By Elizabeth McGowan for Energy News Network.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Virginia News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
As warnings about escalating climate disasters proliferate, it's tempting to pull the bedcovers up - way high - and stay in the dark.
Aware of that urge to hide, a nimble Charlottesville nonprofit has an antidote for the disheartened. The Community Climate Collaborative, or C3, is inviting Virginians to peek at its early success in weaning local businesses from fossil fuels.
Together, 16 members of the Green Business Alliance pledged last spring to cut their carbon pollution by 45% by the end of 2025. Just a year in, the alliance is upward of halfway there - already achieving a 28% reduction.
Thus far, calculations reveal that members have stopped spewing the equivalent of 4,800 metric tons of carbon dioxide, which translates to removing 1,000 cars from roadways for a year.
"C3 is tiny, but we're trying to contribute," emphasized Coles Jennings, the nonprofit's director of corporate sustainability. "There's just too much urgency to the problem."
Alarmingly, business operations overlap with more than 65% of Virginia's greenhouse gas footprint via transportation, manufacturing or commercial building energy use, according to Jennings' review of state Department of Environmental Quality inventory numbers.
Jennings doesn't pretend that a relatively puny carbon curtailment in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains will solve the global climate crisis. But, he noted, the alliance's esprit de corps can provide a glimmer of optimism.
That's why C3 aims to widen its regional reach and eventually duplicate its model statewide.
"These businesses are doing something that's really hard," said Jennings, who joined the C3 staff in December. "By taking action, members become a collective business voice for climate. Then they feel more comfortable speaking out.
"That's when they become influencers, pushing for climate measures."
Jennings, a professional engineer, said serving as a sustainability coach for alliance members has been the thrill of his energy consulting career because of their open-mindedness and commitment to progress.
For instance, he pointed to the willingness of InBio to follow through on recommendations suggested by an energy audit. By upgrading its heating and cooling systems, the professional laboratory services company trimmed its gas consumption by 40%.
"That was super validating for me," said Jennings, who conducted the InBio audit as a freelance contractor in 2019. "I know we're not reversing climate change with one company's gas usage, but it was a really cool personal moment."
He also boasted about how The Center at Belvedere, a nonprofit community gathering place for seniors, constructed a new airtight facility that's 2.5 times as large as its old one, with the same carbon footprint.
On the renewable energy front, half of the alliance members have added a total of 640 kilowatts of solar arrays to their properties.
One of Jennings' favorite tales entails Tiger Fuel, a family-owned fuel distribution company that has, perhaps counterintuitively, championed eco-values by announcing it had acquired a solar company at the alliance's May 2021 launch in Charlottesville.
It's an unlikely avenue for a company that distributes heating oil and propane gas and operates a network of gas stations, car washes and convenience stores.
"Lots of companies in their shoes would look at climate action as a threat to their business and actively resist it," Jennings said. "But instead, they're asking how they can get ahead of it."
'Busy as all get-out'
Life has been "busy as all get-out" in the year since Tiger Fuel purchased Charlottesville-based Altenergy and grew to 363 employees. The latter, rebranded as Tiger Solar in February, has offices in Virginia, Maryland, Washington, D.C, Idaho and Michigan.
"We are absolutely happy we did it and also proud," President Gordon Sutton said about branching into solar. "I don't see a lot of people scrambling to do what we've done. It's never been our intent to be a pioneer. It just felt right for us."
C3 first invited Tiger Fuel to the alliance table due to its decades of service in the region and its serious approach to reversing climate change.
As teens, Gordon and his younger brother, Taylor, had pumped gas, checked oil, and cleaned windshields as their father, David, guided the morphing of the company beyond service stations and fuel delivery. The sons both returned to Tiger Fuel after post-college adventures.
Six years ago, Gordon and Taylor, now chief operations officer, figured solar arrays would match Tiger Fuel's ideals when the price of panels and federal tax credits aligned to fit their finances.
By 2018, they hired neighboring Altenergy to install 17.5 kilowatts atop one store and two canopies sheltering gas pumps.
The brothers are in the midst of having Tiger Solar bedeck a mix of car washes, canopies, stores and one bulk facility with at least another 500 kW. Tiger Fuel would do 100% coverage, but not all canopies can support the weight of arrays and the company doesn't own the real estate at all 11 stores.
Gordon Sutton praised C3 for holding Tiger Fuel accountable for slicing its carbon footprint during a hectic year. The nonprofit deserves credit, he said, for strengthening bonds among enterprises that are secure enough to act quickly and ask one another for environmental advice.
For instance, Tiger Solar has completed a pair of solar installations - one 170 kW, the other 111 kW - at two Staunton dealerships owned by fellow alliance member Carter Myers Automotive.
"It's kind of fun to be engaged in an industry where there's so much tailwind," Sutton said about the solar side of his venture. "It feels like every time we do a project, it's received with a lot of fanfare.
"People are paying more attention because, as a company historically engaged in the distribution of fossil fuels, we're a bit of an outlier."
Still, while the laurels are welcome, the darts can sting. Sutton said he's aware some solar competitors have tried to undermine Tiger Fuel's newest venture as a green sheen exercise.
"This is not some sort of hocus-pocus greenwashing thing," Sutton said about the dedication of Tiger Solar's 50 or so employees nationwide. "This is real people doing real stuff in real time."
Altenergy, founded in 2004, had completed 1,700-plus solar projects totaling at least 42 megawatts. Tiger Solar has added 2.8 MW to that figure.
Sutton views that growth as a baby step. He is intent on extending Tiger's Virginia reach and also convincing owners of other competing fuel distributors, gas stations and convenience stores to join his solar fold.
"We are having conversations," he said. "None has yielded big results yet, but I'm confident they will."
Next? An appetite for more
C3 was adamant about crafting a program centered on smaller businesses because those with fewer than 500 employees are the backbone of Virginia's workforce.
The alliance also includes for-profits Red Light Management, WillowTree, Harvest Moon Catering, Quantitative Investment Management and accounting firm Hantzmon Wiebel; clean energy developers Apex Clean Energy, Sigora Solar and Sun Tribe Solar; Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital and nonprofits Legal Aid Justice Center and CFA Institute.
Luring them to become the alliance's "freshman class" began with relationship-building because it's not every day businesses trust a climate organization with their utility bills.
Energy usage metrics mined from those bills guided the individualized "emissions diet" plan for each business. Each participant began with a different baseline so they wouldn't lose credit for pre-alliance improvements.
Jennings is C3's chief data collector and reviewer responsible for providing participants with reports and updates.
"What's really exciting and unique is the community focus and flavor that's missing in the Fortune 500," he said. "We're bringing in a whole range of businesses that otherwise wouldn't touch this stuff because they don't have the staff to do this type of analysis."
Jennings is fully aware some communities become hamstrung on climate action because well-intentioned and well-researched promises never evolve into doable plans. It can be an arduous and exasperating chore.
However, he figures his nonprofit's endeavor will only boost area efforts to curb emissions. Alliance members are crucial players if Charlottesville and surrounding Albemarle County are to slice planet-warming emissions by 45% (relative to 2011) by 2030.
With such an enthusiastic inaugural membership, Jennings is convinced the project will expand even after the final emissions measurements are released in spring 2026.
"They have such a common thread and an appetite," he said. "My hope is they'll ask 'What's next?' after outgrowing the core mission pledge."
Eventually, he envisions cracking tougher nuts, such as converting fleets to electric vehicles and forming overarching climate action plans that extend beyond carbon footprints.
In the meantime, he wants alliance members to buckle down on energy audits so they can maximize every electron of efficiency instead of leaping immediately to sexier solar.
"I came across this quote somewhere and use it all the time," he said. "'You have to eat your energy efficiency vegetables before you get your solar dessert.'"
Elizabeth McGowan wrote this article for Energy News Network.
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By Ethan Brown for The Sweaty Penguin.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for Alabama News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
A 2023 Pew Research survey found only 27% of U.S. adults feel individual actions can help "a lot" to reduce the effects of climate change. But according to panelists at a Tuesday webinar from ClimateVoice and WorkforClimate, there's a solution - advocacy in the workplace.
"A lot of people understand that if they can get a hold of their employer's resources, they can have an outsize impact on climate change in a way that you will never be able to do as an individual voter or consumer," said Drew Wilkinson, Founder of Climate Leadership Collective.
Prior to founding his own company, Wilkinson was a paralegal at Microsoft. In 2018, two years into his tenure, he emailed The Ocean Cleanup to propose a collaboration at Microsoft's Global Hackathon to find solutions for ocean plastic pollution. At that point, The Ocean Cleanup had built technology to remove plastics from rivers and deployed it in Indonesia and Malaysia, but could not yet identify whether collected waste was actually plastic, or other debris such as sticks and leaves. Through Wilkinson's Hackathon project, participants developed a machine learning model to perform this task, successfully identifying over 30,000 ocean photos.
That same year, Wilkinson and a coworker launched the first employee sustainability community at Microsoft. The group grew rapidly, reaching 10,000 members and 37 local chapters in 2023, and playing a central role in Microsoft's strategy to become carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste by 2030.
"This is fundamentally about changing the paradigm of who gets to work on sustainability in a company," said Wilkinson. "It's not just for the people who have it in their job titles. It's about democratizing sustainability so that everybody can work on it in whatever way they want to."
In fact, a majority of employers want their subordinates' help with sustainability. In Willis Towers Watson's 2021 HR and Climate Strategy Survey, 84% of North American executives reported that employees play a major role in the successful delivery of their company's climate strategies.
It wasn't just large corporations where panelists made their mark. According to Arielle Terry, now Manager of Lending Solutions at ATMOS Financial, even a brand new employee working remotely can create positive change.
"Climate matters so much to me," said Terry. I'm so passionate about it, and I know my friends are probably like 'stop talking about it all the time.' But I just can't."
Before her current job, Terry worked as an Implementation Expert at Perceptyx, an employee experience transformation company with around 400 employees. A month into her job, Terry was shocked to learn that her 401(k) was invested into fossil fuels, deforestation, and other companies whose values did not align with her own.
"As employees, we should not have to invest in things we don't agree with," said Terry.
Before a company town hall, Terry posted a question about climate friendly 401(k) alternatives in the company Slack channel. To her surprise, her question received the most responses and was the first one asked at the town hall. After recruiting ten colleagues to a climate employee resource group, Terry eventually succeeded in convincing the company to add a climate friendly fund. She now works to improve solar lending practices at ATMOS.
While Wilkinson and Terry notched exciting wins in their respective roles, they did not come without challenge.
"A big thing is just, kind of, being ignored," explained Terry. "We were told 'we're gonna reevaluate benefits in 2023' and just being pushed off a lot."
In initial conversations with human resources, Terry learned Perceptyx did not have sustainability goals going into 2023. But by organizing coworkers and staying persistent, she still made a difference from the ground up.
Wilkinson echoed a similar sentiment.
"What it really takes to drive change for employees is a small but very tenacious and very persistent group who refuse to go away. If you can get more colleagues to join your cause, obviously it's harder to say no to ten than one, or ten thousand than a thousand."
To help individuals start their workplace advocacy, ClimateVoice developed an Employee Action Guide. The guide details four steps for all employees, regardless of title, to inspire progress: get the facts, find your influence, engage your coworkers, and advocate for action.
"No matter where you work, you have inside access. You have the relationships with your coworkers, with your leadership," said Deborah McNamara, Co-Executive Director of ClimateVoice. "Start thinking systemically about who's making the decisions and how you can have these important conversations about creating change."
ClimateVoice encourages employees to not just inspire action within the company, but also push employers to use their company's power to influence government policy.
"Right now we have this very lopsided situation where fossil fuel companies are unfortunately dominating the discourse," explained McNamara. "We want employees and companies to be doing more to advocate for the climate solutions that we need through policy."
ClimateVoice acknowledges that political engagement on climate may be daunting for some executives. That's why their guide includes a list of common objections - such as a preference for focusing on internal sustainability, a fear of wasting lobbying firepower, and a worry for pushing away partners like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce - and ideas for how employees can respond.
"It does require changing systems that are very entrenched," said McNamara. "We believe that employees are an important lever for change."
While corporate sustainability - particularly the concept of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals - has become controversial in recent years, companies who engage in the practice report several benefits beyond helping address climate change. Strong ESG practices increase sales, cut costs, attract investors, build customer loyalty, reduce legal liabilities, and improve recruitment with younger employees.
Panelists shared that their workplace advocacy didn't just help their companies' carbon footprints; it also helped their personal climate anxiety. A 2021 Pew Research poll found 59% of millennial and 69% of Gen-Z social media users said they felt anxious about the future after viewing climate content. While studies show excessive fear and anxiety often leads to lower engagement in the climate cause, Wilkinson's sustainability work at Microsoft allowed him to flip that script.
"For me, the antidote to anxiety is action," shared Wilkinson. "Believe that you can get power and influence. [We] are here to tell you that you surely can."
Ethan Brown wrote this article for The Sweaty Penguin.
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By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi for Ohio News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
In case you missed it amidst the New Year's revelry, Congress failed again last year to pass a new Farm Bill, the critical piece of ongoing legislation that facilitates American farming and agriculture. Unable to agree on a full five-year Farm Bill, Congress instead passed yet another short-term extension of the previous bill in the waning hours of 2024. Now, Congress has nine months to hash out the next Farm Bill - but how will Republican control over the government impact the negotiations?
With majorities in both chambers of Congress, Republicans may be "feeling more emboldened to take a hard-line stance" on their favored Farm Bill policies," Dan Jasper, senior policy advisor at the climate nonprofit Project Drawdown, tells Sentient. But Jasper also says that regardless of what the next Farm Bill includes, Congress's repeated inability to agree on one is a major concern in and of itself, as it throws into question the government's ability to ensure the smooth functioning of America's farming sector.
"Anybody who's connected to this bill has been left in extreme uncertainty," Jasper says. "In a moment of rising prices, inputs are getting more expensive as well, and it just leaves [farmers and producers] in a moment of like, 'can our government even deliver on the most basic things?'"
In other words, the stakes of a new Farm Bill are very high in a number of ways, some of which are more immediately apparent than others.
Why the Farm Bill Matters
The Farm Bill is an enormous package of legislation that undergirds America's farming sector. It touches on a wide variety of different policies relating to food, including the federal food stamps program (SNAP), crop insurance, farm subsidies, USDA conservation programs, animal health, disaster preparedness and more.
In theory, the Farm Bill is renewed every five years. In practice, lawmakers often miss that deadline, and have to pass short-term extensions while they hammer out a long-term bill that enough of them agree on.
The last time Congress passed a full, five-year Farm Bill was in 2018. That bill expired in 2023, but Democrats and Republicans couldn't agree on a new one before it did, and so they passed a temporary extension of the 2018 bill in November 2023, and another in the last month of last year.
These Farm Bill extensions last for a year...sort of. Lawmakers and the media have both referred to them as a "one-year extension," but it's actually more complicated than that, because some provisions of the Farm Bill expire earlier than others, and some don't really expire at all. But more on that later. For now, Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the White House, and that will have an impact on the negotiations.
What Happens Next With the Farm Bill?
The optimal scenario would be for lawmakers to pass a new Farm Bill in 2025 that lasts for the next five years. This would be good for lawmakers, as it means they wouldn't have to negotiate another Farm Bill until 2030, and for farmers, as it would provide them with a sense of consistency over the next five years.
This is a point Jasper returned to several times; the amount of sheer uncertainty farmers face when the Farm Bill is stuck in purgatory like this. Farmers rely on a host of government services to run their businesses, from crop insurance and conservation programs to price supports and research grants, and if they aren't sure how or when these programs will continue, it becomes more difficult for them to plan for the future.
"It just leaves them in a moment of like, 'Can our government even deliver on the most basic things?'" Jasper tells Sentient. Even with an extension, he says, "it's still going to lead farmers in limbo, and it's really going to further erode trust in our government. Which is already a problem, but when it comes to farmers, and basic food security, that's a huge problem."
How Will the Last Election Impact the Next Farm Bill?
Republicans captured both the White House and the Senate in the 2024 election, giving them full control of the government in 2025.
Though the exact impact on Farm Bill negotiations is unclear, the next session will see Congressional Republicans with greater freedom to include their own favored policies, and fewer checks on their ability to do so.
This doesn't necessarily mean they'll have carte blanche to do whatever they want, however. Republicans have a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives, so they can only afford to lose a few of their own members' votes before having to rely on Democrats to pass legislation.
This dynamic, which was true during the last session of Congress as well, means that Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the previous House minority leader, has an unusual amount of power in the chamber - so much so that he's been referred to as "the shadow Speaker" and "the most powerful person in Congress."
Moreover, Republicans don't agree on everything. For instance, there's significant disagreement in the GOP regarding Proposition 12, the California law that forbids the sale of certain animal products that were produced using extreme confinement. While many Republicans want to repeal Proposition 12 through the Farm Bill, there are a handful of Republican holdouts in the House who, if they held firm, could single-handedly torpedo any attempt to scrap the law.
Similarly, any Farm Bill will also need the approval of President-elect Donald Trump, who largely hasn't indicated which Farm Bill policies he supports or opposes.
Jasper also believes the next Farm Bill could - and should - contain some small modifications.
"It would probably need some updates to provide adequate support at this point," Jasper tells Sentient. "Given that they've had so much time here, they're basically on borrowed time. [USDA programs] need updates."
For instance, a lot of the USDA's programs are too popular, meaning that more farmers want to enroll in them than funding will allow for. Jasper cites conservation management programs, which have been chronically underfunded since at least 2010, and include the new climate-smart initiatives funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, as an example.
"The demand is growing increasingly, and the supply just isn't there," Jasper says. "There's a lot of interest in those programs, and so my guess is that some of those updates would need at least a nominal increase to keep up with inflation, and that kind of stuff."
Failing to Pass a Farm Bill Would Bring Chaos
One of the stranger aspects of the Farm Bill is that, in addition to funding policies that people do want, it also suspends the implementation of policies that people don't want.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Congress passed several farm-related policies to address economic uncertainty in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II. These policies, which are often referred to as "permanent law," were meant to stabilize farmers' income when commodity prices dropped below a certain level. Because they were based on pre-1920s information, they're now hopelessly obsolete.
Rather than repeal these laws entirely, however, Congress simply suspends them every five years in the Farm Bill. If Congress were to let the Farm Bill expire without passing a new version or an extension, these policies would suddenly kick in - and wreak economic havoc on the agriculture sector if enacted today, according to USDA analyses.
Congress defused this threat in the short-term when it passed a second extension of the 2018 bill in December 2024. But the threat will return in September, when this most recent extension is set to expire.
On the flipside, there are a couple of major policies in the Farm Bill that won't expire even if the Farm Bill does. SNAP funding, crop insurance and a handful of disaster programs will remain in place regardless of what happens with the Farm Bill.
To be clear, that doesn't mean they'll be functioning at full capacity. The American economy has changed dramatically since 2018, and the current funding levels for these programs doesn't reflect that. A new Farm Bill would be required to increase their funding, but not to simply keep them running.
The Bottom Line
In Jasper's eyes, the stakes of the Farm Bill extend beyond one specific program or initiative. For better or worse, the production of food in America is inextricably intertwined with federal policy, and when the continued functioning of those policies is destabilized, so are our food systems themselves. It's not a big leap from that to food insecurity, and Jasper says that high levels of food insecurity should worry everyone.
"Typically, if people are already malnourished and food security worsens, conflict doesn't erupt, because it's hard to fight on an empty belly," Jasper says. "But when people are in the middle, and food security starts to drop, that's when you get conflict."
Jasper's observation echoes that of political theorist Eric Hoffer, who noted that people living in extreme poverty rarely join violent revolutions, as they're too preoccupied with finding their next meal. It's when people are in a transitional period between security and insecurity that they become susceptible to extremism, which is already on the rise in the U.S.
"It relates to the political divisions that we're seeing," Jasper says. "It relates to some of the violence that we're now seeing erupt. This is important, and it's important in a big way that people do not understand."
Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.
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