Draft Agenda
| 8-9 AM | Light Breakfast and Networking | |
| 9:00 AM | Welcome and Orientation to the Summit
Cara Robechek | EAN Deputy Director & Network Manager |
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| 9:15 AM | Unveiling of EAN’s 2026 Annual Progress Report Key Findings + Q&A
Jared Duval | EAN Executive Director Luke Miller | EAN Data Manager & Research Analyst |
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| 10:15 AM | Morning Break | |
| 10:30 AM | Powering progress: Energy leadership and innovation in this moment: a view from Vermont utilities and energy service providers
Shelley Navari | Energy Coop of Vermont, General Manager Josh Castonguay | Green Mountain Power, VP Chief Innovation Officer Darren Springer | Burlington Electric Dept, General Manager Peter Walke | Efficiency Vermont, Managing Director |
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| 11:40 | Leigh Seddon Award
Anne and Arthur Berndt Award |
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| noon | Lunch | |
| 12:45 PM | Presentations Round 1 | |
| Energy and Housing: Sarah Phillips | Vermont Housing & Conservation Board, Housing Director
AI in Vermont’s Economy | Neale Lunderville | Vermont AI Economic Task Force, Chair Climate Workforce | Will Schwartz | Efficiency Vermont, Workforce Development Manager || Rowan Hawthorne | VT Department of Labor Office of Workforce Strategy and Development, Interim Director EV Market Update – Dave Roberts | Drive Electric Vermont, Coordinator Heat Pump Installation and Use | Kelly Lucci | Efficiency Vermont, Director of Strategy and Partnerships || Richard Cowart | Regulatory Assistance Project, Principal |
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| 1:30 PM | Table conversations and report out | |
| 2:10 PM | Afternoon Break | |
| 2:30 PM | Presentations Round 2 | |
| Energy Navigation | Mike Roy | Climate Economy Action Center of Addison County, Board of Directors
Municipal Energy Code Collaborative | Zack Tyler | Energy Future Group, Managing Consultant Thermal Energy Networks | TBD | Vermont Community Thermal Networks Policy and Revenue Options to Support Equitable Access to Electric Vehicles in Vermont | Hannah Dreissigacker | Vermont Law and Graduate School, Master’s Student The Future of Residential Weatherization in Vermont | Richard Faesy | Energy Future Group, Principal Emeritus || Richard Cowart | Regulatory Assistance Project, Principal Durable GHG Reduction Programs Built upon Virtuous Circle Funding and Investing | Christopher Bray | Vermont Law and Graduate School, Master’s Student |
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| 3:15 PM | Table conversations and report out | |
| 3:55 PM | Recap of the Day: Looking Back and Looking Forward
Jared Duval | EAN Executive Director |
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| 4 – 6 PM | Reception | |
The biggest causes
- Habitat loss and simplification
- Fields that once contained dozens of wild plant species have become lawns, cropland, or heavily managed pasture.
- Hedgerows, wetlands, dead wood, and unmowed edges have disappeared.
- Insects often need very specific plants for their larvae, so losing even one plant species can eliminate an insect locally.
- Pesticides
- This includes much more than the old broad-spectrum insecticides.
- Neonicotinoids, for example, can occur in pollen, nectar, soil, and plant tissues and can affect bees and other insects at relatively low exposures.
- Herbicides matter too: eliminating “weeds” eliminates food and habitat for insects.
- Climate change
- Warmer temperatures are shifting insect ranges and seasonal timing.
- A particularly serious problem is mismatching schedules: an insect may emerge when the plant it depends on is no longer flowering, or a bird may need caterpillars before caterpillars are abundant.
- Extreme heat, drought, flooding, and unusually warm winters can also cause substantial mortality.
- Light pollution
- Artificial nighttime light disrupts moths and other nocturnal insects, interfering with feeding, mating, and navigation.
- This is an especially underappreciated factor.
- Pollution
- Air pollution can interfere with the chemical signals plants use to attract insects.
- Water pollution and fertilizer runoff damage aquatic insects and the ecosystems that support them.
- Agriculture and lawn culture
- Large monocultures provide food for a few specialized insects but very little habitat for the broader insect community.
- Closely mowed lawns are essentially biological deserts compared with a meadow.
Details on Roman Telescope:
First we had Hubble which is said to have unlocked more advances in science than any project ever undertaken. It was very good at looking at small patches of sky one at a time.
Then we had the James Webb telescope that was able to detect very faint light allowing looking back into the early universe. it could see into the infrared which penetrated dust clouds allowing a view of early star and galaxy formation.
Now we have The Nancy Grace Roman telescope Making it way to the Lagrange 2 point in the shadow of the earth. This will, like Webb, allow it to stay very cold so it can view objects that have moved away from us causing red shift into the deep infrared. Roman has a mirror similar in size to Hubble but it looks at a broad field of view, 100 times what Hubble sees at one time. And it can move to another field of view 1000 times faster than Hubble. This is a survey instrument to identify all the stars and galaxies in the universe so we can see what is grouped together and what is being separated. It is trying to answer the questions what is dark energy and dark matter which together make up more than 95% of the universe and we do not even know what they are or how they work. The survey will build a map that may give us answers. Additionally The survey will detect planets around distant stars and help understand what proportion is likely to have water and a temperature conducive for life. It will take a month to reach Lagrange point two app 4 times further away from us than the moon. Then it will take app 3 more months to unfold and calibrate all of its instruments. Once set up the observations will begin and torrents of data will be available to all on day one. The whole world from high school students to top astronomers will have access to it. The raw data will be difficult to read but the world is encouraged to form teams working on that data and make it ever more useful to all. That is the planned magic for excoriating discovery.
Links More on Roman: AstroKobi. video
Bird Note: Looking after the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Topic: The management of our environment to maximise quality of life for future generations.
Guest: Earl Hatley, the campaign to grant the Ottauquechee River personhood. Here is some background on the process.
Also what has happened with water in the droughted sail. Watch
Bird Note: The birds connection to your thermostat
First on deck: Making better use of what we have. The man who farmed the rain.
Second: What can be the costs of AI beyond data center’s fuel bill? From Wired.
Third: Bernie Sanders Open Letter to AI from the Guardian
‘pause AI development’ in interest of humanity
Progressive US senator urges Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic to ‘stop building machines that humans cannot control’
Next week our guest will be Earl Hatley To talk about declaring personhood to the White River
Lots of upcoming event and infohere from VECAN:
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Today we unpack WHAT MAKES NATIONS GREAT.
Abundant Energy and the ability to grow Food
The USA is blessed with a disproportional abundance of both.
We will start the abundant energy and where we get it from:
Fossil and now from the sun. Hear Bill Mckibben’s latests, The Crucial Years at the halfway point and whether we will make it. Also Take Five and on YouTube
Now on with good soils for growing food. Her is the beginning of an hour plus interview from the cofounder of the Real Organic product and James Cassidy of Oregon. 0-9:53
We finish with takeaways from solarfest. You will have to wait for UL rule making for plug and play solar. +++
hosted by the White River Natural Resources Conservation District, featuring special guest Don Morgan, current President of the Bank of North Dakota.
Over two days, farmers, legislators, economists, financial professionals, conservation leaders, and community members will come together to explore how public banking has supported agriculture, disaster recovery, housing, infrastructure, and local economic development—and what lessons Vermont might draw from North Dakota’s century of experience.
The Congress will include a farm resiliency tour, farmer dinner, keynote presentations, panel discussions, and collaborative working sessions at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
I hope you’ll join us for this unique opportunity to learn, exchange ideas, and be part of the conversation.
Registration and the draft agenda are available here:
+If you still think of it as “alternative energy,” high time to update your priors. The indefatigable Mark Gongloff chronicles the sheer size of the green economy
A recent report from the London Stock Exchange Group Plc (LSEG) found that “green economy” companies, or those that derive a significant portion of their revenue from stuff like clean energy, efficiency and water management, now have a total stock market value of $10 trillion. If this were a standalone sector, it would be bigger than healthcare and third in the world only to technology and industrials.
Since 2008, valuations for these companies have grown by 18% a year, compared with 12% for the broader market, the report found. Their stocks have outperformed global equities by 133%. A representative sample of these companies, the FTSE Environmental Opportunities All Share Index, topped the FTSE Global All-Cap Index by 12% last year.
In fact, this stealth sector just had one of its best years on record despite many of the world’s governments and the corporate sector abandoning their pre-Trump pledges to zero out carbon emissions to stave off the worst of global heating. Green revenues grew 5.3% last year, the fastest since 2022, the year of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
Evidence keeps mounting that the green economy has entered a new phase, one where its rapidly improving economics give it lasting immunity from fickle political sentiments. Even as the dreams of the 2015 Paris Agreement, net zero, the IRA and more have crumbled, the technology with the power to make some of those dreams come true has only gained momentum.
“What the LSEG data shows us is that the green economy’s resilience is no longer dependent on politics,” Matthew Roling, founding executive director of the Abrams Climate Academy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, said in a statement. “Energy security, grid reliability and supply chain security are now the primary drivers. Those are arguments that resonate in boardrooms. That’s a materially more durable foundation than the Paris Agreement consensus ever was.”
Friday Evening in Rochester there is a free steak dinner (5PM) and a pasture walk, an opportunity to here from leaders in improving Vermont’s resilience through soil management and a chance to brainstorm together. Speakers are:
- Abe Collins, Land Care Cooperative and LandWEB
- John Rodgers, VT Lieutenant Governor and Farmer
- Linda Prokopy, UVM Dean of College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
From LocalMotion VT: Be a part of the conversation! Join us for an informal virtual discussion on e-motos, Tuesday, June 9th at 9:30 AM. |
The Big Picture
As electrotech adoption accelerates worldwide due to the manifold stupidities of the Iran War fossil fuel crisis, new data is underscoring how profound and far-reaching the global clean electrification shift has already become! Our World in Data has a great new visualization of Ember’s recent report that fossil fuel use for electricity declined worldwide in 2025, with clean energy meeting all new demand growth and then some!
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Note that this chart is annual additions, not cumulative, so all these bars are stacking on top of each other!
And Bloomberg NEF notes that energy storage (mostly batteries) has crossed the “100 GW annually” barrier, with 112 GW (112,000 MW) installed worldwide in 2025. (54% of those installations were in China). The solar-to-storage ratio of annual global additions in gigawatts fell from 56 in 2016 (56 times as much solar as storage being built) to just 6 in 2025, as solar kept growing rapidly and storage grew even more rapidly from a lower base. The “solar power during the day, battery-stored solar at night” model is fully mature and increasingly dominating global energy systems. Humanity’s electrification just keeps accelerating!
“It only took four years for energy storage to increase annual additions to more than 100 GW from 10 GW, whereas it took roughly eight and 15 years for solar and wind, respectively. This record underscores growing market momentum and increased industry maturity.”
— Isshu Kikuma, BloombergNEF.
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- Drawdown The Most Comprehensive Plan by Paul Hawken
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What If We Get It Right? By Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
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23:17-27:53 (4:46)
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12:26-13:44 (1:14
Last minute Guest: Johanna Miller of the Natural Resources Council, The power of working together, and a legislative update. Call your senator and ask for support of H740 which build the information for the state to know what needs to be done on the climate front.
Methane the low hanging fruit:
Make Some Noise!
Before Friday May 1st we all should join with REV and tell the Vermont Public Utility Commission (PUC) to REJECT the State DPS plan to postpone the biennial rate update for solar panel owners. In the face of increasing electric rates, this unprecedented move would mean a loss of hundreds or thousands of dollars for every solar household and a big profit boost for utilities.
Let your voice be heard – send your comments to the PUC by Friday, May 1st either online (PUC Case Number 26-0291-INV) or via email to puc.clerk@vermont.gov!
It reads in part: Every once in a while I have to snap out of the hypnotic grip of the bizarre news cycle and remind myself—and you—that there’s something even more important underway than the obvious mental and moral decline of the president: the relentless rise in the temperature of the planet. So here’s my latest occasional update from the physical world, and I fear the news is not good.
Let’s begin with the immediate past, and stay close to home, because the U.S. has been the center of some of the most extreme meteorological action on planet earth recently. Consider our winter: though it was chilly in the Northeast, if you averaged the temperature across the lower 48 it was the second-hottest winter on record. Thats because nine states had their hottest winter ever and five their second-hottest. As Andrea Thompson pointed out in Scientific American, “nowhere in the U.S. had a record cold winter this year. Nowhere even came close.”
That winter, by the way, was December, January, and February—what we call “meteorological winter” because it coincides with the coldest quarter of the year. It was outrageously hot and very dry, with severely shrunken snowpacks across the mountains of the West, which made Westerners nervous about the chances for wildfire as the summer wore on.
And then came March.
March was the single craziest month in U.S. weather history. Here’s how Seth Borenstein put it in the lede of his account for the Associated Press
March’s persistent unseasonable heat was so intense that the continental United States registered its most abnormally hot month in 132 years of records, according to federal weather data.
The federal government is still collecting weather data (though far less than it used to) and so we know the following remarkable fact according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
The average maximum temperature for March was especially high at 11.4 F (6.3 C) above the 20th century average and was almost a degree warmer than the average daytime high for April.
As Bob Henson points out in the Yale-based blog Eye of the Storm,
In 35 of the 48 contiguous states, the statewide average reading was among the top-ten warmest for any March. Not a single contiguous state was cooler than average.
Henson also points out that a lack of rainfall meant it’s so far been the driest year in American history
The nationally averaged precipitation total for 2026 to date is an ominous one: a mere 4.79 inches. That’s the lowest value on record for any January-to-March interval, including such notoriously dry periods as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The previous record low was 5.27 inches, set in Jan.-Mar. 1910.
As Henson’s colleague Jeff Masters succinctly told the AP:
Climate change is kicking our butts
And I fear it’s barely begun the beating. Because over the last two weeks, even as the world has fixed its gaze on the Middle East, meteorologists have been staring in some awe and terror at what appears to be a rapidly building El Niño. I’ve been telling you this is on the way for some months, but it’s coming into ever-clearer focus. NOAA again, in its April forecast, put the odds of a El Niño beginning this summer at better than sixty percent. More to the point, the wide array of computer models around the planet are beginning to predict a so-called “super El Niño,” when temperatures in the critical region of the Pacific shoot up far far far higher than in the past. Henson and Masters again:
For October, roughly half of the ECMWF ensemble is calling for sea surface temperatures in the main El Niño region (Niño3.4) to exceed 2.5 degrees Celsius above the seasonal average. Such values would correspond to what’s loosely referred to as a “super El Niño.” Though there’s no official definition for a “super” event, the term is often attached to El Niño when its peak anomalies reach at least +2.0°C. Since 1950, the only El Niño events that have hit this threshold for at least one three-month interval were in 1972–73, 1982–83, 1997–98, 2015–16, and 2023–24. Only one of those events, in 2015–16, pushed all the way past +2.5°C.
Here’s a useful graph of the various estimates from the computer modelling, courtesy of Zeke Hausfather
Basically it reads: a world we haven’t seen before. Because remember, El Niño comes on top of the steadily rising temperature of the earth. If these forecasts bear out, then possibly 2026 and certainly 2027 will be the hottest years ever recorded on this earth. As the atmospheric scientist Paul Roundy put it, there’s a “real potential for the strongest El Niño event in 140 years.” We don’t know, of course, exactly how this will manifest, but as Gabrielle Cannon wrote yesterday in the Guardian
A super El Niño that occurred in 2015 brought severe drought in Ethiopia, water supply shortages in Puerto Rico, and smashed records after unleashing a vicious hurricane season in the central North Pacific, according to an analysis by US federal scientists.
The cycle tends to create drought and heat across Australia, around southern and central Africa, in India and in parts of South America, including in the Amazon rainforest. Heavy precipitation, meanwhile, could hit the southern tier of the US, parts of the Middle East, and south-central Asia.
I think it’s safe to say that we can expect more weather chaos than we’ve ever seen before (the good folks at Covering Climate Now put together a useful briefing for reporters last week). Here’s my prediction, since my job is to figure out how the physical and political worlds intersect:
The havoc unleashed by a super El Niño will coincide with the havoc unleashed by Trump in the Gulf to produce a perfect storm of support for rapid action on getting off fossil fuels. Our brief vacation from thinking about climate change as a crucial fact of life on this planet will be over; the conjoined fears of the next months will combine to put us in a very new place politically.
My main fear is that this useful moment is coming very late in the game.
3/28 Show info
Bird
#1 https://www.birdnote.org/listen/shows/voices-and-vocabularies-eastern-bluebirds
#2 https://www.birdnote.org/listen/shows/rita-shultz-friend-bluebirds
Blue Bird house build: https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/three-designed-birdhouse-plans-for-eastern-bluebirds.html
2 very important positive moves to reduce global emissions of GH gases
1) The work of methane sat.
First 14:15 of https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-deal-with-these-methane
comments
2) Biden announced $6 Billion for reducing emissions from industrial production processes first 6:04 min of Volts/ https://www.volts.wtf/p/biden-sets-out-to-supercharge-industrial we played part of this not the one above as intended. also interesting: https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-deal-with-scope-3-emissions
Yesterday's 350Vermont's electricity committee with our congressional reps staff for environmental affairs
Comments
See the tool-program: https://www.climateinteractive.org/en-roads/
March 26 - Speaker Series - Bill McKibben, "In the hottest year, where do we stand? Notes from the climate fight" https://actionnetwork.org/events/march-26-speakerbillmckibben
Today's show:
Show:
Rally and March for Justice: Saturday January 27, 2024 1-3pm
Meet at Montpelier City Hall - March to the Vermont Statehouse
Recording of show:
- December 7, 2023: "A Miracle Will Occur" Is Not Sensible Climate Policy
- November 10, 2023: How We Know that Global Warming is Accelerating and that the Goal of the Paris Agreement is Dead
- November 8, 2023: Global warming in the pipeline Oxford Open Climate Change, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2023, kgad008, published
Recording of this show:
On Thursday, November 30th, consider attending the public Q&A session on Bill H.59, an act relating to community resilience and biodiversity protection, from 4:30 - 5:30 on Zoom.
Register by going to https://vhcb.org/our-programs/VCSI
Here's what to expect:
"We are collecting feedback from various stakeholders on several key questions to complete an inventory of current and possible conservation in Vermont:
· What are our values in creating the Conservation Plan? What is important to you to have in the 30x30 and 50x50 Conservation Plan?
· What kinds of land counts towards the goals? What kind of conservation practices or land protection counts towards the goals in the Act?
· How are we getting there? What are the practices, programs, methods we are currently using or could use to get to our goals?
· How do we improve equity? How equitable are existing land protection and conservation strategies and programs? How can we achieve more equity and access?
· What are the current and potential funding opportunities?. What are existing and potential funding sources that can be leveraged to accelerate conservation?"
Follow the link for more information:
Vermont Conservation Strategy Initiative | Vermont Housing & Conservation Board
Events: Total energy News Clean Heat standard:We are delighted to announce that we will again be hosting the EAN Leveraging Change Speaker Series, which was a popular in-person event for EAN members before it was shut down by COVID. Restarting on November 2nd from 5-7pm in Montpelier, we plan to host these events approximately once per month to bring in speakers from our broader region who can help advance understanding of emerging opportunities to make breakthrough progress toward Vermont’s climate and energy commitments.
This new series starts close to home with a conversation about: Climate Resilience successes and opportunities. Our speakers will be Sue Minter, Executive Director of Capstone Community Action and Neale Lunderville, President & CEO of VGS, both of whom served as Chief Recovery Officers after Tropical Storm Irene. Peter Walke, Managing Director of Efficiency Vermont, will moderate the conversation. There will also be plenty of time for networking. Light food and non-alcoholic beverages will be supplied by Cafe Noa. Attendees are welcome to bring alcoholic beverages (BYOB).
Thanks to everyone who attended the EAN Summit on September 28 and 29. The videos from the first day of the summit are now available on the EAN website. If you attended the summit, but have not yet had a chance to submit your evaluation, please share your feedback with us by the end of this week.
Vermont climate action network website: https://vecan.net/ and programs of special interest from their newsletter:
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Words of wisdom:
Five Steps to Climate Sanity:
Beyond Both Despair and Hopium
- Stay abreast of climate science. Accept its difficult conclusions as the best understanding we have. Expect to be alarmed on a regular basis, inescapably. Learn.
- Accept also that both societies and natural systems are already fated to devastating developments. Terrible losses lie ahead. Almost everything will be changing. The future isn’t what it used to be. A great sadness is normal. Cry.
- Recognize that warnings about climate change and forceful proposals for national action to address the threats go back almost five decades. The failure to act over these years may be the greatest failure of civic responsibility in the history of the republic. Get mad.
- Appreciate that no matter how tearful the future, every fraction of a degree makes a difference. Every bit of warming we prevent is important. Learn well what must be done to head off future devastations, including both the immediate steps and the deep societal and economic transformations. Dream.
- Know that the fight for the future requires all of us, each bringing what we can to the effort. Find ways to get involved, seriously involved. Know too that in the end our efforts do not depend on our odds of success. We must act even in the face of hopelessness, warriors defending a sacred place, simply because it is the right thing to do,rebelling beyond hope because the human spirit tells us with insistence that what is unacceptable—all the suffering, all the loss, all the tears—must not be accepted. Fight.
Gus Speth
October 8,
Our guest: Nancy Mallory publisher of Green Energy Times.
Montpelier 5-7PM October 2nd:
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- Researchers are discovering that listening to the soil can be a way to understand biodiversity belowground without having to overturn every bit of the land.
- Studies have shown that soils of restored forest areas have both more complex sounds and more critters than soils of degraded sites.
- Soils of intensively managed agricultural lands, also appear to be quieter, indicating that soil sounds could be a proxy for soil health.
- Some researchers are also using sounds to identify distinct species in the soil, which could open up lots of possibilities for both pest management and wildlife conservation.
And more from Humming Bird Films
Operations Manager
Events: Balevt.org Hoodwinked: Missing the forest for the trees
Thu., August 10 at 7 PM, BALE Commons, South Royalton
Zack Porter Reservation HERE
6/1/23 show Roger Hill Big picture weather-climate. https://weatheringheights1.wordpress.com/
links: Steady State Economics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAXPLfiHP2g