Category: Act on Climate

Modern American society crumbles without energy. Employers who store all their files online, young drivers of gas-powered cars who rely on Google Maps to get where they’re going, residents who pay their rent and gas-powered utilities online: all their lives and operations fundamentally change without energy.

Given our reliance on energy, one would think that we all knew more about where it comes from and how it’s related to the climate crisis. But many of us don’t. And too few of us realize why that’s a problem.

So where does our energy come from? How does it shape the climate crisis? And what can we do about it? Let’s get to it!

How is my energy generated?

Different machines rely on different forms of energy. For instance, most forms of transportation in America rely on fossil fuels, from the gasoline that fills your SUV to the gasoline that powers the bus you take to work. Here, we’ll focus on how electricity is generated (you’ll see why soon).

Most electricity generated today is done by pouring water (in dams) or steam (in most U.S. power plants) through a wheel (i.e. rotor), which spins a turbine. A generator converts the energy of the spinning turbine into electricity. As shown below, most power plants in the United States, and Pennsylvania, use fossil fuels to boil water into steam. They then funnel that steam through the turbine to generate electricity.

In Pennsylvania, a measly 5% of the Commonwealth’s generated electricity comes from renewable sources. Chances are, the outlet you use to charge your phone is delivering you dirty energy. Why is this the case? Well, let’s talk about how you get your electricity.

How do I get my electricity?

Our electricity system, dubbed “the grid,” is complex and confusing. Let’s start with a broad view. The U.S. does not have a national grid, but a host of Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) systems overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The RTO from which Pennsylvanians receive their electricity is from the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection, or PJM, shown below.

PJM controls the wholesale electricity marketplace across 13 states, including Pennsylvania, and does long-term planning around what fuel sources are used to generate electricity, where that electricity is generated, and how it is sent to places that need it. Each state sets its own regulations on PJM. Pennsylvania’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC), for instance, determines how much your electricity costs, i.e. “set rates.” At the municipal level, the Philadelphia Electric Company (PECO) distributes electricity to residents.

Importantly, PECO is owned by Exelon, a for-profit energy company that owns more than a dozen nonrenewable power plants in the state.

This trend is not uncommon. Many utility companies have deep investments in the burning of fossil fuels. Many are also dangerously close to their PUCs and respective governments, bordering corruption. For instance, FirstEnergy, an energy company operating across PJM and throughout Pennsylvania, recently spent $61 million in bribes on Ohio lawmakers to pass a nuclear energy bailout law. The energy companies, who are guaranteed monopolies from the state, siphon profits off of ratepayers, and because media outlets rarely cover these stories, few people in the public know enough to care about it.

Energy and the Climate Crisis

Energy is the glue that holds modern society together, but that glue bears the stain of fossil fuels in Pennsylvania. 

From the gas in our buses to the plastic of our candy wrappers, fossil fuels have infiltrated almost every aspect of our lives. As a result, using energy or energy-intensive products exacerbates the climate crisis. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. We can decarbonize our grid and our economy. But we would need to electrify everything first.

Renewable energy, like that of solar power, does not operate like liquid fossil fuels. Remember that most power plants burn fossils to spin turbines and generate electricity. In contrast, solar energy is converted into electricity almost immediately. This means that renewable energy is best suited to serving electrical devices, like computers and medical equipment. This also means it’s poorly suited for machines that are directly reliant on liquid fossil fuels, like airplanes and gas heating units. This is a serious problem, considering that electricity accounts for 28 % of America’s greenhouse gas emissions.

So we can decarbonize the grid, but that won’t decarbonize the economy. Doing that will require us to electrify everything. Simply enough, we need to replace our machines that rely on fossil fuels with machines that rely on renewable energy. However, because we have delayed the transition for so long, we need urgent and rapid mass action, including political and social movements.

In September of 2020, the Temple College of Public Health hosted several political leaders to discuss Social Justice, Public Health, and the 2020 Election. Most questions posed to the panelists centered around electoral participation. Nevertheless, one question in particular caught our attention.

Just over halfway through the discussion, the panelists were asked to reflect on climate change as a public health issue. U.S. Representative Mary Gay Scanlon, a Democrat from Delaware Country, took to the zoom stage in response.

After acknowledging the PES refinery explosion and the trash-burning plant in her district, both being textbook examples of environmental racism, Scanlon provided an overview of some of regulatory confines under which climate action policies operate:

“When I was on the local school board, we had to do some rebuilding. Of course, you want to do it in a sustainable way. But the laws and regulations you operate under require certain things with respect to funding and you can’t raise taxes more than a certain amount in our school districts so… the budget was always a concern. 

“People wanted to put solar panels on and would say, ‘well right across the river in New Jersey all those schools are doing solar panels.’ Well, New Jersey had implemented state funding to incentivize the use of solar energy. We didn’t have that in Pennsylvania so that became economically not possible.”

Scanlon then stressed the federal government’s role in funding state and local climate action. The Representative’s story illustrates a tension between climate action policies and the divisions of power between our governments.

Local governments are reliant on state and federal funding, revenue streams which have withered over the past half-century due to predominance of neoliberal governance — leaving cities, and communities of color in particular, out to dry. This problem is pronounced in Philadelphia, where the state government’s flat tax rate inhibits Philadelphia’s ability to raise revenue. 
Assuredly, there are other revenue-raising tools the city can employ which have gone underutilized. Still the issue remains: much of the funding for a Just Transition will need to come from the federal government.

America has a Plastic Problem.

We generate over 35 million tons of plastic waste each year, or enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys football stadium every 16 hours. Most of that plastic is sent to landfills or incinerators, both of which are deeply problematic, while the rest of it floats our roads and meanders its way into our waterways. 

Philadelphia is No Expectation.

In fact, we’re especially problematic. We consume an estimated 1 billion plastic bags a year while the City’s Water Department removes 44 tons of trash from the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers in a single year. But some forms of plastic are easier to remove than others. 

Plastic doesn’t biodegrade like food waste or paper does. It just breaks up into smaller pieces. Those pieces get smaller and small until they are virtually impossible to remove. We call these “microplastics,” or plastics less than 5 millimeters in length. That’s the size of a grain of rice.

Because they are so small, microplastics are then easily consumed by wildlife. As the plastic accumulates in their bellies, they may starve to death. They may suffer but still survive. Either way, they pass those plastics onto the next animal who eats them, who will pass it onto the next one. As it moves through the food chain, that plastic eventually reaches humans. 

We don’t know the long term effects of microplastics on our bodies’ health or on the overall health of the food chain. However, we do know that the problem is only getting worse. Half of all plastics ever manufactured were made in the past 15 years and, at its current rate of production, plastic is estimated to outweigh all the fish in the sea by 2050.

In Pennsylvania alone, microplastics were found in more than 50 of most popular waterways.

It’s time for policy change to reduce plastic pollution in the city and state. Sadly, a state law temporarily bans local governments from banning plastic bags. Fortunately, the local governments of Philadelphia, West Chester, and Narberth are suing the state government on grounds that this ban is unconstitutional.

While a step in the right direction, a plastic bag ban is not sufficient to ensure the well-being of human and non-human life in Pennsylvania.

In their report “Microplastics in Pennsylvania,” the environmental advocacy organization PennEnvironment calls for the policies to phase out single-use plastics, establish responsibility for waste producers to manage post-consumer waste, prevent overstocking in the clothing industry, and developing green infrastructure to filter microplastics from our sewage.