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Join the public forum hosted by Jessica Azulay and the Alliance for a Green Economy to discuss the hidden costs of energy consumption and the impact of climate change on the economy. Learn about the causes of climate change, greenhouse gas emissions from energy, and explore alternatives like heat pumps instead of pipelines. Find out how to influence the decision-making process of utilities and the Public Service Commission (PSC).
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Proposed Pipeline Public Forum Jessica Azulay | Alliance for a Green Economy
Hidden Costs • Extreme weather, made worse by climate change, along with the health impacts of burning fossil fuels, has cost the U.S. economy at least $240 billion a year over the past ten years. (2017, National Geographic)
What Causes Climate Change? Simple chemistry – when we burn carbon-based materials, carbon dioxide (CO2) is emitted • Basic accounting of what we burn, and therefore how much CO2 we emit • Measuring CO2 in the atmosphere and trapped in ice to find that it's increasing, with levels higher than anything we've seen in hundreds of thousands of years • Chemical analysis of the atmospheric CO2 that reveals the increase is coming from burning fossil fuels • Basic physics that shows us that CO2 absorbs heat • Monitoring climate conditions to find that recent warming of the Earth is correlated to and follows rising CO2 emissions • Ruling out natural factors that can influence climate like the sun and ocean cycles • Employing computer models to run experiments of natural versus human-influenced simulations of Earth • Consensus among scientists who consider all previous lines of evidence and make their own conclusions List from EDF: https://www.edf.org/climate/9-ways-we-know-humans-triggered-climate-change
What can we do? Heat Pumps, Not Pipelines!
PSC Process • Legalistic vs Democratic • Utilities have an advantage