Annual Eco Festival at Kingsborough Community College April 30, May 1 and 2

[bofyal]

Dear all,

Each year on or around Earth Day, Kingsborough Community College holds its annual Eco-Festival.  This year save the dates for April 30th to May 2nd. The goals of Eco-Festival are to raise ecological and environmental literacy, foster global citizenship, promote meaningful dialogue about environmental issues, and inspire environmental action and stewardship.  From lectures to film screenings to workshops to panel discussions, participants have the chance to explore the impact of their decisions on the environment from multiple angles.   In 2013, more than 1500 students, faculty, staff, and community members attended Eco-Festival. Many faculty incorporate assignments revolving around Eco-Festival into their curriculum, and for the first time this year, students will be able to fulfill their civic engagement requirement through participating in pre-selected Eco-Festival programming.

 

The theme of this year’s Eco-Festival is Our Sustainable Future: Building Local Resilience to Global Change. Highlights include a keynote speakers Eric Sanderson featuring his Manahatta Project (past and future); Marielle Anzelone featuring her Wildflowers in the city initiative; Talons (live birds of prey); an Environmental Share Fair, featuring companies and non-profits making a positive impact on the environment through their business models; hands-on workshops for students to gain experience with green efforts for every-day living including composting and planting; a Student Town Hall assessing KCC’s green initiatives and brainstorming further improvements; an Eco Café Night featuring live music and poetry; a field trip and tour of the New York Aquarium and a beach cleanup/civic engagement opportunity for students to volunteer. For information on the many other lectures and events see the full 3-day program by visiting the website http://www.kingsborough.edu/eco-festival/Pages/default.aspx

 

The 3-day event is FREE!

Best Wishes and we hope to see many of you.

Jacob Mey
Asst. Prof. Kingsborough Community College

[Karen Orlando]

Thanks for sharing. Lots of good info. Unfortunately I have learned one of the participants is United for Action who have actively been involved in quite a miseducation campaign on the Rockaway Pipeline Project and the proposed Port Ambrose LNG project. On this list in fact last year someone presented a flyer from them describing the LNG port as an export project and not as an import project. The information from this group conflicts with the tens of thousands of pages of information on the Port Ambrose project filed with USCG just as their information on the Rockaway Project conflicted with most of the information in that docket as well. Most unfortunate. 

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[Karen Orlando]

Unfortunately there is factual evidence all over the internet, in the FERC docket on the Rockaway Lateral/Northeast connector projects that clearly demonstrate that United for Action activists have presented an extraordinary amount of misinformation on not one, not two but at this point 4 projects and one of them is the Port Ambrose project which they are described at the ecoevent as teaming up with students on. 

United for Action activists have inaccurately described the rockaway project and not just potential impact but the actual location and purpose of the project. There is almost not a single fact on just this one project alone which they have not entirely misrepresented. And this is despite being supplied with numerous documents and facts for almost two years. 

Just as there is an extraordinary papertrail on the rockaway project which includes years of prefile documents as well as the congressional record on HR2606 there is an enormous amount of information on both the currently proposed Port Ambrose project as well as the amended application for Liberty's prior project on file at regulations.gov under dockets for the USCG and MarAd. Nearly all of this paperwork conflicts with how these "activists" have chosen to educate on both of these projects. 

People are entitled to be passionate about their cause, in this case the issue of fracking primarily in the Marcellus Shale. They are not entitled though to use that passion to attempt to influence policy and policy makers through misinformation campaigns. United for Action activists whether representing simply themselves, their organization or the Coalition Against the Rockaway Pipeline have been misrepresenting too many facts and themselves for too long now. 

There is nothing at this point that can be said to be constructive about the activism of United for Action if it only leads to complete confusion. This is not environmental education. It is not science based nor fact based and it is being encouraged by too many politicians and other people, too many environmental groups, who ought to know just how destructive miseducation is particularly when it involves students. 

http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=USCG-2013-0363   Learning to think critically is an important skill for life. Students at Kingsborough would do better to read and analyze data themselves even from just one document on either port ambrose or any other project than to sit through any presentation by these activists.

[bofyal]

The Students are free to choose their own projects ad materials to study. You are free to come to campus and participate in the debate when we have forums. I'm a scientist, so I'll need clarification and specifics on examples of 'miseducation' done by us or misrepresentation done by United for Action. Either way - both sides are welcome at the panel table - we encourage our students to participate in debates representing a broad spectrum of views. The students themselves choose what they are passionate about, but they don't do it blindly - that would be a derogatory characterization of our students.
Prof Mey

[Karen Orlando]

This isn't about science. United for Action members through the coalition against the rockaway pipeline misrepresented the rockaway pipeline project in nearly every way possible. They supported promoting the idea that the Rockaway pipeline ran straight through restored wetlands in Jamaica Bay and via the Coalition against the rockaway pipeline stated Jamaica Bay would even be trenched as part of the project.  They also supported promoting the idea that the project ran straight through neighborhoods in the Rockaways (as in down people's blocks and not through Riis beach) and they supported this idea in the aftermath of hurricane sandy. None of these things are true, which means that I'm not talking about debating something that relates to the project--say ocean impact from construction or whether the project is beneficial but am simply talking about the inability of these activists to convey simple facts, the who what when where why. ( where the project is potentially going to be built, what construction methods are being used, etc all of the things that are actually weighed in various permitting processes and the environmental review for the project.) 

They have also stated that the Rockaway Pipeline project is possibly not intended to deliver supplies into New York City but intended to deliver gas supply overseas, that the metering station which is above ground is either a vault (below ground) or simply a valve and have labelled Port Ambrose as an export project. Port Ambrose is described pretty specifically in a lot of paperwork as a floating regasification delivery project into the area.  About a year after a reporter published a story which linked to the Environmental Assessment for National Grid's project which was deemed non-jursisdictional in terms of review for the rockaway project, United for Action members claimed this project was built with no environmental review at all via the coalition against the rockaway pipeline.  There is also nothing to debate about any of these things. 

http://unitedforaction.org/2013/07/06/stop-the-lng-liberty-port-ambrose-project/  There is no debating that just a few days prior to the first public  meetings on the port ambrose project in July 2013 United for Action and very specifically Edie Kantrowitz who also bills herself as a leader of an organization against the rockaway pipeline project called this proposed deepwater port an export project. The actual application however says otherwise. 

Students will likely hear that Port Ambrose is secretly intended for exporting Marcellus gas. Other than the fact that the Deepwater Port Act was changed to allow for exports in late 2012, there is not very much that is concrete to indicate that there are conspiratorial plans to export by Liberty Natural Gas. As an example, there are already 7 DOE conditionally approved LNG export projects which are in various stages of review with FERC and a whole host of competing projects behind those on a  long list of potential export projects which in the first place would likely beat Liberty to the punch. Then there is the fact that the existing 26 inch Transco Lateral has been delivering into this region for the last 45 plus years and doesn't appear to be an economic nor wise place to choose to export from even if one supported exporting as a national policy, not to mention that an expansion is being built off of that line (the rockaway lateral) to deliver into the area.

One doesn't "debate" with these folks. One is given the choice to either get on board with their message or not. That message is pretty clear. Ban fracking now and there are no options other than solar, wind and hydro for our energy needs and it is possible to move there immediately. There is no difference between coal and natural gas but rather as they say natural gas is worse than coal for climate change and the planet's health. That is all there is to the discussion. You can only either accept these things or not. If for example this means you have to ignore ocean acidification as an environmental issue, so be it. In the case of the rockaway pipeline project if this means you must ignore years of prefile data and almost every written word or resource report so be it.

I found a draft paper from James Hansen that questions whether scientists have a duty to expose popular misconceptions. My own experience with the Rockaway Pipeline project is that it is almost impossible to expose popular misconceptions even when they are based on things that are very easy to prove are false, sometimes with a simple map, and even if you are present while the misconceptions are being manufactured. If you support the message being put out right now in NY state what you are allowed to say is that France has banned fracking and you must ignore the fact that France also gets an enormous amount of electricity from nuclear plants. You cannot be an environmentalist and discuss nuclear. 

"Public misperceptions about nuclear power were thrust on me after I gave a talk in Australia 

in which I noted that nuclear power probably was needed to help phase out fossil fuels. My next 

talk was picketed by people asserting that nuclear power was killing a huge number of people 

and causing birth defects. When I queried them regarding the sources for these incredible 

assertions, I was told that Helen Caldicott was the source. 

One problem we sometimes have in communicating global warming science to the public is 

a misperception that the science is based on “beliefs” rather than evidence. That allows deniers 

to counter it with their own “belief”. Caldicott’s assertions were nothing more than her belief. 

George Monbiot, a respected British journalist, explored in detail the sources of Caldicott’s 

assertions. The resulting article that he wrote begins: 

"Over the past fortnight I’ve made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement 

to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. 

The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged and wildly 

wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice." 

Monbiot’s 2-page article, “Evidence Meltdown”, is well worth reading. The extent to which 

the public has been misled is, indeed, deeply troubling."  http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2014/20140221_DraftOpinion.pdf

I'm not using that quote to try to convince anyone that we need nuclear energy as piece of a complicated puzzle. I put that quote in this email because I feel similarly particularly with the last line about what has happened with the rockaway pipeline project/national grid's BQI, the Northeast Connector and now Port Ambrose which are the 4 projects United for Action has deeply misled the public on.

Nearly every piece of data in the rockaway docket and more, including the 2009 state energy plan which mentions the last expansion on transco's line by name, points in the opposite direction of what United for Action has chosen to say for a long time. There are CUNY law school students who have already put together https://cuer.law.cuny.edu/?p=1390 comments based on the messaging of these activists and these comments are not based on the actual facts or details.  I don't see how that could have helped those law school students one bit. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ARniaRzvcw  I don't think I am incorrect that the description of the rockaway pipeline project via CARP which is united for action plus a few other groups seems to be that the rockaway pipeline is leading to fracked gas storage tanks offshore???  Nothing to debate there. That is simply misinformation.