Once you’ve reduced your fossil carbon consumption, you can offset the rest via the Finger Lakes Climate Fund. Your carbon offset donation will be given out as a grant to low-income households to help them make energy efficiency improvements and renewable energy investments. If you want to align your values with your actions, you’ll want to take the Energy Challenge and join the ranks of Finger Lakes residents who are weaning themselves off natural gas and other fossil fuels.

The theme of our recent Energy Fair was community energy security. Real energy security.

Most of us associate “energy security” with fossil fuel industry lobbyists who try to convince Americans that we will be more secure if we stop relying on imports of foreign oil and just let them expand drilling offshore or in the rural lands of America.

But is that really a plan that will make us more secure?  Consider this:

Energy efficiency has never polluted the Gulf of Mexico or slimed the shores of Alaska.

Solar panels never gave a child asthma or blew off a mountain top.

Wind turbines have never threatened millions with cancer-causing radiation.

Energy conservation has never polluted drinking water supplies or destroyed a rural landscape.

We’ll never be really secure if we continue to base our economy and our way of life on fossil energy.  We know it’s a tightening noose with constantly rising prices and amplifying environmental damages.

Even though President Obama and plenty of Wall Street investors believe that shale gas is a necessary and viable source of energy, we don’t think it will add up to be an overall advantage for our country – not when all the costs are factored in, and certainly not when we consider how justice is distributed.

Here in Tompkins County, we have a powerful coalition of citizen groups, local governments, businesses, nonprofits, and institutions all devoting considerable time and resources to energy efficiency and renewable energy investments.  We clearly have made progress toward community energy security, and we’ve got a lot going in the right direction, but it’s also clear that it is going to take all of us working together, and staying motivated, to reach our goal of a more enduring, safe, affordable, and fair system for powering our community.  We really are in this together, and together our community is poised to make a successful transition to a new energy system based on responsible use, and investment in a diverse mix of energy sources like geothermal, biomass, solar, wind, and hydropower.

We need to work both at the individual level and at the community level.  As we each take responsibility for our own fossil fuel consumption, we can feel good about “walking our talk” when it comes to opposing hydrofracking.

We will also be participating in plugging the leaks in our local economy that come from buying fossil energy imported to our community.  Instead we’ll be helping support our local economy by creating green jobs.

And as we convert more systems to biomass, our rural landowners can earn money from growing a self-renewing energy supply – a reliable, long-term source of income compared to the destructive boom and bust cycle of shale gas drilling.

Every county resident has the capacity to become a hometown energy hero.  To make your pledge on the Finger Lakes Energy Challenge.  To get the help you need from local energy experts.

But also to step forward and be visible in our community on this topic of energy security — to speak up and tell your energy story and inspire others to take the time and make the investments that will lead to our individual and collective energy security.

To be willing to say “this is important” and to act as a change agent in your family, at work, and with your friends.  To speak to your local elected officials about their plans for transitioning local governments and schools to a safer energy system.  To tell state and federal officials to act responsibly and treat us fairly when crafting energy and climate policy.

To be willing to donate and invest locally in helping other people achieve energy security, such as through the Finger Lakes Climate Fund, or simply by becoming a member of Sustainable Tompkins so that events like the Energy Fair can be offered to our community.

This is the path to community energy security.  Transitioning our systems and our lifestyles, and watching out for each other along the way.   It is not the goal of the fossil fuel industry to make us more secure.  We will have to do that for ourselves.

Horwitt is the author of Environmental Working Group’s recently published “Drilling Around the Law”, a report on drinking water supplies from Pensylvania to Wyoming and how gas drilling has affected them.

Dr. Steve Penningroth will introduce Mr. Horwitt and address local concerns in regards to water quality and gas drilling.  Dr. Penningroth is the Executive Director of the Community Science Institute, a nonprofit organization that includes a certified water quality testing laboratory in Ithaca, New York. Previously Dr. Penningroth was an Associate Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and a Senior Lecturer in Toxicology at Cornell University in Ithaca. He recently authored a textbook entitled “Essentials of Toxic Chemical Risk: Science and Society,” which is being published by Taylor & Francis this month.

Please join us. All are welcome.

Drinking Water and Gas Drilling: What are the Risks?
April 18th, 7PM
Unitarian Universalist Church, 306 North Aurora Street, Ithaca
Speaker: Dusty Horwitt, JD, of the Environmental Working Group
Introduction by Dr. Steve Penningroth of the Community Science Institute

Sponsors: : Social Justice Council of the First Unitarian Society of Ithaca, Sustainable Tompkins, Community Environmental Defense Council; Citizens for Healthy Communities; Shaleshock Action Alliance; GDACC (Gas Drilling Awareness for Cortland County); People for a Healthy Environment, Inc.; Schuyler County Environmental Management Council; NYSESS (New Yorkers for Sustainable Energy Systems Statewide), Marcellus Accountability Project

Our Marcellus Challenge pledge-in and energy fair on March 3 was just what we needed to counteract a long, snowy winter and a protracted battle over gas drilling.  About 150 people crowded into the auditorium at the Womens Community Building to listen to a series of excellent speakers “connect the dots” on consumer demand for fossil fuels, and talk to local energy experts before taking their pledge.  Lisa Wright of Shaleshock Action Alliance wrote us to say “Thanks for the opportunity to take part in a fabulous and fun event.  The more we reframe our circumstances from victims to empowered citizens, the more effective we will be in controlling our destinies in the face of this daunting challenge from Big Oil and Gas.  This was a great success! Thanks, everyone!!”  We are working now on taking the Marcellus Challenge on the road across our region!

Mark Pierce from Cornell Cooperative Extension was one of five guest instructors at last Saturday’s Energy Teach-In for twelve leaders from the Shaleshock Alliance.  The energy teach-in was hosted by Sustainable Tompkins as part of its Marcellus Challenge which aims to help local citizens reduce their demand for natural gas and fossil fuels through conservation, energy efficiency, and investment in renewable energy.  Attendees spent the day exploring options for energy savings from air sealing, insulation, elimination of phantom electrical load, and a wide variety of conservation behaviors accessible to everyone.