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Inflation Reduction Act

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Photo by DanTD from Wikimedia Commons

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) announced Friday, Sept. 15, $1 million in federal funding for Smithtown through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service’s Urban and Community Forestry grants program.

This project will implement tree inventory assessments focused on public outreach and education while protecting and improving the existing tree canopy through tree maintenance activities throughout the town.

Tree planting will take place after a public outreach and education campaign. The campaign aims to increase local awareness of the positive impacts of maintaining an urban tree canopy for quality of life, the natural ecosystem and the environment.

“I am proud to announce Long Island communities are among the first in the nation to tap the historic funding I secured in the Inflation Reduction Act to conserve and increase tree canopy, educate residents and improve storm and flood resilience with new tree plantings,” Schumer said. “I fought hard to plant this funding in the Inflation Reduction Act so that Long Island could have access to the funding needed to breathe new life into its communities.”

Gillibrand added to this sentiment, noting the environmental trends that have made this funding necessary for communities such as Smithtown.

“Expanding access to trees and green spaces on Long Island will give our communities a higher quality of life,” the U.S. senator said. “This money will help bring new life to the Island, where families can enjoy a greener, healthier environment.”

Town of Smithtown Supervisor Ed Wehrheim (R) weighed in on this injection of federal stimulus. He tied the money to ongoing townwide efforts to improve the existing canopy.

“We are incredibly grateful to Senator Schumer for his advocacy in securing this funding, which is a gamechanger to advance our urban forestry agenda, the result of which will allow us to improve the community’s quality of life, wildlife and ecological habitat,” he said. “This grant will undoubtedly serve as the catalyst to expanding cutting-edge initiatives like our tree inventory, STEM and community outreach programs and our street tree canopy, which Smithtown’s urban foresters and the Department of Environment and Waterways have worked tirelessly to broaden over the years.”

He added, “We look forward to expanding our local green space, which will deliver ecological benefits for generations to come.”

The senators noted that a neighborhood lacking trees can lead to various problems, from increased air pollution, urban heat islands and poor health outcomes, all on top of negative economic impacts like decreased property values.

Schumer and Gillibrand said the Inflation Reduction Act has finally created the robust funding needed to maximize access to urban forests in cities and towns across New York.

The Inflation Reduction Act included $1.5 billion over the next 10 years for the U.S. Forest Service’s Urban and Community Forestry program, more than five times the current level of funding.

Schumer and Gillibrand explained that Urban and community forests cool neighborhoods, improve psychological well-being, keep electricity costs down, positively impact property values and help residents avoid the severe health impacts associated with heat waves.

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Photo from Town of Brookhaven

By Nancy Marr

There is substantial agreement among environmental groups that we want a circular economy — that is, we want to reduce waste by all means possible — by reducing, re-using, repairing, and recycling our waste — so that there is none, arriving at “zero waste.”

The DEC has just released a draft solid waste management plan designed to help New York State meet the climate goals of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, passed in 2019. It proposes reducing waste at its source, returning materials back to productive use, and diverting waste from landfills to avoid the emission of greenhouse gases, reaching a reduction of emission by 85% by 2050. The DEC has also issued rules requiring that any facility with over 25 pounds of food scraps either donate it or take it to a designated site for recycling. (Suffolk County has only one food-recycling site, so that requirement has been waived, leaving the food in the landfill.)

Because waste removal is a town responsibility, there has been no movement toward creating a county role which could be funded by the DEC, along with its role of regulating and overseeing town operations. Much of the municipal waste in Suffolk County is incinerated, with the ash deposited in landfills in the towns of Brookhaven and Babylon. Towns without landfills are sending their waste off the island to other states, using trucks with high rates of carbon fuel emission. Construction and demolition waste from building projects, and yard waste have been recycled more successfully, except for glass, which is currently part of municipal waste. It is being studied as a subject for recycling if markets can be developed for its final stage.   

A conference held recently (by the Evan R. Liblit Memorial Scholarship Committee) at Stony Brook University with speakers on waste to energy efforts, large scale organics management, and funding through the Inflation Reduction Act, ended with a roundtable of four of the town supervisors in Suffolk County and a representative from the NYS Department of Energy Conservation who welcomed the attendance of the town supervisors and commented on the unusually large number of people in attendance, showing a growing concern with the issue of waste reduction.

The town supervisors who participated in the conference — from Brookhaven, Smithtown, Islip, and Babylon — all agreed that they communicate regularly about issues of waste and are taking steps to reduce it but they said they cannot do it alone. How do we create and implement a regional or county approach? Most of the town supervisors reported that the residents of their towns are not aware of the problem and their part in it. To reduce our emissions by 2050 will require an accurate calculation of how the population is growing and the amount and nature of the waste.

Concern about the waste problem is most often expressed by residents objecting to measures taken to deal with the problem. In Smithtown the plan to utilize rail lines to move the waste to other states has met with opposition to the idea of railroad areas, despite the fact that it would reduce the emissions from trucks from the road and reduce road traffic. In Brookhaven, plans by Winters Brothers for removing ash by rail have also been opposed. How would people react to increases in garbage collection rates if more towns implement a Pay-as-You-Throw program, although many areas of the country now use it, substantially reducing the trash they pick up.

The supervisors cited successful efforts by teachers and schools to build understanding of the waste crisis, but how can we do more? 

Community groups are leading efforts to create community composting for our farmlands, open repair cafes, and create anaerobic digesters. Small groups of concerned citizens meet regularly as Carbon Crews, to learn new ways of reducing their footprints. Larger organizations, such as Beyond Plastics, have publicized the dangers of producing and burning plastics and are working on state regulations (Extended Producer Responsibility) to make producers aware of the costs to municipalities of disposing of the waste their products create. 

We can all do more, at home and away. If each of us cannot throw away less, little will be accomplished. Watch the DEC webinar to be held on April 11 from 10 to 11:30 a.m. to describe the Draft New York State Management Plan. For more information go to https://www.dec.ny.gov/chemical/41831.html

Nancy Marr is vice-president of the League of Women Voters of Suffolk County a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that encourages the informed and active participation of citizens in government and influences public policy through education and advocacy. For more information, visit https//my.lwv.org/new-york/suffolk-county.

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Electrons, shown as red dots above, collide with an ion. Such a collision will reveal the internal structure of the quarks and gluons that are the building blocks of the proton and neutron. Image from BNL

National labs, including Brookhaven National Laboratory, received considerable additional funds as a part of the federal Inflation Reduction Act.

BNL, which will get an additional $224 million over a five-year period, will collect the additional funding from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science to support several projects designed

In a statement, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm called the additional funds for energy-related research and support, which total $1.5 billion, “one of the largest ever investments in national laboratory infrastructure” and suggested that the effort would “develop advanced energy and manufacturing technologies we need to advance the frontiers of science and tackle tomorrow’s challenges.”

At BNL, the Electron-Ion Collider, an enormous project that will start construction in 2024 and should start running experiments in the early part of the next decade, will receive $105 million.

BNL is building the EIC in partnership with the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia, which will also receive $33 million for work towards the new facility.

As its name suggests, the EIC will collide electrons and protons or heavier atomic nuclei and hopes to make numerous discoveries, including providing an understanding of how the energy from quarks and gluons provides the mass of a proton.

Additionally, the EIC will provide advances in health and medicine, national security, nuclear energy, radioisotope production and industrial uses in particle beams. Research on the technologies that will become a part of the EIC will advance the development of magnets and other particle accelerator parts. These advances could lead to energy efficient accelerators, shrinking the size and costs of future accelerators, which could attack cancer cells, design solar cells and batteries and develop drugs and medical treatments.

While the additional funds will help advance the development of the EIC, the total cost is considerably higher, at an estimated $1.7 billion to $2.8 billion.

Beamlines

Additionally, the Office of Science will provide $18.5 million to speed the creation of three new beamlines at the National Synchrotron Light Source II.

The NSLS II already has a host of beamlines that enable researchers from around the world to study the structure of batteries as they are operating, catalysts that help tap into energy sources, and biologically active molecules that could play a role in understanding basic biochemistry or that could lead to the development of drugs.

The new beamlines, which, like others at the NSLS II, have three-letter abbreviations. The ARI will provide a complete picture of the electronic structure of a sample, particularly in connection with temperature, chemical, structural and atomic variation.

ARI will help understand and control the electronic structure of next generation quantum materials.

CDI, meanwhile, will explore the condensed matter macroscopic and microscopic physical properties of matter, including the solid and liquid phases that arise from electromagnetic forces between atoms. CDI is in its final stages of its design.

The SXN will provide element access from carbon to sulfur. The beamline will offer measurements of different signals, such as X-ray fluorescence and total electron yield absorption, which is important in catalysis, condensed matter physics and environmental science.

The DOE is also providing $20 million for five Nanoscale Science Research Centers. The Center for Functional Nanomaterials is leading the effort to revitalize the nanoscience infrastructure.

The funds will accelerate the acquisition, development and installation of five instruments, which will advance research in fuel cells, solar cells and other materials that are part of the country’s efforts to develop cleaner forms of energy.

A/C and Heating

BNL will receive $33 million to support an upgrade to the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe’s CERN laboratory. The upgrades will enable a high-energy particle detector to make use of increased particle collision rates.

The lab, which focuses on energy research, will also receive $14.5 million towards infrastructure improvements that will increase the efficiency in distributing electricity and heating and air conditioning in labs throughout the facility.

Finally, the lab will receive $1 million to develop instrumentation for a nuclear physics experiment that seeks to find neutrinoless double beta decay, which is led by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

BNL Lab Director Doon Gibbs described the funding as an investment in the nation’s innovation-based economy.

The funding will support “research with direct impact on the development of clean energy technologies as well as ground-breaking basic research in nuclear and high-energy physics — fields that could lay the foundation for future advances,” Gibbs said in a statement.

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Nuclear power. Pixabay photo

The nuclear industry will see major growth thanks to the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, and Long Island communities must again resist calls to go nuclear.

Among other incentives, the new federal law gives tax credits to utility companies that invest in new nuclear plants. While this may benefit other places around the country, such as West Virginia’s coal economy, it will do no good for Long Island.

The decommissioned Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant, still standing today, is a living relic of Long Island’s long-standing opposition to nuclear power. At the time of its construction, the plant saw intense local resistance for various reasons. 

While efforts to oppose Shoreham proved successful, we know that bad ideas die hard. While nuclear energy sees a renaissance nationwide, let us remember why we are a nuclear-free zone.

Anyone driving on the LIE at rush hour understands the glaring logistical hurdles of evacuating Long Island during a potential nuclear meltdown. It can take hours to get off the Island on any given day of the week. Our mass transit network is outdated and already incapable of supporting this overdeveloped and highly congested regional economy. 

In an age of more frequent and intense hurricanes, a nuclear meltdown appears ever more plausible. Swift and successful evacuation seems unlikely, if not impossible. For these reasons, adding nuclear infrastructure would be an existential threat to the health and safety of Long Island residents. 

Properly treating and disposing of radioactive material remains an unsettled science. Ridding ourselves of this toxic waste would put a greater strain on our already cluttered roads, highways, tunnels and bridges, further complicating evacuation efforts.

Finally, while we acknowledge that nuclear energy vastly outperforms wind and solar technologies, we should continue exploring these cleaner, safer alternatives. We should limit our carbon footprint and reduce fossil fuel consumption where possible, but we should do so responsibly. Reintroducing nuclear power to Long Island merely swaps one environmental hazard for another, endangering our citizens needlessly.

The apparent ties between our electric service provider and the nuclear industry should give Long Islanders unease, especially since the Long Island Power Authority maintains an 18% stake in the Oswego-based Nine Mile Point Nuclear Station. 

History tells us that powerful and monied interests may try to score a quick profit, even at the expense of ordinary folk. In time, some here on Long Island may seek to use the newly available nuclear energy subsidies. We must not let them. 

Long Island has never been — and never will be — a safe venue for nuclear energy. We must remember the example of Shoreham, how generations of Long Islanders have fought to keep our island nuclear free. Let us continue their work.

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