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    June 11th 2024 Organizational meeting, Sustainable Ely

    4pm June 11 2024 Climate Meeting at Ely Field Naturalists Resource Center

     This is a summary of the ideas presented. We had a lot of interactive discussion making it hard to attribute ideas to individuals except for a couple of instances.

    Intro from Barb: It’s nice to see everybody here. The May meetings went well, congratulations everybody.

    Present by zoom: Doug Lande, Max Dann, Jodi Chaffin, Anne Stewart Uehling. Present in person: Celia Domich, Mary Louise Eisenhower, Angela Campbell, Frederica Musgrave, Cathy Vanderboom, Brian Dahlin, Catie Clark, Elton Brown, Andrea Pike, Betsy Flaten, John Flaten, Kess Ebbs, Bill Tefft, Abby Dare, Hudson Kingston, Barb Jones.

    On the table there are print copies of materials you may find of interest:

    • There are 3 items from Grand Marais, their Community Vision Plan, Climate Action Plan and Appendices with lots of technical detail.
    • We also have the Morris strategic plan that they put together in 2018. It is useful to know what items they thought were important early in their work.
    • There are 2 printouts from Climate Generation who generate first class resources for teaching climate issues in K-12 schools. One copy is “Becoming a Climate Educator” and is aimed at teachers who don’t think of themselves as climate experts and who haven’t taught this material before. “How do you do it? How do you start?” Another is a curriculum for grades K-2 and deals with “Where does our food come from. What’s on my plate that gets grown around here? How do we support sustainable food in our school?” These are 2 of many files of curriculum materials at all grade levels. All the Climate Gen material is available online, you have to register with the site but then it’s all free to download. Climate Gen was created by Will Steger.

    We all know how important it is to have students involved. In Grand Marais a couple of student activists petitioned the city council which got their sustainability movement started. This topic generates plans to contact our K-12 Ely school, details below.

    At the May 29th “Open Conversations” meeting we were also tasked to write a paragraph of your ideas of how to proceed. This is Anne’s contribution:

    Ask City Council to create an ad hoc committee tied to the City Plan Update group to explore sustainability

    It should include:

    -faculty/staff/student representative from VCC

    -faculty/staff/student from Ely Public school

    -city council members

    -housing authority member

    -township/county level representation

    -members from area organizations: CURE, CC group, arts, business

    The charge should be look at ways to enhance livability of our community, look at costs and savings of switching city vehicles to electric, encouraging more energy efficient building and reducing waste. They should also research what grants would be available. 

    -Involve high school students in planning a sustainability event like the annual EARTH DAY with help of the Iron Range Partnership for Sustainability

    Several positive comments were made on Anne’s text including the need to specifically mention the importance of Earth Day types of events, the environment, and plant and animal habitats. Thanks Anne, it is good to have this in writing.

    Looking at how the Morris effort was started, they set a couple of big goals and a lot of specific actions. Their big goals were:

    1. Produce 80% of the energy consumed in the county by 2030
    2. Reduce energy consumption 30% by 2030
    3. No land-filling of waste generated within the county by 2025

    Here in Ely we cannot produce a lot of energy, that goal is not relevant to us. But we can aim to reduce energy consumption and waste generation. We have not yet decided what our Big Goals will be. We need to do that.

    We can also look at the individual projects they attacked in the start back in 2014 and 2015, some of these can give us ideas. This list of what they accomplished was made in 2017:

    The first comment on this list was “We remember Troy said don’t use the word climate, but here they are using it.” It seems that we have to be careful about where and when we use the term.

    Here are comments on specific items:

    #1 is “Rural Climate Dialogue” in 2014. This is a partnership with IATP (Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy). Hudson offered to ask their climate person to talk with us. They specialize in adaptation, e.g. dealing with storm water surge and flooding which would be relevant to us in Ely.

    #2, Extreme Weather is also relevant. We get derechos and winter storms, ice storms, hail etc. that can cause damage. We need to be resilient to these events as well as to heat, drought and fire.

    #3 Community Education showing the video “Chasing Ice”. Troy described how they recruited a city leader to talk before the film about sustainability issues and followed the video with a general discussion. It opens up the discussion to a wider community.

    #4 By 2016 Morris has a grant from the MPCA. It likely takes about a year to decide where/how to apply, write the grant and wait for the award.

    #5 Also 2016, they started the “Morris Model” website. ECG does not have a website, but we have a blog and a YouTube channel. Should we upgrade?

    #6 Morris creates a financing plan and gets another grant. This time from CERTS (Clean Energy Resource Teams – part of UMN extension).

    #7 LED lights are installed on Main Street

    #8 Already Morris is linked with Saerbeck Germany, that was fast. We know Jessica Hellmann at UM’s Institute on the Environment (IonE) who organizes such collaborations. We need to get something rolling in Ely before taking this route. Any application would have to come from the City of Ely.

    #9 in 2017 Morris shows another video “Beyond the Flood” (Note there is later discussion about how/where to show videos in Ely, we can do this too).

    #10 Outreach to schools was a natural in Morris as they have a teacher education program. Our group recognized the importance of this and the topic was picked up again later.

    Another aspect of the Morris initiative is the huge amount of outreach. They have small meetings with subgroups but their large meetings have 30 or more participants from all parts of the community.

    The table shows attendance at a 2018 retreat. It includes the Mayor of Morris, the City Manager, County Commissioners, School Board members, attorneys, UM Morris faculty and staff, Otter Tail Power Company representative, CERTS, GreenCorps member, retired scientists and community members. This is the result of a lot of consultation and team building. Anne spent several years at UMN in Morris, she comments that they have reached out to create committees that had specific goals from the start of the program.

    The rest of our meeting went into details of how to make our own effort to reach out to communities in Ely who we hope would be supportive of local sustainability efforts.

    The major areas covered were

    1. Showing films/videos at the State Theater or at MN College North, Vermilion Campus (Vermilion for short)
    2. Finding staff/student collaborators at Vermilion
    3. Finding staff/student collaborators in the K-12 school system
    4. Exploring the process and structures setup in Grand Marais

    Subgroups with connections or particular interest volunteered to take the lead to make contacts and report to the larger group before the next meeting on July 9th.

    Film/Video group: Hudson, Jodi and Frederica (and others?) will explore what videos are inspiring and relevant. They will also advise on how and where to show them, advertise, and recruit local speakers to discuss how Ely is involved.

    Working with Vermilion: Kess, Bill and Hudson will contact their friends and colleagues to invite them to participate in our work and find out how we can work together. What student orgs may be relevant?

    Finding Collaborators in K-12 schools: Adam and Frederica will contact teachers and staff with offers to help with curriculum materials, summer courses, and strengthening climate education as best we can. Should we also contact Vermilion Country School? Frederica will contact the MN Science Teachers Assoc.

    Grand Marais: Angela and Barb (and others?) will contact both the City and Schools in GM. Betsy has a link to the school superintendent. If possible they will visit to talk directly, otherwise zoom. Should we ask a GM representative to come talk with us directly?

    Many names of potential contacts and collaborators were mentioned both in the K-12 system and at the college.  Since these people have not yet agreed to work with us (although we hope they will) their names are not copied here.

    There are many important items not yet addressed. These include how to involve the hospital and clinic. They are big employers, large energy users and a critical part of the community. Several potential contacts were mentioned but I did not note who (if anyone) volunteered to talk to them.

    We should also have outreach to the local camps, guides and outfitters? Many camps offer serious environmental and wilderness training from day trips to advanced technical explorations. Abby suggested this idea. Thank you, we should move on this soon.

    We also have an obligation to let our City Manager – Harold Langowski – know what we are planning. As an engineer he appreciates detailed plans and we must work to formulate them. He is one of the most important and influential people with knowledge of the practical aspects of any changes that our group might recommend.

    Our group members should consider getting involved with any open positions on city commissions. Some of these slots require Ely residency and some do not. In particular, when there is a rewrite of the City’s long term plan we should contribute.

    Doug (Lake County District 2 Soil and Water Conservation District Supervisor) suggested that we try to get a Federal Climate Corps intern.  He also reports that the Soil and Water Conservation District (SWDC) are in the process of incorporating climate change wording into their documents. That is good news. Note that SWDC was active helping the Morris effort.

    Here are some useful web links:

    Google “City of Grand Marais” to get their general website. On the left hand side bar look at the tabs for “Sustainability” and “Community Vision Plan”

    https://www.ci.grand-marais.mn.us/

    Google “Climate Generation” to reach https://climategen.org/   Go to the “Educators” tab then to “Resource Library” to see some of the variety of their materials. There is a lot on this website, including their summer courses.

    Troy’s talk in Ely on May 19th is on YouTube with 2 versions. On YouTube search for “Ely Climate Group” to find our channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFYEXa0qx5p9Nb25QBXhgbg

    Or search for CUREMN to get the CURE version https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=curemn

    The Q&A is available in text form at https://elyminnesota.com/elyclimate/ and in video format on the CUREMN YouTube channel.

    The City of Ely’s website is here: https://www.ely.mn.us/

    Commissions and Boards are under the “Government” tab which includes OPEN positions available to residents and non-residents.

     

    The Comprehensive Plan is on the EEDA website (Ely Economic Development Authority”

    https://eeda.ely.mn.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Ely_Land_Use_Comprehensive_Plan_2016.pdf

     

     

    May 19th 2024 Troy Goodnough Morris Model Q&A + video links

    You can find videos of Troy’s talk on “Sustainability in Small Cities” on the Ely Climate Group YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iYAarZ6lKM&t=3s

    You can see the CURE video, which has shots of Troy in addition to his slides, here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md-OBlvnH8M&t=3375s

     

    This is a lightly edited transcript of the Q&A following Troy’s talk. There are some omissions where the audio was poor quality.

    Q1:  Have you done anything at your laundromats for reclaimed water? It’s mandatory in laundromats out West. It saves 2/3 of the water.

    Troy: No, I don’t think we have. Thank you for the suggestion. I don’t know about this. I will check it out.

    Q2: I’m wondering, at the initial startup of this effort, what steps you took to involve the city and get the city to be on board.

    Troy: Right. So how can you involve the city as we as we started moving forward so that engagement with the city was the primary objective from the very beginning.  Have meetings with the city manager and the mayor and the city council and have students go in front of the city council to talk about things that they are interested in. Find a shared project, maybe something like a movie event, where we would have the city manager come and talk before the movie and say, “Here’s things that the city is thinking about”. So that relationship building piece is actual work. It took time. And so that’s kind of where we began. There’s more to say about that. But do intentional relationship building, strategic relationship building throughout all of this, and then find small projects where we thought we could work together. And so for us, the LED lighting project was something the city manager said “That seems like a good idea”. LED lighting sounds like energy efficiency which is one of our pillars.

    Q3: Is there a board within the city or county that that oversees those efforts?

    Troy:  Morris has the form of government that has a strong city manager, and then it has a mayor and city council. So the city manager has a lot of power.  But the city council obviously has to approve things. So the goal was to court all three of those, that is the City Council, the city manager, and the mayor.

    Q4: Morris has 5 thousand people. On a global scale it is insignificant. How does your plan scale up from there to 5 million or more?

    Troy:  Wonderful question. So this question about how does the work happening in rural small towns scale, how does the work happening in any town scale? This is a fun question that we should explore for an hour in itself. Here are a couple of points. One is that I think there’s a lot of acknowledgement that democracy is having some challenges across the United States. Coming up with a good new idea is difficult, but when the idea is out there it seems obvious. Working from the local to the global truly is the way to go. If all of us try to expand clean energy in our communities where we can, there will be a lot of benefits. If all of us tried to actually improve our zero waste in our communities that really would be good. If all of us tried to engage with our schools that would be good. But I have to brag for just a moment. My wife, who is a chemistry professor at Morris, worked on her sabbatical with the state of Minnesota on rewriting the state’s science standards. That included incorporating climate change into the curriculum. And so things have changed in the school curriculum. There are doors that are open now to having more conversation in the school about climate and climate solutions. And so I think, at every level, the development goals reflect how we can create a more flourishing community. Of course, waiting for someone else to solve the problem is not the best we can do. But at the same time, it would be naive to say that this work isn’t a systems challenge. And so it is a sandwich. We have to do the work at the community level, and policy needs to change and create that sandwich. I can tell you that the environmental space, the kind of sustainability space, has never been more exciting. I visited with some of you, prior to this talk, about some of the challenges of eco anxiety eco grief. With the inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the US passed the largest pieces of climate legislation of any industrialized nation ever in the history of the world. I don’t think people know this. We need to talk to our friends and neighbors about how policy has achieved something big. The last thing I would say is, because I love the question, our futures are interdependent so part of the topic this conversation is what can rural or small cities do to contribute to the larger whole? What I know is what happens in rural Minnesota will largely influence the health of the state of Minnesota, because that’s where we have the wind energy.  The Dakotas are the Saudi Arabia of wind.  Policy is challenging. So the Dakota or my Dakota friends, they’re not exactly sure what future they’re thinking about. That’s democracy, right? They’re thinking about what they want for their kids and grandkids.

    Q5: I would like to thank you for bringing to this earth such an incredible force of energy. We are privileged to get to know you, your dedication and your passion is amazing. Most importantly, it’s an honor to have you being a voice for Minnesota, especially with such a delicate subject because we need to heal and the healing begins at home.  I think of the situations that we’ve had here in the past, we need to reach out across the nation to these people. They don’t understand that we have loved this place for generations.  And so it needs an awareness. We have to come to a reality to make a dream come true, so we can move forward. You and I have to stop being the one I was, to become the one that I want to be. We know 80% of our bodies are water and we need energy from the universe which is infinite. There are many galaxies each with many stars, one of them is our sun with the earth where we live. We are spirits having a human experience. So how we are behaving is the real challenge. And thank you for being here with us.  

    Troy: First of all, thank you for the comments Mauricio, and also thank you for the emphasis on healing and humility, and this question about how do we bring people together.  How do we engage in civil conversations? This is a challenge that we’re all facing. We’re looking to leaders who inspire us to be our best selves.

    Q6:  I noticed there’s the council and the mayor in the Morris government. There is a committee. I can’t remember if they’re appointed or not, but they serve four years. I don’t know if that’s a limited term or not. But here in Ely we have a dozen or so different Commissions where they can serve up to two years. With all these different Commissions to go through it seems like your system is simpler and I think that is so stunning.

    Troy:  Every week or so we need to have meetings with groups of people either online or in person.  For example, we get together on a Thursday afternoon and simply sit in a room and discuss “How’s that project going?” It becomes a joke at some point “Oh that project!” but you have to keep discussing the details. Part of that is the relationship piece, building trust with each other, because things come out of that. We need to build those muscles of just being together, right? And it takes work to keep that continuity going. And then as new leaders come in, this is a big challenge. We also could talk at length about what happens when new leaders come on board. How do we try to bring leaders on board who share the vision, and how do we inculcate new leaders? How do we make them feel welcome? How do we help them get some wins early and celebrate it?

    Morris does have a planning commission and they do some important work.  I think your question inspires me to ask “Why have you not engaged more?” I say to myself, “Troy, it really is our team. Why have we maybe not engaged more with our planning commission?” There’s just more work to do and one of our goals right now is to widen the circle. The goal is to not be insular, to grow our core group, but also to include the 80 or so people on our email list who are connected to city government, county government and the schools who we feel are part of the Morris Model circle. You saw the pictures of some of the events, you know when we had a bunch of people in the room. The nice thing is when we ask people to show up and come to the room you know we’ll get maybe a 200 people show up and but then we have to stay engaged with them. So thank you for the challenge question.

    Q7: How many full time employees are actually paid to work on this now through the city and schools, and how many were there when you started?

    Troy: So a lot of progress was made without any formal group. We just got together and wrote grants to a lot of these groups I mentioned, to CERTS, to the Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships, to the West Central Initiative, to anyone who would give us money. We would ask for some and say please, and but it’s been relatively recently we’ve had a Coordinator. Most of the time we did not have a Coordinator. At the macro level wouldn’t it be wonderful if many of our communities could have an organizer, young or old, but it is really fun to have young folks around. Let’s launch some new environmental professional careers and gain from intergenerational wisdom. It would be it be awesome if there was more funding to support things like this. I want to encourage you. You don’t have to have a full time coordinator or a part time coordinator to get going. A lot of the work in the beginning was relational. We could have a community event and have the beginning of the event talking about something that we think is important. But all along this path has also been really trying to strategically cultivate leaders in our team. There’s a tension in community development.  We could have a longer conversation here. Do you cultivate the citizenry or do you cultivate leadership which is part of the citizenry? You should do both. But one approach that is really important is to develop real relationships with people who are in positions of leadership. That’s taken a long time, it’s very complicated and we still have a lot of work to do.

    Q8: We have a zoom question. Does your website have examples of the costs and savings for some of the initiatives you’re engaged in?

    Troy: The website does not have financial information about costs. I will bring this back to Griffin. That’s a wonderful idea. The report that Griffin and our German intern wrote about solar across the city has some information about savings, but across the board we have no summary. But this is a great idea.  Most of the things we proposed, when they went before the city council, if they didn’t seem to have a cost break they were less interesting. Where I live, a lot of the conversation really does have to start around money but the goal isn’t to end there. The goal is to become more aspirational too.

    Q9: About 15 years ago, I visited a dairy farm that was capturing the waste and generating about $2,000 a month on their electric bill as a pilot plant with a small dairy. You had mentioned you have some of the largest dairies for generating your own electricity with biogas. Is this happening?

    Troy: We’ve got some large dairies in and around Morris, are they generating electricity with the biogas? What are they doing exactly? The short answer is that one of the largest dairies did use biogas and make electricity early on. But that wasn’t the business they wanted to be in. So they mothballed the biogas, the anaerobic digestion facility. But eventually an outside investor came in and said, you’ve got the anaerobic digestion system, we would love to take your gas upgraded and stick it in the pipeline. Now it’s really interesting the way the world is right, amongst friends here, I have emphasized we’re trying to use language that unites and doesn’t divide and this is hard. There are a lot of people who do not think climate change is a real thing.  So how do we how do we still make progress? The way this financing works for the renewable natural gas plant to come into town, and create investment jobs is because Californians attribute value to renewable natural gas, and the federal government does too. So between renewable energy credits by Californians who want renewable natural gas and the federal government those credits go together to create a financial model that makes it work.

    Q10: Here is another way to look at a model – a country of Canada has a single player for medical costs. Also the government being single payer again, mandated no more burning coal. Less pollution saves on medical bills.

    Troy: Yes. Not an energy bill.

    Q11:  You said your library has geothermal energy. Yep. And I would suggest you have a ground source heat pump. Yes. It’s called geothermal energy in the state of Minnesota.  Absolutely. Thank you. This is correct. So geothermal energy starts at 120 degrees. Yeah. This is a ground source heat pump. So I would ask that we present that to keep what we talk about on the open up and we’re not pulling the wool over anybody’s eyes.

    Troy: I appreciate the correction. Use the right language. That’s right. Thank you, sir. And also, he said something about about Canada. It’s also interesting in Minnesota in terms of progress in the present moment. We’re seeing our utilities shutting down coal plants. So in Otter Tail County, my investor owned utility is shutting down coal. We also saw one of the largest coal fired power plants in Xcel’s territory, Sherco, shutdown. So things really have changed in last 15 years. I remember 15 years ago, we had environmental groups showing up at Administrative Law Judge hearings advocating for a change in the path. We had amazing leaders like Senator Ellen Anderson, saying we could absolutely put more wind electricity on the grid. And then the Next Generation Energy Act passed which was a big deal. It was bipartisan, with Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty, and the Democratic legislature. And MN met the goal of that Act eight years early. It has paid to be ambitious. I would also mention distinctions about geothermal and ground source heat exchangers. One of the projects our German intern is working on is the role of air source heat pumps in a rural Minnesota community. Do any of you have like mini splits in your house? My parents and I drove around Babbitt today to reminisce and I had forgotten that everybody’s got a fuel oil or LP propane tank. I had forgotten that the natural gas line didn’t run there. You know, the natural gas lines also generally don’t run to Native communities either. So some of the best opportunities to do Air Source Heat Pumps financially exists in communities that don’t have a natural gas line.

    Q12: We have the only Junior College system in the state of Minnesota does not have natural gas. Muffled comment.

    Troy: So Vermilion (Minnesota North College, Vermilion Campus) does not have natural gas. Background noise.

    Q13: We know that Morris is exceptional in every way but there are a lot of other small towns in Minnesota. Who’s number two who’s number three? Are any of the others making good progress?

    Troy: Thank you for the kind words about the Morris community. What I would say is that the sustainability puzzle, the sustainability conundrum, the sustainability game is really contextual and regional. Before 2005 Morris was windy, and there were no wind turbines, and it was sunny, and there were no solar panels. And the goal was to join the resources with the tech. I will digress just for a second because I think in my community talking about the costliness of things like “that’s a bit spendy” is like a way to kind of carry some cashet in a conversation. I think it’s important to realize that VCRs were expensive, and then they weren’t and DVD players were expensive and then they weren’t, and calculators were expensive, and then they weren’t, and mobile phones were expensive and they weren’t and then it was the internet and then your camera. And wind was expensive, and then it wasn’t and then solar was expensive and then it wasn’t. Did you know energy storage is expensive, and it’s boring to me, because it’s just not going to be expensive five minutes from now. The question is will we do the process that we know works, to bring us through a cycle of innovation and adoption. Who’s pushing that? We need early adopters. You know, I’m probably not the right early adopter, but I have friends who are. I wish I was.  I really admire my Vice Chancellor who is early adopting all kinds of stuff.

    And we need those role models. But in terms of your question about who’s doing cool things, I think that regionally across the state, I see models that I admire but I will not name them.

    Q14:  Can you talk more about how you sold the campus on the composting idea what was the main benefit? The people side of that?  

    Troy: You know, this was a great example where the students said to our administration, they said it seems like you’re doing a lot of cool stuff on clean energy, but our zero waste game doesn’t seem very good. And that was true. We could be doing more and that precipitated that trip down to compost school, where they learned how to do it. But of course with all these things we did we did some financial analysis. We knew how much it costs to haul our waste. There’s tonnage fees, there’s tipping fees that we pay to our garbage hauler. We knew that if we could divert this much compost, this this much organics from the landfill we wouldn’t pay these fees. We could use that as fertilizer on campus. So we built a budgetary model too. Part of that was trying to say there’s environmental benefits.

    That reminds me of what I wanted to say to an earlier question because you brought up the question about the social cost of carbon and how do we price that in? And obviously, we’ve got groups like Citizen Climate Lobby, that have been yelling at the top of their lungs for years that we should be thinking about such things. But we still had to make the case that this was good for the bottom line. Again, everything is hard and all this was still a big pain in the butt.

    So this is where like we have amazing leaders, our facilities director Lisa Harris is a total rockstar.  She got our composting units that go all around campus. So no matter where you are on the Morris campus, you can put your apple core in a composting container.  But someone and then had to train the custodial staff to do that, and then we had to train the community to do that. Sometimes I go to the Common Cup in town. They’ve got these signs that literally say, compost here, aluminum cans here, and it’s always messed up.  So we had 100 kids the other day on the Morris campus and we were telling them everything’s compostable here, except these two things. And I stood by the garbage containers and I was telling them yep, no, yep, no, yep, no. So I did trash talking, we’ve got to do some of that. So, but many of us live our lives through little sayings and adages. And the first act of love is attention. And so we teach our kids to love things, right? To love the Boundary Waters, to love what we see. And so we need to teach our kids to pay attention. Now, by the way, we tried to run a composting program at the elementary school and the high school. Do you know where it didn’t work at the beginning? The high school. Yeah, of course. Yeah, it didn’t. So little kids were like I get it like that’s where my compost goes.

    Q15: What was the final product?

    Troy: The composting material made on campus was used on campus as a soil amendment.

    Q16: What about a state mandate to require solar on all rooftops of new buildings?

    Troy: We have never had more money or more tools to tell us whether solar is worth doing in a given spot. If there are groups that think that this is a good idea that would be something worth advocating for. For the Morris Campus we view it as something that makes sense. And the City of Morris viewed it as something that makes sense. And the School District viewed it as something that makes sense. There are other layers to the conversation that are more complicated. We have laws in the state that allow us to put solar on the roof that is under 40KW. But there are also questions, for example, what it would look like if we could put solar on top of the whole vast school complex. We did some studies on this a couple of years ago. But we need to think about the incentives, and the ability to get on the grid and grid congestion and paying to get on the grid – it needs extra study. Where it gets really interesting is in the boring stuff. And that’s why I’m thankful that there are wonderful non-profits in our state, like Fresh Energy and Great Plains and CURE that get into the nitty gritty about the policy. Minnesota is sunny and we have wind. But Minnesota has no coal, Minnesota has no oil or natural gas. We are pulling oil out of rock and dirt in the Dakotas and in the tar sands of Canada’s boreal forest. The question about energy return on investment EROI is important because when we get to the point where it takes a barrel of oil energy to get a barrel of oil out of the ground as you can guess that isn’t the time to think “Should we build a renewable future?”  That is the end of society as we have experienced it.

    Q17: Have you had any pushback from the big utility companies?

    Troy: One of the things we have been trying to do in Morris is to build a relationship with our utilities. Going back to the LED lighting, we were talking to the utility all the time. For the electric chargers, we put electric chargers in the community – the utility did it. I want to make an important point which is that we are all responding to incentives and we can change incentives. So some of my rural friends would say “Here is what we hear from our big city friends – don’t grow corn, don’t grow soy beans, or sugar beets, don’t make ethanol plants” What do you want us to do for our livelihoods? This is hard. I don’t have any answer to this but this is part of the challenge that we have got to address together.

    For the utility, their incentives are different. This is a dance. I think that sustainability is about harmonizing the tensions. We are not all going to agree and there is going to be some stuff left on the table. There is a business model that farmers operate under and a business model that utilities operate under. The utilities business model is to build equipment. My utility was going to build a 1.6 billion dollar coal fired power plant just across the Dakota border and they would have got cost recovery on that and that’s how they would have made money. But now we are in a moment of great transition, of great urgency, of disruption. What is the right model for that?  This is above my pay grade. We need more conversation with the utilities and others about their incentives and what happens if the incentives change.

    Talking about the charging – who has the best EV charging structure in the United States? Elon Musk. So this is a profound question – one billionaire person built out a charging network, but we think that electric charging is a backbone for driving down greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. It should be a community benefit. Rural communities are left out of the transition. The US built the highway system as an act of economic development. We know the history of rural community electrification, where rural communities were begging “May we please have electricity now?”

    Who will own this future? Utilities are in the business of selling power. Is the transition something important to them and is there a sense of urgency, or is there some other player? So will it be gas stations or will it be the State of Minnesota saying this will be public infrastructure for the public good? Of course we are going to have charging stations. Will it be our regulated utilities doing this? But we need an answer now, remember one billionaire did it.

    Thank you, thank you, much applause.

    March 12th 2024 Recycling everything, MN’s Zero Waste Coalition

    Hi Folks

    Our next climate meeting will be March 12th at 4pm in the Ely Field Naturalists Resource Center above the NAPA store. The meeting will be both in person and zoomed.

    This month we will be hosting members of the Minnesota Zero Waste Coalition–including Eureka Recycling (a mission-based waste service provider), the MN Environmental Justice Table, and rural advocacy organization CURE represented by our own Maggie Schuppert and Hudson Kingston. The conversation will dig into how the growing Zero Waste movement is tackling the waste crisis in Minnesota–by reducing waste at the source, redesigning systems to support reuse, and conserving resources and promoting sustainability within our communities—and share what is happening this session at the Legislature to move Minnesota towards a zero waste future.

    You can find more about Eureka here: https://eurekarecycling.org/about-eureka/

    more about the MN Environmental Justice Table here: https://www.mnejtable.org/

    and more about CURE here: https://curemn.org/

    Here is our zoom link:

    Topic: Ely Climate Group Meeting
    Time: Mar 12, 2024 4:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada)
    Join Zoom Meeting
    https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89676877021?pwd=uAIGClNCWc5PbxHUvZgYR9uudglDUt.1
    Meeting ID: 896 7687 7021
    Passcode: 591585

    You can find our YouTube channel here to review recent recordings:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFYEXa0qx5p9Nb25QBXhgbg

    You can find our blog here: https://elyminnesota.com/elyclimate/

    Hoping to see you 4pm Tuesday March 12th

    Thanks

    Barb

    Feb 13th 2024 Clean Energy Resource Teams

    At our meeting in January, Hudson made a compelling case for heat pumps. During the Ely Winter Festival we had the opportunity to see and drive a variety of electric vehicles on display at Ely’s DQ. These technologies are becoming more known and accepted, and certainly help us reduce our carbon footprint. But making changes is not easy. We have lots of questions, for example:

    What is the range of an EV in cold weather?

    What will a heat pump cost and is it noisy?

    Do I have enough electrical power at my home for all this stuff?

    What does LCP or (Minn Power) charge per kWh for a heat pump or EV charger?

    What about all those federal and state tax incentives and rebates we hear about?

    Our February meeting features Nik Allen from CERTs (Clean Energy Resource Teams) to help us find some answers. Thank you Nik! Here is an excerpt from the CERTs web page:

    The Clean Energy Resource Teams work across the state of Minnesota to provide residents with the best unbiased resources, tools, guidance, connections, funding and financing opportunities, events, and stories to get your projects done. Best of all, we’re not trying to sell you anything: our resources and tools are free.

     You can find more information here: https://www.cleanenergyresourceteams.org/residents

    You can find the recording of the meeting here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFYEXa0qx5p9Nb25QBXhgbg

    Jan 9th 2024 Heat Pumps

    Jan 9th 2024 Climate Meeting Heat Pumps  This is a pdf summary

    You can find the full recording of the meeting on you tube.

    Either search on you tube for “Ely Climate Group” or go here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFYEXa0qx5p9Nb25QBXhgbg

    December 2023, planning session

    Notes on Dec 5th 2023 Meeting notes, BJ

     

    We met at Mary Louise’s home to discuss how to proceed in 2024. Many thanks Mary Louise for the good atmosphere and to all who contributed. Before the meeting, I asked Ted Spalding, who started the group several years ago and now lives near the twin cities, to write about how the group started. Here is his story:

     

    I got interested in global warming in the 1960’s. I have no background in science but I bought into the idea of global warming, and have remained interested to this day. One day about 12 years ago I passed a legal pad around the room at Tuesday group. That’s how we got started.
    Don’t ever give up. Unlike Sisyphus your group along with millions of other groups around the world will get the rock to the top. All we have to do is defeat entrenched business interests, entrenched lobbyists for fossil fuels and against global warming technologies, whole nations who think global warming is a hoax (ie the United States) and on and on. I think success might be found by a two pronged approach. You work in two directions at once simultaneously. Top down and bottom up and where they meet you may have a solution.

    GOOD LUCK for the sake of all the BIOSPHERE.
    Ted

     Thank you Ted, we are still going. We discussed our objectives, our meeting time/dates/locations, how to involve more of our community and be more effective. Here are my notes, and comments from others. If you have good ideas for the group that are not discussed here, we would love to hear them!

     

    January 2024 Meeting

    Next meeting Jan 9th at EFN at 4pm. Note new time. Zoom and in person. Community notices to TimberJay and Echo. Main topic to be heat pumps with local plumber explaining how they work and what it takes to have one installed. Do they work in winter? Comments from Hudson and/or Maggie on their personal experience with one, IRA rebates/tax incentives.

    February 2024 Meeting

    Possibly more IRA info about household or local business deductions and tax breaks. Recruit speaker from CCL or CERTS? Date, time, place TBD. If liaison with school or college can be re-established take the meeting to them and select topic of mutual relevance. If this is a Tuesday dates are Feb 6th or 13th. Note there is a possibility of Meghan Salmon-Tumas Northland College, Ashland WI visiting Feb 13th for TG and/or CC arrangements not yet decided. (If MST visits this would also work well for Bill’s Nature Nights, or for a “special” lecture at the college, would we want to make either option be the CC meeting for that month?)

    Note: There are 6 EV chargers at the DQ. Hudson/CURE/CERTS plan an EV event in the DQ parking lot in February. Details TBA. We should be there for support.

    Thoughts for more meetings:

    Plan discussion around a book or video. Hudson suggested Wellstone’s “Powerline” as an example.

    Ideas for topics: biomass, plastics, agriculture energy and carbon, the electric grid, the Midwest hydrogen hub, COP28, population, health & climate (HPHC)…  Send your suggestions.

    We have a lot of possibilities for local speakers and we also have summer visitors and we can recruit zoomers from almost anywhere.

     

    General thoughts on purpose and activities of the group:

    Members like the monthly meeting format where we can explore new topics. We are happy when members write LTEs and call their representatives but these activities are personal decisions.  We recognize the good work done by our colleagues at CCL and value our increased interaction with them especially recently over the important topic of clean steel and potentially in the future on details of the IRA. Our climate group and CCL are complementary. One is small independent and local, the other strategically organized and national. Continued collaboration is sensible whenever our objectives overlap.

    In addition to monthly meetings members are interested in pushing for local changes. Discussions on how to do this covered a variety topics including more trees for Ely, especially around Zups, a dark sky initiative, electric school buses, solar panels for the school/college, and more. It was agreed that since we are a small group we should adopt a single direction for our efforts and that not every member of the group would want to participate. There would likely be other locals interested to join in the effort, this would bring more contacts and experience. In order to plan for this we have our first COMMITTEE with Barb and Maggie recruited to start it off. Who else should we recruit? Enhance your resume, please volunteer!

    Thanks

    Barb

    Nov 7th 2023, Aaron Kania District Ranger

    November 7th 2023 “Managing Forests” Aaron Kania, Kawishiwi District Forest Ranger

    Aaron talked about how our forests have changed from times before Europeans arrived to the present and what we may expect in the future as our climate changes. Indigenous people used fire to clear the understory hence avoiding many severe crown fires. Our current dangerous situation includes a dense understory from a history of suppressing fires, extremes of climate including droughts, and close contact between people and forested land. He covered how carbon is stored in the forest and how it cycles through decay and regrowth.

    This was a rich discussion, thank you Aaron.

    We recorded a zoom of this discussion. You can find it here:

    https://us06web.zoom.us/rec/share/CXTCFjskn2IRsMzWkvrblZ5v5CaCIy3qaNOTdV1yHT-KoYW1X7Rocixbb2gCuddO.xJYyKBNmmZCxqXeC

    Passcode: aevu1+kC

    Here are 2 more good resources about forests, fire and biodiversity:

    First a video from the US Forest Service recommended by Aaron:     https://www.fuelingcollab.com/episode-2-2

    Second a short report in Politico on an article in the journal Nature. This was found by Becky: https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2023/11/13/protect-forests-dont-plant-new-trees-to-fight-climate-change-scientists-warn-ee-00126853

    Letter to editor TimberJay Oct 27th 2023

    The Iron Range can benefit from the fight against Climate Change

    Many of us are concerned about climate change. Northeast Minnesota is home to the MN Northland Chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby and to the Ely Climate Change Group. A recent combined meeting of these groups viewed and discussed the 24 minute video on opportunities for iron and steel in MN made by CCL.  You can watch it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4JyAWRuvsI

    The manufacture of steel contributes around 7% of the world’s greenhouse gases. Minnesota is the major source of iron ore in the USA and MN exports its iron ore to other states, some in the form of taconite pellets and some in the form of direct reduction grade (DR grade) pellets. All the processing of these pellets into direct reduced iron (DRI) and finished steel occurs in the rust belt, with the jobs and associated “value added” going to other states (like Ohio).

    A new and much cleaner way of making steel uses DR grade pellets and electric arc furnaces to produce direct reduced iron using green hydrogen made with renewable energy. We are excellently situated to do this process here in northern MN, right at the mine sites. We have the iron ore (no one else has this), we have access to large amounts of renewable energy (wind and hydropower), we have a well-developed transportation network, we have the water and the brown field sites ready for development and we have the labor force wanting good paying jobs.  MN was selected recently as one of the Department of Energy Hydrogen Hub locations. The demand for “green” steel continues to increase as people become more concerned about climate change.

    There can be side benefits to making DRI here. For example Form Energy makes iron-air batteries designed to run for 100 hours for the management of renewable energy on the electric grid. These batteries need DRI. Xcel is planning to install these batteries (10MW, 1000MWh) at Becker MN (the Sherco site). Many more will be needed as the electric grid transitions from fossil fuels to wind and solar power. Form Energy is building a battery plant in West Virginia. They would find ideal conditions to build their next battery factory in MN next to a DRI plant.

    Another application for the highly reactive DRI material is to decrease the sulfate in water discharges that inevitably come from the mining and production of iron. An inexpensive procedure that cleans discharge water has been developed in Babbitt by ClearWater BioLogics. DRI is essential for this.

    National Renewable Energy Lab and MN NRRI research shows that Minnesota leads all other states in the most cost-effective development of these clean-energy and iron-based industries.  Now is the time to push for these initiatives before these opportunities disappear to competing states.  The Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provide enormous funding for exactly these types of projects that develop and use technology to reduce CO2 emissions and generate well-paying, sustainable jobs.  Please let your state and federal legislators and local leaders know you support this future for Northern Minnesota.

    Barb Jones for Ely Climate group; Jeff Hanson, Brett Cease, Mike Overend, Eric Enberg, Charlie Orsak, Katya Gordon and Russ Mattson for the MN Northland Chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby

    Oct 10th Green Steel and Northland Opportunities, CCL and Jeff Hanson

    You can find the CCL video (24 mins) here:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4JyAWRuvsI

    You can find the zoom recording of our Oct 10th meeting (including both video and discussion) here:
    https://us06web.zoom.us/rec/share/nYNCpZxeEBYbKdzT__RDbZO_ovMlRNTc4asS8IpIm28lJ1vJh2mX2MsjkmdAPrOm.RlIXLwDuXSMEBdrD
    Passcode: 14Y#t=5C

    Let your lawmakers and newspapers know you support these opportunities
    Rep. Pete Stauber stauber.house.gov/contact
    Sen Tina Smith smith.senate.gov/contact
    Sen Amy Klobuchar klobuchar.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/email-amy

    Sen Grant Hauschild sen.grant.hauschild@senate.mn 
    Rep Roger Skraba rep.roger.skraba@house.mn.gov
    IRRRB https://mn.gov/irrrb/about-us/contact/
    Find your legislators www.leg.mn.gov/leg/legislators
    Timberjay marshall@timberjay.com
    Ely Echo https://www.elyecho.com/letter-to-the-editor

    SAMPLE – use this, or make changes, or write your own
    Dear legislator xxxx
    Climate change affects us all. In northern MN we need to use our resources to help reduce pollution from the iron and steel sector. We mine iron ore but then ship it away for processing and do not clean up the pollution affecting our waters and wild rice beds. Instead we could process the ore locally using our plentiful green energy supply, and we can also address the sulfate pollution to clean our lakes and rivers. This would produce clean steel which is needed in increasing supply for the energy transition and for iron-air batteries like those developed by Form Energy. It would also create clean environments and local high paying jobs. Our colleagues at Citizens’ Climate Lobby have made a short video on the topic. You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4JyAWRuvsI Funding is available through the Inflation Reduction Act. MN has the ore, the clean wind power, the transportation infrastructure and the workers. We need to seize this opportunity.

    Finally there is a meeting of the Mineland Vision Partnership (MVP) meeting focused on Climate Change in Chisholm on November 8th 10 – 12am.  This meeting is open to the public and you may wish to attend. The CCL team will be making a presentation. MVP’s website https://mvpmn.org/ states MVP is open to the public and encourages all interested stakeholders, whether private property owners, mining company representatives, business and community interests to engage in the organization’s activities.”

    Thanks to our Northland CCL team for their leadership.

    Barb

     

    Sept 5th 2023, Randy Kolka on Mercury in the Environment

    Randy is the lead scientist on mercury related research in Forest Service Research. You can find his bio here: https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/about/people/kolka  He has been working on mercury cycling in northern Minnesota since the mid-1990s, starting with his PhD dissertation.  Much of his mercury research is on the USDA Forest Service’s Marcell Experimental Forest just north of Grand Rapids.  He also leads the important SPRUCE experiment (Spruce and Peatland Responses under Changing Environments) which some of us have visited.  Randy is an adjunct faculty member at six universities in the US and Canada and has nearly 300 scientific publications.

    Factors Influencing Mercury Cycling and Bioaccumulation in Fish

    Cutting-edge research on the Marcell Experimental Forest and other locations in northern Minnesota over the past couple of decades have led to discoveries related to mercury biogeochemistry, atmospheric deposition, hot spots where the bioaccumulative methylmercury is produced and controls on that production, the impact of fire on the transport and bioaccumulation in fish, and how warming associated with climate change influences mercury cycles.  As a result of our long-term mercury research program, EPA and the state Minnesota Pollution Control Agency has used our research in major cases such as the Polymet mine decision, and currently with proposing a total maximum daily load (TMDL) policy for the St. Louis River.

    This talk was recorded on zoom. Here is a link to the video:

    Passcode: E#s^n$g9