Those are counted where the car is manufactured. It does get confusing and dicey depending on how you count it.

CH: What do you think about when we are saying 'carbon neutrality' there are some progressive groups saying that we need these fossil fuels to stay in the ground. What is the consensus of that in the larger environmental left? When do we need to go carbon-free as opposed to carbon neutral?

All those terms, carbon free, carbon neutral can be pretty confusing, and people use them differently as well. But putting that aside, the timeline as I see it we will need to be using 100% renewable electricity by 2035. So we need to try and get all of the power generations off of fossil fuels entirely by 2035 and have that be replaced by mostly solar and wind are the least impactful ways to generate electricity. In Mass, we have tremendous opportunity, especially around wind because we have an enormous coastline. That is the first goal as I see it. Then by 2050, We shouldn't be producing more emissions than we are capturing. You can capture emissions by trees and other technologies. I'll admit that carbon capture is not my area of expertise. But we need to reduce our overall emissions by 85% to 90% and the last 10-15%, the emissions that really hard to get rid of, emissions from agricultural processes and a few other things that difficult, we need to be counter-balancing that with carbon sequestration, carbon capture. Hopefully, right around mid-century, we are capturing more carbon than we are producing. Truly what we are going to have to do in the long run is pull carbon out of the atmosphere. We are not quite there yet.

CH: So I am from Revere, I live in Dot right now, but I am from Revere and I saw my parents for a weird COVID Christmas this year. My dad was driving me home and funny enough he works at the Exelon Natural Gas plant outside Boston, he's been working there for thirty years. He's been on the floor, he is a union mechanic and steward. As far as a power plant goes, he knows how big of a project it is. Why I bring this up, is because we were driving over the Tobin and he said 'look at all these lights, how is solar and wind going to power the city?

I'll roll this into my next question. What does decarbonizing look like over the next 10-15 years? Are there going to be major changes?

JS: There will definitely be major changes. The idea that there will not be major changes is misleading. I think we want to dull the impacts, especially on vulnerable populations and folks who are low income and are living in communities that are over-burdened by pollution. That is who we want to make sure that isn't receiving the brunt of this impact. However, we are changing our economic system to some extent. It is going to be challenging. I think some of the biggest challenges will be around transportation, and also our building sector. We know we cannot keep producing combustion cars. California will stop selling combustion cars by 2035 and Massachusetts is looking to do the same. That will be a big difference. That means more public transit and more electric vehicles.

And then the building sector. You probably have an oil or gas furnace, you may have a gas stove. Recent studies have shown that houses with gas infrastructure is actually super bad for air quality. There is a lot of studies with COVID as well. We need to stop using gas infrastructure in buildings and switch to electric, which operates differently.

Your point to your dad, the power generation section, the power generation sector, that is the area we have done the most on at Sierra, we started the build-out to renewables to some extent, but we have a long way to go. But the short answer is, just to talk about wind for a second, we have tremendous wind potential in Massachusetts. We could power the state 8 or 9 times over, just with wind power. And I am talking about mostly offshore wind as well and about an offshore wind project in the south of Cape Cod that is incredibly cost-effective and the turbines are offshore so they avoid a lot of the impacts that onshore turbines have.

Talking about solar power, if you put solar just on the buildings and homes that make sense, which is not all of them, a fraction of them, but all the ones that are facing the right way, solar alone would power a third of the state's electricity. The potential for renewables is there,  but it is just about scaling and changing our grid to be more flexible and not rely on large gas generating plants in the future at the same time thinking about those workers. Those plants are probably going to be closing in the next couple of decades, how to make sure they are taken care of and aren't left without a job or any resources.

CH: Sometimes you'll notice people saying two things at once if you read between the lines. The founder of Exolon, the power generation corporation that mostly uses nuclear and LNG, came out and said we need more environmental regulations and has been an advocate for them in some way. On the other hand, he works with and makes deal with the Koch brothers and adjacent PACs and industries. I was also researching Sierra Club and Sierra Club back in 2007-2010 took something like 25 million dollars from fracking and LNG producers in California.

So I guess I am asking this question to re-assert Sierra Club's view on decarbonization. But also if there is any idea in progressive circles to effectively combat this doublespeak?

JS: Sierra Club does not take corporate donations. I am not sure what you were reading but I'd be curious to see it. I'd be surprised for us to see us taking a donation from any kind of fossil fuel-related corporation that is because we are actively fighting LNG plants.*

I'll talk quickly too about CEO doublespeak. The thing is, and you may see this at the governmental level as well, people know that renewable energy is popular. There have been great studies done by MASS INC in Massachusetts,  and this may have been posted recently on WBUR, the overwhelming majority believe climate change is real and that the state should take urgent action to address it. And CEOs know this. They know that fossil fuels are not popular. So what happens is that they speak a good game but their actions do not always represent what the public wants, and it is also just because of money. There is still a really good business in buying and selling and burning fossil fuels. Things like natural gas are the results of long very effective marketing campaigns. I actually don't like the term 'natural gas' I call it methane gas which is what it actually is. 'Natural gas' is just a word made up to describe methane and methane is a fossil fuel and also produces greenhouse gases when burned, just like oil or coal. And frankly,  nuclear power as well, but technically nuclear power doesn't produce emissions like oil or coal, but there are other problems associated with it as well that have created problems for surrounding communities so I wouldn't advocate for the expansion of nuclear either.

We need to focus on solar and wind power. These are the sources we have found that have the least impact on people's lives for their result.

CH: Joe Biden sees fracking as a bridge fuel to get us off coal and oil. But a lot of folks on the progressive left have said a flat-out no to this. We need to stop fracking immediately.

JS: Yeah I agree with that. The idea that fracking was a good idea as a bridge fuel was popular 20 years ago. Even in Sierra Club 10-20 years ago, we had that conversation. But even in the climate world, that is a long time ago.

There is a lot to be done personally, switching your furnace over, eventually buying an electric vehicle, keeping up with ordinances, etc. But there is still equally a lot of work to be done on the activist front as well. Like get out on the streets and start to hold these fossil fuel companies accountable.

I think that is exactly right. When we talk about the responsibility of people. People's responsibility is to get involved. Speak truth to power and be aware of what is happening in your community. But it is the government's responsibility to figure out how we change how we do business and move forward with a renewable economy without hurting residents and workers. I don't think you and me should figure out how to get the state's footprint to zero, that is the state's job for them to pass to pass for us to figure out how to make it easier for us to do that. So it's less about individual responsibility but more about what we can do together. When we went to war in WWII, the government wasn't telling individual people to go out and buy weapons. There was a massive mobilization that involved all sectors of our economy. That scale of mass mobilization is what we need today, just obviously not one geared towards war.

CH: How do we increase democratization outside of the voting booth around energy and climate issues? How do we empower and educate people about these issues?

JS: To me, democracy is not something that happens every four years in November, democracy is something that happens every day or every week. That can mean different things for a lot of people. It can be like being involved locally, with local orgs, it could mean you meet with your state rep every few months, or it could mean you're marching on the streets. What I try to tell people to do is to get involved and set a stake for what you believe in.  When people let the world pass them by is when bad things happen. But when we speak about things that we believe, that is our best way to ensure we have the world we want.

CH: What do 'green jobs' entail? How much long-term work comes from a solar field?

JS: ‘Green jobs’ means a lot of things. It is a lot broader than that. The wind projects in Massachusetts can create tens of thousands of long-term jobs. There is a lot of work that goes in to monitoring and maintaining those turbines. There are out at sea, they are high scale high paying. But remember it is not just about energy production we are also talking about homes and businesses. So we are talking about replacing all oil and gas furnaces with electric heat. That is so much work. Decades and decades of retrofit will be required. The opportunity to train to do energy-efficient instruction to be familiar with new appliances is going to be a huge industry in the next few years. It is not just on the power generation side, there will be changes to every sector of the economy in our transition to renewables.

** We followed up through email about this topic and Jacob said this:

"Ah yes. I vaguely remember this. I thought you were referring to something recent.

There was a change in Sierra Club around 2010 relating to our position on methane gas. Do you remember that I said that advocates used to see it as a bridge fuel? These donations are from that era. My understanding is that the debate around gas was actually so controversial within Sierra Club that it led to the resignation of our former ED, Carl Pope. Our current ED, cut off the donations in 2010 when he came onboard and every since then, the Club adopted the policy I was telling you about. In my opinion, advocates' views on climate issues continue to evolve for the better, but as you can see, it's not without some growing pains. Sierra Club has had a very very long history and not all of it has been positive."