July 2020

At 7 p.m. on Tuesday August 11, Quincy Climate Action Network and the Thomas Crane Public Library will cosponsor an online lecture by environmental lawyer and Boston College Law School professor Zygmunt J.B. Plater. Plater will recount his experiences as chairman of the State of Alaska Oil Spill Commission’s Legal Research Task Force, which investigated the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989. He will also discuss what the findings of the task force can teach us about the politics of climate change.
Continue reading →

Join Quincy CAN and sponsoring partners for a virtual Eighth Congressional District Candidate Town Hall on the Environment, featuring Representative Stephen Lynch and his challenger Dr. Robbie Goldstein.

The Town Hall will take place on July 21 at 11:30 am and will allow you to learn directly from the candidates how they will address the pressing issues facing our communities.

Candidates will discuss their views on issues that relate to our land conservation, equity, climate change, sustainable transportation, and more. The issues that affect you, your community, and the natural places you care about, need strong leadership at the federal level. Attend this one-hour session to better understand the candidates’ positions so that you can make an informed decision for this important election.

You will have the opportunity to submit questions when you register, as well as during the live, virtual event.

Please register today!

June 24, 2020

Environmental lawyer and Boston College Law School professor Zygmunt Plater recently remarked that government and individual responses to the coronavirus pandemic show that actions “that may have seemed radical in the very recent past now seem necessary for societal survivability.” In that way, Plater said, the pandemic and our responses to it should give us a new way to look at the actions we need to take against climate change.

Quincy Climate Action Network agrees with Plater that both crises require novel and multipronged responses, and yet the actions required to fight climate change, while numerous and varied, aren’t nearly as radical as what societies have done in the last few months. Compared to closing down economies or staying shut up in our houses, climate solutions are generally painless. Continue reading →

March 10, 2020

Dear Editor,

If you’re like other Quincy residents, you’ve been getting even more phone calls and marketing letters than usual from energy suppliers touting cheaper and sometimes greener electricity, claims that have often proven deceptive according to a 2019 report by Attorney General Maura Healey.

We wonder if the accelerated pace of these offers has anything to do with progress being made on the Green Municipal Aggregation (GMA) plan that was recently approved by our city council. Continue reading →

February 11, 2020

Five of QCAN’s Ward 5 residents met with City Councilor Chuck Phelan during his office hours on February 5th to discuss local issues related to climate change. We encouraged Councilor Phelan to vote for an amendment to the single-use plastic bag ban that would incorporate a modest surcharge for single-use paper bags, which contribute several times more climate-warming gases than single-use plastic bags. We hope that such an amendment can be proposed and approved before the plastic bag ban takes effect on March 1st. Continue reading →

January 10, 2020

The office of Quincy Energy Manager Shelly Dein hosted a presentation last night by Harvard Extension School graduate student Vanessa Goh of her inventory of current greenhouse gas emissions generated within city limits – along with a proposed mitigation plan. This type of report helps set a baseline for all the sources of our community’s emissions so that we can set – and hopefully meet – future targets. Continue reading →

01/16/20

Dear Governor Baker:

I urge you on behalf of the Quincy Climate Action Network to convert the MBTA buses that operate in and around our city to battery electric buses. As climate activists QCAN members are working first of all to reduce the greenhouse gas pollution that threatens the property and lives of Quincy residents, and converting the fleet to electric buses is a critical part of achieving that goal. Electric buses have one quarter the carbon footprint of diesel hybrid buses, a footprint that will grow increasingly small and eventually disappear altogether as the electricity supply comes more and more from renewable sources. Today one Quincy bus route alone, the 215, daily emits 2,000 pounds of CO2 equivalent. Continue reading →