Alaska Institute for Climate & Energy
ADVANCING solutions to the interrelated social justice, climate and ecological crisis through collaborative research and project development.
ALICE fosters cutting edge climate mitigation and adaptation solutions best suited to Alaska through broad based, collaborative research and project development.
Much of the rapid change Alaska is currently experiencing is the result of interrelated global climate, ecological, and sociopolitical crisis. Responding effectively to these challenges requires vision, bold leadership, deep expertise, flexibility, and a collaborative, holistic approach.
We bring together Alaska’s most visionary scientists, Native Elders, artists, and agency and private sector experts to work together to solve the interrelated problems of climate change, biodiversity collapse, and social injustice.
Drawing inspiration from Project Drawdown, Natural Solutions, Bio4Climate, Bay Area Smart Energy, and other innovative approaches, we research and develop collaborative shovel-ready projects that move Alaska towards a more resilient future.
An example of our work is the Railbelt Pumped Energy Storage Concept that lays the groundwork for a renewable energy-based economy that will create thousands of new jobs, reduce greenhouse emissions and reduce the cost of energy for every Alaskan.
Other projects in the works include:
- A statewide assessment of rural Pumped Energy Storage (PES) potential and design of 30 or more fully PES/renewable energy powered electricity generation systems that will move rural communities off expensive diesel and heating fuel once and for all.
- Development of an Alaska Climate Solutions Hub to catalyze collaboration between scientists, energy experts and affected communities.
- Comprehensive review to identify holistic solutions with the greatest potential for success and rapid pilot-project development. Ideas of interest include marine permaculture, peatland restoration, PES salmon habitat mitigation, and green hydrogen production.
ALASKA’S NEW ENERGY FUTURE
Since 2014, ALICE has been working to move Alaska towards a 100% renewable energy future in partnership with a revolving working group of Alaska renewable energy experts and advocates.
Climate Action Planning
An actionable outline to implement climate solutions on a community-wide political level.
Oil and Gas Accountability
An investigation into the current state of Alaskan oil and gas emissions
Utility Member Action Campaign
Some simple steps that Alaska’s Electric Utility Coops and Boroughs can take this year to save money and significantly reduce our individual and collective greenhouse gas (GhG) emissions.
Happening Now
Breathing a 🌎 sigh of relief...
www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/11/23/kerry-climate-change/?fbclid=IwAR3mltITGCW_...
Biden to name John Kerry as presidential climate envoy
www.washingtonpost.com
President-elect Joe Biden will name former Secretary of State John Kerry as a presidential envoy on climate, according to his transition team, signaling his commitment to elevating the issue of climat...BREAKING: President-elect Joe Biden has just named former Secretary of State John Kerry as special envoy to lead his administration’s efforts to fight climate change.
"America will soon have a government that treats the climate crisis as the urgent national security threat it is," Kerry said of his new role.
Biden selects John Kerry for 'climate czar'
hill.cm
Biden cited “the battle to save the climate” among his top five priorities.As the growing season extends, what plants are people experimenting with in Alaska? “Our gardens can be nature preserves - sanctuaries for native flora - in an increasingly volatile world. Just as classical Greek and Roman texts were preserved in the libraries of Islamic scholars and Irish monks in the Early Middle Ages, our gardens, parks, and farms can become places that preserve irreplaceable species today, and ensure the future of biodiversity in eastern North America.”
Assisted Migration: Facing Climate Change in Our Own Backyards
www.shelterwoodforestfarm.com
It can be hard, I think, to have hope in a time of climate change and mass extinction. Oftentimes, seeing the diversity of trees that grow in my West Philadelphia neighborhood is what gives me more ho...Wind-powered transatlantic car carrier could cut carbon emissions by 90%
www.greencarreports.com
By harnessing the wind, a new car-carrier design will have a smaller carbon footprint than combustion or battery-electric ships.Have a safe thanksgiving everyone. 🧊🦃
insideclimatenews.org/news/20112020/warming-trends-outdoor-propane-heaters?fbclid=IwAR03lVSOR_9vb...
Warming Trends: Outdoor Heaters, More Drownings In Warmer Winters and Where to Put Leftover Turkey
insideclimatenews.org
A column highlighting climate-related studies, innovations, books, cultural events and other developments from the global warming frontier.Although perhaps more subtle, our Railbelt utility’s loyalty to Hilcorp and Cook Inlet gas is no exception, despite having the nations second highest electricity rates.
www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/20/gas-industry-waging-war-against-climate-action
Revealed: how the gas industry is waging war against climate action
www.theguardian.com
In a nationwide blitz, gas companies and their allies fight climate efforts that they consider an existential threat to their business28 ideas from our Advisory Council Member Rick Steiner. What would you add?
"Now, with the incoming Biden administration, we simply can’t afford more Obama-warmed-over. We need more. We need to insist on big, bold policies that actually correct the dramatic, downward slide we are on environmentally in Alaska, nationally, and globally. President Biden will of course need to focus initially on COVID and economic recovery, but there are a lot of essential environmental actions he can and must take administratively as well, even if the Dems do not win control of the U.S. Senate in January."
Here is a preliminary list of some Alaska environmental issues for consideration by the Biden transition teams and administration:
1. Prohibit fossil fuel leasing on federal lands and waters, including the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), ANWR, NPRA; encourage/subsidize alternative energy leasing, wind, tidal, solar, geothermal, etc.;
2. Rejoin and strengthen the Paris climate accord, double current emission reduction commitments (Nationally Determined Contributions), work with G20 governments to fully fund the Green Climate Fund to support emissions reductions across all sectors of global economy;
3. Identify and eliminate all federal subsidies for fossil fuels, transfer at least half of these to alternative energy development; impose tax on all carbon emissions, use some of the new tax for adaptation efforts in coastal Alaska, including village relocation;
4. Reverse Trump FWS Refuge/NPS Preserve wildlife rules, revert to Obama rules;
5. Reverse exemption of Tongass National Forest from roadless rule, prohibit any further logging of old-growth forest;
6. Congressionally designate Nellie Juan-College Fjord Wilderness, 2 million acres in western Prince William Sound, Chugach National Forest;
7. Establish “ANILCA for the Seas;” Alaska National Interest Oceans Conservation Initiative (ANIOCI); by establishing several Marine National Monuments in Alaska by Executive Order (Antiquities Act) – Aleutians, Bering Strait, Arctic Ocean…Bering Strait marine monument to be co-managed with Russia, negotiate High Arctic Marine Sanctuary with other Arctic nations (in Arctic Council);
8. Establish Chukotka/Alaska working group to harmonize management of Bering Sea and Chukchi Sea marine ecosystems across the international border;
9. Reauthorize federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund (OSLTF), raise per barrel tax from 9 to 10 cents/barrel, keep no upper limit (cap), add a tax on bitumen (tar sands oil), develop formula to distribute 50% of annual earnings (about $250 million of the $500 million/year) to states for spill prevention and response preparedness;
10. Adopt rulemaking to prohibit transfer of any federal Pittman-Robertson (federal aid to wildlife conservation) funds to states that conduct predator control; commission National Academy of Sciences (NAS)/National research Council (NRC) panel to review Alaska’s predator control programs post-1997;
11. Incentivize state establishment of wildlife protection buffers along boundaries of federal Parks and Refuges;
12. End Pebble mine permitting;
13. End Ambler Road permitting process (through Gates of the Arctic Preserve);
14. Establish U.S. Seabird Commission (to function like, or join with, the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission);
15. Establish rigorous transit ship safety protocols through Aleutians and Bering Strait, rescue tugs, routing agreements, Areas-to-be-Avoided; nominate both areas as Particularly Sensitive Sea Areas (PSSA) under U. N. International Maritime Organization (IMO), etc.
16. Finalize Bering River coal acquisition by Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, restore balance between habitat and research spending, assess other potential large parcel habitat deals;
17. Require oil industry to monitor and reduce fugitive methane emissions from wells and pipelines;
18. If Dems take control of Senate, amend ANILCA to eliminate the “no more” clause (that currently prohibits executive land withdrawals of more than 5,000 acres on AK federal lands); and eliminate sport hunting/trapping on Preserves and Refuges, continue to permit all subsistence on Preserves and Refuges;
19. Establish federal scientific integrity policy, requiring academic freedom/free speech policy for all federally funded scientists/university professors (e.g. NOAA, BOEM, NMFS, USFWS, NPS)
20. Reduce Total Allowable Catch (TAC) for Bering Sea Pollock and other bottom fish to enhance fish abundance for seabird/marine mammal populations;
21. Fund USFWS to conduct walrus raft pilot project in Chukchi Sea (at Hanna Shoal);
22. List all proposed candidate species under Endangered Species Act (ESA): walrus, ice seals, Alexander Archipelago wolf; strengthen critical habitat protections in ESA;
23. Strengthen National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA);
24. Use carbon tax/subsidy reprogrammed funds to purchase Pt. Lay coal resource (owned by Arctic Slope Regional Corp.) to leave it in the ground as carbon sequestration;
25. Establish Office of Federal Ombudsman for Alaska (to provide grievance opportunities for agency staff and the public re: federal agency actions in Alaska);
26. Direct Secretary of Agriculture to prioritize a shift of national agricultural policy and subsidies away from energy/chemical intensive agriculture, to sustainable, regenerative agriculture. Establish goal to reduce ecological footprint of all U.S. agriculture by 50% by 2030;
27. Appoint independent National Academy of Medicine/National Academy of Sciences panel to assess our national posture/policy toward pandemics – review COVID response, what went right, what went wrong, how to better prevent and respond to the next pandemic (this idea is already forwarded to the Biden COVID team);
28. During Lame Duck period (prior to inauguration), appoint a custody steward for each Agency Review Team to ensure that federal officials preserve all documents/emails that might point to malfeasance by Trump administration officials.
www.anchoragepress.com/columnists/alaska-environmental-issues-for-consideration-by-biden-administ...
Alaska environmental issues for consideration by Biden administration
www.anchoragepress.com
As Alaska progressives know all too well, for the past 20 years (post-Knowles administration) we have been marginalized, dispossessed, and ignored by Alaska’s state government and congressional dele...Who likes Beaver? Reintroduction of beaver and the use of beaver dam analog (BDA)'s to restore riparian areas and wetlands is gaining popularity! The Homer Drawdown group recently voted to implement, "For Peat's Sake" a community-driven education, conservation and restoration project. Peatlands are one of the planets most effective carbon sequestration ecosystems. But they are drying up due to human induced ecological change and warming. It's possible that volunteers will soon be mimicing our furry water engineer brothers. Another plus: beaver are "keystone" species, enhancing greater biodiversity where ever they live. "Scientists calculate that up to 250 million beaver ponds once puddled the continent—impounding enough water to submerge Washington, Oregon, and California. *Castor canadensis* even paved the way for agriculture: By trapping sediment in their ponds, beavers "produced the rich farm land … of the northern half of North America," paleontologist Rudolf Ruedemann wrote in *Science* in 1938."
Beaver dams without beavers? Artificial logjams are a popular but controversial restoration tool
www.sciencemag.org
Imitating busy rodents a cheap way to repair damaged rivers, researchers sayTrump Administration’s Final Push to Drill the Arctic Refuge: What Comes Next?
ejus.tc
In its waning days of power, the Trump administration is attempting to open the Arctic for oil and gas drilling in sacred and irreplaceable Alaskan wilderness. This month, the administration issued a ...Demand it!
The politicians taking money from the oil-gas-military industry are not our friends!
Biden Be Bold: AOC & Cori Bush Join Climate Protest Outside DNC Urging Activists to “Bring the Heat”
www.democracynow.org
Indigenous, racial justice and climate activists staged an occupation outside the Democratic National Convention in Washington Thursday, calling on President-elect Joe Biden to take immediate climate ...Progressive group slams Biden White House pick over tie to fossil fuel industry
thehill.com
Progressive environmental group the Sunrise Movement on Tuesday criticized President-elect Joe Biden’s selection of Rep.“The second Arctic Resilience Forum will be held online every Wednesday from 11:30am – 1:00pm (EST) over a series of ten weeks, beginning October 7, 2020. Each session touches on a specific aspect of Arctic resilience. The forum seeks to actively engage participants in conversations about how to build the resilience of Arctic communities and ecosystems. It offers the opportunity to discuss concrete best practices and experiences from the Council and the broader community of circumpolar experts and knowledge holders. The Arctic Resilience Forum aims to continue to strengthen cooperation on resilience work.”
sdwg.org/what-we-do/projects/arctic-resilience-forum-2020/
sdwg.org
The second Arctic Resilience Forum will be held online every Wednesday from 11:30am – 1:00pm (EST) over a series of ten weeks, beginning October 7, 2020. Each session touches on a specific aspect of...Dear Joe Biden: are you kidding me? | Erin Brockovich
www.theguardian.com
The president-elect has tapped a former DuPont consultant to join his Environmental Protection Agency transition boardWe’ve wasted 40 years on denial and ineffective half-measures. Accountability and transparency are key to getting the job done. What can we take from this new Canadian effort?
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/net-zero-emissions-1.5807877
Trudeau unveils new net-zero emissions plan to meet climate change targets | CBC News
www.cbc.ca
Environment and Climate Change Minister Jonathan Wilkinson tabled new legislation today that would force the current and future government to set binding climate reducation targets to get Canada to ne...Please join us for this important series.
Arctic change is accelerating. Great new publication documenting the details from our own Anna Liljedahl 👏.
Arctic riparian shrub expansion indicates a shift from streams gaining water to those that lose flow
www.nature.com
Shrub canopy height and density is greater along Arctic streams that lose water into unfrozen ground than along gaining streams, suggest analyses of field measurements from Toolik, Alaska.This is from 2019 but worth revisiting as we ready ourselves for real action on the climate front. While time is short, neither can we afford to rush in with the wrong "solutions".... "Indigenous peoples, he said, live with a different sense of time. While many non-Indigenous peoples think of time as focused on the last 200 years, many Indigenous traditions and peoples think over thousands of years, and have stories and teachings based around a fluid concept of time and the relationships embedded throughout time. "The reason people get all hung up on the urgency of climate change. Some philosophers and climate scientists, Whyte said, call climate change "unprecedented," like it's never happened before, and say all the climate problems are because of cognitive things, like greed or ignorance, but never about a breakdown in relationships....If you try to control it, you're not going to have a lot of success," Whyte said. "But if you actually tried to relate to it, learn from it and appreciate the independence of the nonhuman world, as well as the people there, you're going to be able to adapt to that new ecosystem and deal with the changes in the environment you're encountering." He said, adding that at every layer of his traditions, Indigenous peoples were thinking about societal organization, to be as adaptive as possible A fluid system of government can only be possible through the relationships people have with each other, and the nonhuman world, operated at a highly moral level, he said. "So the idea is, if your relationships with others are consensual, trustworthy, reciprocal, they're accountable, that's how you ensure fluidity and adaptability," he said, which is how many Indigenous governance systems were able to occur across huge regions and continents, in constant exchange of information. "Connection isn't about change and fluidity, but about moral responsibility". Someone who believes that it's only relatively recently that we've been dealing with climate change is also probably someone who thinks we don't have a lot of experience or wisdom to cope with it, Whyte said. "For us, studying environmental climate change is a part of how society's organized. Climate and environmental sciences are some of the oldest," Whyte said. "We don't understand the way time unfolds in a static linear way. Imagine, if the way in which you told time, was based on cues you got from the seasons..."The changing seasons act as cues to particular social activities, like harvesting, hunting, fishing, and other social coordination, Whyte said, all of which are threatened by a colonial, linear, static relationship to time."
Urgency in climate change advocacy is backfiring, says Citizen Potawatomi Nation scientist
www.nationalobserver.com
Kyle Powys Whyte, an Indigenous scientist and climate change expert, says Indigenous peoples have led some of the most vibrant climate change movements, focused on repairing and strengthening ethical ...A potentially useful resource. Let us know what you think!
toolkit.climate.gov/regions/alaska-and-arctic
Alaska and the Arctic | U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit
toolkit.climate.gov
Arctic ice cover plays an important role in maintaining Earth’s temperature—the shiny white ice reflects light and the net heat that the ocean would otherwise absorb, keeping the Northern Hemisphe...This needs to not happen.
www.washingtonpost.com
The Trump administration on Monday called for oil companies to pick spots where they'd like to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, launching a leasing process it aims to finish just before P...A lot of folks may not appreciate that as of 2019-20, there's a hunting season for mule deer and white-tailed deer in Alaska! Neither species is supposed to occur here, but that's how quickly species distributions are changing. I'm willing to bet that within two or three decades, we'll have feral European hogs in the Fairbanks area. And, according to these researchers, "The coldest spots—Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, sort of north-central—is where we have, by far, the most pigs."
Huge feral hogs invading Canada, building ‘pigloos’ as they go
www.nationalgeographic.com
Feral swine, the offspring of wild boars and domestic pigs, are spreading through Canada into areas where many didn’t think they could survive.This content isn't available right now
When this happens, it's usually because the owner only shared it with a small group of people, changed who can see it or it's been deleted.Great relevance to Alaskan coastlines, with the potential to increase fish, sequester carbon and reduce wave erosion from rising seas and increasing storms.
Marine Permaculture Arrays | Climate Game Changers
climategamechangers.org
Around half the organic matter in the oceans is comprised of kelp and phytoplankton. Through photosynthesis they produce at least half of the atmosphere’s oxygen, in the process sequestering gigaton...“Why should something as dry and technical as energy-measurement warrant attention? Because misunderstanding it dramatically overplays the difficulty of meeting global clean-energy goals.
“Understanding the enormous amounts of wasted energy produced from burning fossil fuels shows why replacing it with cleaner sources may not be as much of a lift as it seems. ...The magnitude of challenge is smaller than most people think.”
Trump rushes through US Arctic Refuge gas and oil lease sales - Electrek
electrek.co
Donald Trump's administration, unsurprisingly, is rushing through a drilling-rights auction in Alaska before President-elect Joe Biden takes office.news.uaf.edu/paper-published-on-subsistence-and-wood-energy-in-rural-alaska/
Paper published on subsistence and wood energy in rural Alaska
news.uaf.edu
“Stoking the Flame: Subsistence and Wood Energy in Rural Alaska,” by Amanda Byrd and Jennifer Schmidt, was recently published in Energy Research and Social Science.New Energy Future for Alaska
Help us ignite the power of the grassroots to launch the long-overdue renewable Energy Future for Alaska!
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