Our journey has taken us to many places over the course of our remarkable lifetimes. Over the last dozen years, our focus has been on solutions to the climate crisis and to the accelerating loss of biodiversity, which may prove to be more harmful to us in the short run. In 2012, following Superstorm Sandy, we established the Center for Regenerative Community Solutions, aiming to provide pathways for communities to enhance their resilience, self-sufficiency, and reconciliation with nature.
One of our tools for this transformation—or so we thought—was a new kind of financing, called Property Assessed Clean Energy or PACE. PACE has a number of interesting features, not least of which was the prospect of generating positive returns for saving energy and reducing carbon emissions. Most of our economy is set up to reward extraction, pollution, and wasteful over-consumption. PACE seemed to be one of a rare class of economic solutions designed to do the opposite, rewarding people for doing the right thing.
The idea was originally created by Cisco de Vries, an advisor to the Mayor of Berkeley, California, who was looking for a way to help homeowners upgrade their homes. By floating revenue bonds, the city could access low-cost long-term financing and offer homeowners loans for solar and energy efficiency measures that would save them money by reducing waste and improving quality and building performance. The loans would be repaid by an extra charge on their property tax bills, more than offset by the savings.
This arrangement offers investors low-risk and highly stable returns. Revenue bonds are not the same as general obligation bonds, which pledge the full faith and credit of the municipality, but they are tied to dedicated revenues through the property tax system. Issuing bonds is nonetheless a complicated and costly process, and consequently most PACE lending is now done directly by designated capital providers.
We spent a dozen years shepherding C-PACE legislation through the New Jersey Legislature, securing its passage, and having it signed by the Governor, with implementation overseen by the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA). We continue to have high hopes for what it can accomplish. At the last minute, the Legislature adopted a bill making all C-PACE assessments subject to Prevailing Wage requirements (whereas they had previously been explicitly exempted from that). We are currently advocating for the adoption of a carve-out for smaller projects, as the Prevailing Wage requirements are likely to exclude more than 80% of otherwise cost-effective projects. We have nothing against the unions, but not all projects can afford to be union jobs, and we need to get them done anyway.
Our focus, then, has been almost entirely on cutting carbon emissions from buildings and funding long-term resiliency and water-related improvements. This remains critically important, but it appears at this point to be a losing battle. Emissions continue to rise across all sectors, and we are close to tipping points that could shift us into a runaway hothouse Earth. Moreover, because of the lack of legislation and lack of awareness, we have been unable to complete any PACE projects in either New Jersey or (for different reasons) in New York. Consequently, we have turned our attention more and more to the other side of the ledger. If we can’t stop emitting carbon, then we must somehow capture more of it, mostly in vegetation, by restoring degraded areas of the Earth and the oceans so that they can absorb greater amounts of it.
This leads to the two-part structure of this book. In the first part, we look at the feasibility of restoring the carbon balance by cutting our emissions. We could do this, and it would even make good economic sense to do it, but we aren’t doing it. Efforts to expand the use of renewable energy had been accelerating, but are now being reversed by an administration in Washington that is in thrall to the fossil fuel industry. They are busy burying their heads in the sand by denying core scientific concepts in the interest of short-term economic gains (and often failing at that as well).
But it’s clear from the scientific evidence that global heating will continue, leading to increasingly costly and disastrous outcomes. We must continue to talk about this until enough of the critics are convinced that the outcomes can be shifted to a lower carbon balance. At this point, however, technologies to capture and remove CO2 from the atmosphere remain insignificant. The only solution is to restore enough of nature to draw down the excess carbon from the atmosphere and return it to the Earth.
Part 2 of the book deals with the available pathways for achieving a habitable future. We no longer have the option of continuing along the present path while trying, unsuccessfully, to do less harm. Toxic materials are accumulating. Habitat is being destroyed much faster than it can be restored. Capital is still mostly being invested in the wrong places—extraction, exploitation, and defense or warfare. We need to shift our society’s direction. Fortunately, there are many ways to do this, and they are a lot more satisfying than the current model.