updated Feb 2020
Had good conversation around climate slides at Multnomah Meeting yesterday.
Slides were created to be conversation starters, not to be tutorial, but here they are, for reference.
Oops. The slides are with my laptop in the car. Will have to
Updated Aug 2019
Paris To Pittsburgh To SR15 To Now 2020 Session For the information on the 2020 Session needs see Thinking Through Oregon Climate, below.
information on carbon budgets in light of SR15
Thinking Through Oregon Climate
The World Is On Fire
climate supportive organizations
A Trusted Source of Leading Knowledge Sharing
How hard to Decarbonize?
Making changes 5-4-2019 Ed A.
Want a quick catch up on the climate crisis? Try this link.
http://esf-oregon.org/doku.php?id=climate_crisis_notes
Making changes 8/11/2015 – Ed A.
Mail List: Note that for climate action stuff, in addition to this wiki/website there is a “listserv” in other words a mail list that members can use to broadcast their thoughts to other members of the list. Mostly it has be Ed A. sending out quick notices of upcoming events or specially interesting news that I may not find time to put on the website (but probably should). Since there are other active climate people in the Quaker community, I'd like to see their input, too. The mail list would be a way to get me to put interesting things on the wiki if you think that should happen and don't want to learn to do it yourself. Email Ed Averill
Please consider helping keep this site updated. There is lots happening, and I'm not keeping up with it.
New for 2019
Attended a training on lobbying by FCNL hosted by West Hills Friends Church today. It was a good training. Mary Priem attended, and will be becoming a part of a committee of local advocates for FCNL, which will complement her role with the Oregon Friends Committee on Public Policy working with the Oregon Legislature.
When I noted the following, it was still alive in the legislative session. With the session over, it seems to have died – hopefully temporarily. See my letter to Representative Bonamici.
Climate action at the legislature has been pretty dull this year, especially considering how many bills had been prepared for this long session.
Oregon HB3470 was developed with the help of Our Children's Trust, see: \
http://ourchildrenstrust.org/ORHB3470 \
The Climate Stability and Justice Act, HB 3470, creates a comprehensive climate change policy for Oregon with a framework to fairly and cost-effectively phase …
It has had activity in recent hearings. I haven't heard that it progressed, though.
Debbie and I went with the Sierra Club people to a PUC hearing. Since the legislature has not changed the law, we don't have new force for removing coal power from Oregon's power grid. Pacific Power presented their 20-year plan to PUC, and it got questioned. Pacific Power and the associated coal mines, power grid, and coal power plants, and with the BNSF railroad all owned by Birkshire Hatheway supplies a huge amount of coal power to our grid. Their plan notes that many of their plants would at least require upgrades to stick with upcoming EPA requirements. Sierra would like them to recognize that they can supply us power cheaper in the future by switching to green sources instead of either scrubbing the coal smoke or switching the plants to “natural gas” (methane). Such a move would both be cheaper to the ratepayer, and far better for the planet. However, unless Pacific Power switches their investment strategy, they would find themselves buying this green power from plants they don't own, and therefore cannot ask for PUC rates to give THEM the return.
The new Portland and Multnomah County Climate Action Plans (CAPs) are getting finalized for this cycle. They are good goal documents, but have little force in law. Note that Portland has done well with their previous CAP without it having the force of law, either.
However, Portland does want to have an official policy on participation in new fossil-fuel export or processing infrastructure. The Climate Action Coalition has been asking that they officially say that they will not enable new investments in these activities in their borders – and will encourage the county and State of Oregon to do the same. This could have a huge impact on containing our carbon footprint.
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Debbie and I (Ed Averill) went to PIELC 
the first week of March. It was fantastic. The keynote events are on YouTube. There are things worth looking at, but unfortunately, they capture the whole thing and put it up w/o editing. I may extract good parts, later.
We met with the southern Oregon coalition against LNG exports, and hope there will be some good demonstrations develop in the timeframe of Earth Day.
Then Debbie and I brought a bad cold back home and stayed there with it until about now…
The Propane Terminal in Portland is a hot item. It's carbon footprint would eclipse all previous and planned effort for Portland (the presidential climate champion city?) to be green.
But simultaneously the Portland Planning and Sustainability Commission brought out their revised Portland Sustainability Plan for review. There is opportunity to have a great set of objectives – and ones that would not allow hosting a Propane Terminal.
Watch the Upcoming Events upcoming for ways to support this. And see:
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Sierra et. al. are working on getting Oregon to plan a phase-out of coal by 2025 with replacement energy being mostly green. The bill exists both in the Senate and House versions, and the word is optomistic. Please follow opportunities to submit communications to your legislators, encouraging their support.
Please click here for Coal to Clean 101 on Wednesday evening.
* Propane Project opposition includes: The Audubon Society of Portland, ILWU-Local 8, Friends of Baltimore Woods, and Climate Action Coalition members: Portland Rising Tide, 350PDX, NoKXL/Portland, Portland Raging Grannies, Our Children's Trust, 1st Unitarian Universalists-Community for Earth, PDX Bike Swarm, and SEEN-Sustainable Energy & Economy Network.
LNG in OREGON–2 Projects
-Email Sen. Merkley: http://www.merkley.senate.gov/contact/.
USPS letters: 313 Hart Senate Office Bldg, Washington, DC 20510.
Local comment calls to the Senator's Staff: 503-326-3386
-Email Sen. Wyden: http://www.wyden.senate.gov/contact/.
USPS letters: 221 Dirksen Senate Office Bldg, Washington, DC 20510.
Local comment calls to the Senator's Staff: 503-326-7525
Click here for more background on the Lummi fight.
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The purpose of this wiki is to allow information to be exchanged quickly and easily amongst members of the Climate Education Committee and it's parent body, the Multnomah Monthly Meeting of Quakers.
I've [Ed Averill] tried to give it enough form to suggest how others could jump in and do things. There are video tutorials to do, and I'll try to get to them, soon. I may do that w/o audio first, and then come back to put sound in.
Peace and Social Concerns has historically had an activity directed toward climate change, but it went inactive for a while. In 2014, a new attempt has been starting again, but is still in gestation. Over the summer, Anna Barnett saw the upcoming Climate March as an opportunity needing attention and took it on. Along with that, Willamette Quarterly Meeting (WQM) had picked the topic of Climate Change for the fall meeting, and Anna tackled that, too. So, Anna has gotten a lot of people involved with climate change – demonstrating that there is a lot of interest.
From the WQM activity, Anna gathered lists of people interested in addressing various climate topics. She has now passed back email info to those groups, allowing them to organize themselves and get started. I believe that sharing information about those groups and their activities on this wiki would be good.
There are some confusing aspects to working with the wiki. Generally, the way to create a new page is to
give an old page a link to the new page (and save that old page),
click on the linkto the new page.
it sort-of goes to the empty new page, but you must discover that the Edit page button has become a Create this page button and click on it.
