Shea Nolan probably had one of the more sustainability focused childhoods in Ithaca. The father of this LACS graduating senior is the owner of Home Green Home on the Ithaca Commons, so Shea’s family was always checking out products for their performance and their ecological footprint. He now has the chance to share some of his homegrown expertise after winning the second grant award from Sustainable Tompkins’ Youth Climate Challenge program.
Shea’s project is to develop a curriculum packet to teach 4th and 5th graders how to use a solar oven to cook delicious meals while imparting the basic science behind their use. The $637 grant from Sustainable Tompkins will be used to purchase three solar cookers and print and laminate lesson plans. Local schools and nonprofit partners like Cayuga Nature Center will be able to sign up to use the ovens and curriculum materials.
Shea will get some help with the curriculum design from his mother Michele, the Principal of Alternative Education at TST BOCES and retired LACS biology teacher Dan Flerlage (a member of the Sustainable Tompkins grant team). Shea will be testing out the new curriculum on Belle Sherman summer school students this year. He’s not sure yet which of his favorite solar oven recipes they’ll make together, but roast chicken or cookies reportedly turn out great.
The first grant award in the Youth Climate Challenge from Sustainable Tompkins has been made to two Ithaca High School students, Tilden Chao and Abigail Glickman. The students submitted their Keep It Cool: The Future of Refrigeration proposal in April, and received a grant of $990 to pursue their innovative and unique outreach and education program on containment and reduction of hydrofluorocarbon (HFCs) refrigerants.
HFCs replaced the ozone-destroying CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) refrigerants after the 1987 Montreal Protocol was ratified. This unprecedented global accord has secured the future of our protective ozone layer, but unfortunately the replacement HFCs have a greenhouse gas effect up to 23,000 times that of carbon dioxide. The students plan to develop a website and educational materials on alternative and safe refrigerants and host a summit for local businesses that depend upon refrigeration such as grocery stores, restaurants, and food distributors to learn about the alternatives. A new global accord, the Kigali Amendment, was adopted in 2016 to mandate the phase-out of HFCs starting in 2019. The students hope to help local businesses get a jump on both preventing leakage of HFCs and the transition to less harmful coolants.
Great News! PSC Approves our Alternative to the Dryden Pipeline!
After three long years of citizen action, we now have the official decision from the NYS Public Service Commission to approve our community’s proposal for an alternative to a new gas pipeline in Dryden to provide energy for new development in Lansing. Thanks to all the good folks involved over the past 3 years in making the case for building and heating with the climate in mind! Special thanks to Irene Weiser of Fossil Free Tompkins for pursuing our goals all the way through the PSC case process. We also want to thank Brice Smith and Melissa Kemp for their work with ST in the early days of this campaign to put together our presentation on ‘Building and Heating with the Climate in Mind’ that we gave many times over the winter of 2014-15.
NYSEG will now install four electric pressure boosters along the existing gas pipeline to Lansing to assure reliability on very cold days for heating the Lansing schools. In the near future, NYSEG will release a call for proposals on ways to provide space heating and hot water for existing and new development in Lansing through more efficient design and equipment that does not use fracked gas, propane, or fuel oil.
Read the PSC press release here.
We worked with a team of students through Engaged Cornell during the 2016-17 academic year to survey local residents about their energy bills and collect stories about how utility bills affected the household economy, especially for lower-income residents. You can read their report High Energy Cost Burdens in Low-to-Moderate Income Communities to learn more about how our housing affordability crisis is compounded by inefficient buildings and heating systems.
Thanks to Professor Howard Chong and students Kelly Strohm, Sara Hwong, and Elizabeth Barnett for leading the student team on this project.