December 2023, planning session

Notes on Dec 5^th 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 9^th 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 6^th or 13^th. Note there is a possibility of Meghan Salmon-Tumas Northland College, Ashland WI visiting Feb 13^th 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