Clean Energy Leaders: High School Students Mobilize for Energy Efficiency in Nevada

This week, six high school student leaders from Southern Nevada will head to Carson City, the state capital, to urge their legislators to increase Nevada’s commitment to energy efficiency. I'd like to introduce you to them because I think you'll be inspired by their leadership and optimism, and because they represent a new generation of clean energy advocates doing important, groundbreaking work all across the nation. These students have become active with the Nevada Sierra Club and the Alliance for Climate Education, and say that experience has motivated them to make a difference on a bigger level.
"I wanted to get involved because of my newly-found passion for clean energy," said Joe-Allen Nunez, a 17-year-old junior at Liberty High School in Henderson, Nevada.
Nevada's potential to be a clean energy powerhouse is massive. In 2014 the booming solar industry in Nevada created nearly 6,000 jobs, up from 3,100 the year before. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, the Silver State leads the nation in solar jobs per capita. This job growth is largely due to smart, bipartisan policy that created a space for affordable, clean energy to compete.
However, while solar is booming, Nevada's energy efficiency success has slowed significantly. The state fell from 15th to 29th on the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy’s recent ranking of the most efficient U.S. states.
The Liberty High School students think their state should be leading on energy efficiency—and that young people can drive that change. These young people are currently serving in ACE's yearlong Action Fellowship, focused on training powerful leaders that act on climate. ACE will be recruiting Fellows for the 2015-2016 cohort in April and May.
"When I think about young people getting involved, I think about one of my favorite quotes from Robert Kennedy, which is, 'It's perhaps well to ask what kind of nation we are and what direction we want to move in,'" said Sarah Ko, a 17-year-old Liberty student. "The direction I want to go is a better one, and young people can be the answer to that. Young people are mistaken for being 'too young' in their ideas because they lack experience; however, we can become informed, we can become passionate about issues that emerge in our society, we can become the change that our world needs."
For 14-year-old Liberty student Jalen Seel, that leadership can help stop climate change. "I wanted to get involved to help our generation as a whole, and to keep moving us toward a future with no worries of climate change," said Seel. "It's important for young people to be involved so we can share new beneficial ideas that adults may not have thought of, and to also to put our time, effort, and hard work into something we care greatly about."
When it comes to energy efficiency, these students know the huge savings it can bring to residents of the Silver State—and that means saving money, saving carbon pollution and saving billions of gallons of water as the drought continues.
For example, NV Energy customers spend more than $3 billion a year on electricity. If smart energy policies were put into place, energy bills for homeowners and businesses could be reduced by 10 to 30 percent. This is money that could go toward hiring more staff, feeding more school kids or paying off a mortgage.
A robust energy efficiency requirement could save Nevada households and businesses $3.4 billion by 2020. And on top of all that, Southwest Energy Efficiency Project (SWEEP) estimates that 4,680 jobs would be created.
The students are excited for their trip to visit with legislators in the State Capitol and encourage people of all ages to get involved in energy efficiency and clean energy issues. "Students should do as much as they can to conserve and preserve," said Liberty Ann Pangilinan, a 16-year-old student.
Sarah Ko says young people should start environmental clubs at their schools to work on climate issues.
16-year-old Caitlin Gatchalian encourages others to get political as well. “If other students wanted to help, I think they should send letters or emails to their legislature because we all have a voice, but how we use it is what counts,” she said.
Whatever proactive work you do on the environment and climate change, 14-year-old Anyssa Candelaria says you should keep at it. "If you start young, the habits you get will last throughout your lifetime."
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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