Congressional Climate Camp #4: Federal Policies for Climate Mitigation and Adaptation Win-Wins

Congressional Climate Camps
Find out more about the briefings in this series below:
Part 1	Budget, Appropriations, and Stimulus
Part 2	Federal Policies for High Emitting Sectors
Part 3	Lessons Learned from Past Congresses and Current Attitudes on Climate
Part 4	Federal Policy for Mitigation and Adaptation Win-Wins
Part 5	Understanding Budget Reconciliation

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) is holding a Climate Camp online briefing series. We are going over the basics of the legislative process, highlighting key areas and opportunities for achieving near-term and long-term carbon reductions through policy.

Our fourth session looked at a suite of climate solutions that simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase resilience to climate impacts. Briefing speakers discussed how these solutions also advance environmental justice, job creation, and conservation.

 

TOPICS

Click below to go straight to the different highlights and sections. 

Coastal Nature-Based Solutions

• Dr. Bhaskaran Subramanian, Ph.D., Chief, Shoreline Conservation Service, Maryland Department of Natural Resources

Solutions from the Agriculture Sector

• Dr. John Quinn, Associate Professor of Biology, Furman University

Mass Timber – Sustainable Buildings as Carbon Sinks

• Russ Vaagen, Founder and CEO, Vaagen Timbers

Achieving Efficiency and Resilience Through Building Codes

• Kim Cheslak, Director of Codes, New Buildings Institute

Ensuring Win-Wins Advance Environmental Justice

• Jacqueline Patterson, Senior Director, Environmental and Climate Justice Program, NAACP

Highlights

Coastal Nature-Based Solutions

Dr. Bhaskaran Subramanian, Ph.D., Chief, Shoreline Conservation Service, Maryland Department of Natural Resources

• Maryland has over 6,600 miles of coastline spread throughout 16 counties.
• Living shorelines—or nature-based solutions to erosion control—enhance habitats, protect the shoreline from erosion, improve the aesthetics of the coast, and create coastal resilience.
• There is no “one size fits all” solution that determines the most effective type of living shoreline. The best living shoreline erosion control is dependent on site conditions, project objectives, and the ocean energy regime of the area.
• Structural erosion control methods, such as bulkheads, riprap, and revetment walls, have not survived severe storms (like Hurricane Isabel in 2003) in the past. Nature-based, living shoreline solutions stay intact. Living shorelines typically cost ten percent of what structural erosion solutions cost.
• The Shoreline Conservation Service, established in 1968, has completed 485 living shoreline projects. Of the 177 recently assessed, 131 projects were doing as well or better than they were when implemented. These projects use features such as wetlands, forest buffers, and dunes.

• In 1968, Maryland established that natural erosion control was preferred over structural solutions with the creation of the Shore Erosion Control (SEC) program. Maryland’s Living Shoreline Protection Act of 2008 requires property owners who prefer structural solutions to prove to the state that living shorelines would not work on their property.
• Maryland’s Resiliency through Restoration Initiative supports grants, innovation, and risk monitoring for maintenance and adaptive management as ways to expand erosion control solutions.
• At the federal level, Coastal Zone Management (CZM) programs in states have tackled the country’s most pressing coastal resilience issues for 50 years. Grants allow states to invest in technical assistance, planning, and implementation of resilient infrastructure.
• Blue carbon is the carbon sequestered from the atmosphere by the ocean and marine environments. Blue carbon is a co-benefit of living shorelines. The Blue Carbon Initiative and Duke’s blue carbon modeling project research blue carbon and its relationship with coastal resilience.
• The best way to make our coasts more resilient is to work with nature with living shoreline projects, not against it with structural projects.

Q: What steps do you take to ensure living shorelines are well maintained and not replaced in the future by structural erosion control?

• Subramanian: That is a very good point because, for the 200 projects that I visited, it is not the kind of living shoreline project or the contractor that determines project success: it is the maintenance, or lack thereof, that is really important. We work with our project partners, often private property owners, and have very strong ties with them. I have not had a project where they have converted a living shoreline project into a structural project, because the land owners see the core benefits of these projects. Open lines of communication are also important. Any projects I do, I keep in contact with them, and they reach out to me with any problems or maintenance issues.
   

Solutions from the Agricultural Sector

Dr. John Quinn, Associate Professor of Biology, Furman University

• There are over 22 million farms in the United States that cover at least 922 million acres. Agricultural systems are diverse and include pasture and rangeland, forest, food crops, fiber crops, and fuel crops. Agriculture produces $330 billion in diverse products each year.
• Modeling projects that by 2050, product yields are going to shift because of the environmental impacts of climate change.
• A diverse set of solutions from the agricultural sector can help adapt to environmental changes, including solutions like conservation agriculture, farm irrigation efficiency, regenerative annual cropping, grassland protection, and plant-rich diets at the consumer level.
• Project Drawdown produces abundant research on these practices.
• Conservation agriculture is a diverse set of practices to conserve soil and ecosystem structure and function. Examples are no-till farming, cover crops, and crop rotation. Conservation agriculture could sequester 9.43 to 13.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) and create $78 to $113 billion in profits in the United States.
• Regenerative annual cropping, which encompasses practices that are similar to conservation agriculture (including compost application, green manure, and organic production), could sequester 14.5 to 22.3 gigatons of CO2e and create $136 to $206 billion in profits by 2050. It also creates opportunities for public-private partnerships.
• Farm irrigation efficiency could sequester 1.13 to 2.07 gigatons of CO2e and produce savings of $540 to $930 billion by 2050. The National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) under the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) provides information about practices like irrigation efficiency to farmers, and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) under the NRCS helps farmers invest in irrigation improvements and other sustainability practices.
• Agroforestry refers to planting trees or shrubs alongside crops or livestock. The trees or shrubs store carbon while also protecting crops, which can increase yields by 10 to 12 percent, even after taking into account the land lost to trees. USDA’s National Agroforestry Center produces research on agroforestry.
• USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is the largest private land conservation program. CRP pays farmers to idle land, thus protecting grasslands. Quinn expects funding for CRP to grow.
• USDA Climate Hubs provide regional data and tools to the agriculture industry.
• Strong relationships between farmers are the best way to spread information and best practices for responding to climate change.
• Plant-based diets are a way for consumers to eat healthier while helping reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Q: Are there areas of the country where we would realize the greatest adaptation or mitigation benefits from these practices? How is that information shared? If members of Congress have questions about this for their districts, where would you refer them to?

• Quinn: What might be a valuable practice in one part of the country might not work in another, even within a county. Working with local NRCS agents is a really valuable tool for farmers and a way to support them more broadly. Climate Hubs are important because they provide region-specific information. Specifically for agroforestry, Climate Hubs have a decision-making tool to see which region you are in, which agroforestry practices there is data on, and the best recommendations for those.

 

Mass Timber – Sustainable Building as Carbon Sinks

Russ Vaagen, Founder and CEO, Vaagen Timbers

• Vaagen Timbers was created to give consumers the opportunity to support sustainable forestry activities. They help the environment while building high-tech, energy-efficient buildings.
• Intense forest fires, or megafires, are becoming more common as climate change worsens. It is important to thin forests to lessen the effects of forest fires, leaving the larger trees with wider spacing between them to be more resistant to fire.
• Vaagen Timbers uses the smaller diameter trees that are a byproduct of forest thinning to create its products.
• These smaller diameter trees are run through the sawmill, processed into rough lumber, finger jointed together for length, then made into either cross laminated or glue laminated products.
• Buildings made with mass timber offer multiple benefits: carbon sequestration in the wood, energy efficiency, avoided use of carbon-intensive concrete and steel, forest restoration, and recyclable materials if the building is ever taken down. 3D modeling and other advanced techniques make it possible to build more efficient buildings with less waste.
• One project Vaagen Timbers is working on is Blockhouse Life, which is constructing smaller, modular, sustainable housing units using Vaagen Timbers products. The units can be built quickly and give residents both space and community.
• Vaagen Timbers is also working with Matt’s Place Foundation to provide materials for a house built for residents with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
• Vaagen Timbers has also worked with Oregon State University-Cascades in Bend, Oregon, where forest fires often strike, to provide local timber for projects there. Trees that have burned in fires can now act as material for building.
• The Big Tech companies, like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, are pushing for eco-friendly buildings. Mass timber is an option that offers a much lower carbon cost than steel or concrete.

Q: Could you comment on the workforce development opportunities that your company has brought to its part of the country as it has grown?

• Vaagen: We are in a rural community north of Spokane, Washington, that does have a fair amount of manufacturing. What we are bringing to the table is high-tech work that people are able to get a community college degree or workforce-focused degree for, adding to their skills and pay. We are tying the gap tighter between building science and manufacturing. In the traditional way to build, there is a design team, then an architect, an engineer, and a general contractor that operate each in their own vacuum. With mass timber, we are doing many parts in one spot and are now educating the developers, the architects and so on. It is a paradigm shift that draws back to forest management and allows people to know where their products came from.

Q: How is increased use of wood in buildings good for our forests?

• Vaagen: In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a growing environmental movement to change forest management. Instead of adapting our forest harvesting, we stopped it, and went from 12.6 billion board feet annually of harvest on forest service land to 1.8 billion. Since that time, the trees have grown up and out, and our forests are filled with fuel for fires. We need to go back and revisit forest management in previously managed lands, especially near communities. If we bring sawmills that are dedicated to small diameter trees back into communities, we can create products that work really well and manage our federal forest lands. It adds jobs where they are critical. There are examples around the world where they are doing this right, like Sweden, Norway, and Austria. They are not over-harvesting their lands, but they create wonderful products that come from nature, like high-efficiency buildings.

 

Achieving Efficiency and Resilience Through Building Codes

Kim Cheslak, Director of Codes, New Buildings Institute

• Building codes are laws that regulate how we design and build. You cannot build or renovate a structure without complying with these regulations.
  • Codes are the largest way to impact buildings, which are responsible for 75 percent of U.S. electricity consumption and half of the nation’s fossil gas consumption. This contributes to 38 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
• There are three primary codes rating bodies: the International Code Council (ICC), ASHRAE, and the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). Code changes are an open process where proposals receive public comment and are voted on. New codes come out every three years.
• We can build a new building today that uses 70 percent less energy than any existing building. One net zero energy building can save 159 tons of greenhouse gases per year.
• Meeting the United States’ Paris Agreement goals means cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2030. By addressing buildings, we can eliminate 20 percent of current U.S. carbon emissions.
• In order to achieve net zero carbon buildings, we need to consider energy efficiency, renewable energy, grid integration and storage, building electrification, and lifecycle impact. Building codes must have an equity component that considers the impacts on people.
• With energy efficiency, the goal is to ensure base codes and building systems achieve highly efficient, passively resilient buildings.
  • The International Code Council’s 2021 energy code and ASHRAE’s companion standard account for a 10 percent and five percent gain, respectively, in efficiency over the last code cycle. Neither of these organizations have yet committed to moving towards a net zero energy or a climate-based solutions approach. They are moving in the right direction, but progress is not ensured.
• We need to provide on-site and off-site renewable energy. Procurement regulations can help achieve resilience, support state renewable portfolio standards (RPS), and focus on additive generation saving.
• Renewable energy can be included in the code through both the residential and commercial zero energy appendix.
• Fifty percent of U.S. renewable energy generation and capacity has been driven by state renewable portfolio standards, which specify the percentage of retail electric sales that must be supplied through renewable energy.
  • Twenty-nine states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia, representing over 65 percent of the U.S. population, have RPS. Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., are striving for 100 percent renewable electricity.
• Climate-driven electrification means focusing on all building systems and vehicles powered by clean energy.
• Buildings in major cities already use more electricity than gas.
• Inconsistent state policy limits our ability to meet national clean energy targets. States are either advancing or prohibiting building gas bans and electrification codes.
• Grid integration means ensuring that buildings can include controls and storage to respond to time-of-use signals.
• Adapting to an interactive grid will be critical to maintain building services and support future decarbonization efforts. The electric grid requires a better integration of the distributed energy resources that we are putting into our buildings.
• The GridOptimal Buildings Initiative empowers players on both sides of the meter to actively support the transition to a carbon-free grid.
• We must take lifecycle impacts into account in building design. Reducing the impacts of embodied carbon, refrigerants, and construction will lower the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of buildings.
  • Embodied carbon refers to anything used to construct buildings (materials), while operational carbon refers to when the building is constructed and running.
  • We should focus on what we use to build, as building materials and construction contribute to 11 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
• The federal government controls the appliance standards program, which limits overall progress on the efficiency of building systems and the code’s ability to meet high-performance building targets.
• There is a lack of enforcement at the federal level to require that states bring their codes up to date.
• Federal programs like ENERGY STAR and the Department of Energy’s Net Zero Energy Ready Home need to be focused on not just producing a fairly efficient home, but the most efficient and zero-carbon home.
• How jurisdictions can apply the code is limited by state laws in many places, which holds them back from contributing to national goals.
• Jurisdictions are further limited by the traditional code development processes, so organizations need to provide support to make the code process more equitable.

Q: What do we mean when we talk about energy efficiency improvements that have resilience benefits and have become part of the code more recently?

• Cheslak: We saw incremental improvements in the envelope and across different spaces, such as air tightness and how much free cooling buildings are giving away to the outdoors. There are several measures in both the residential and commercial sections where designers have more flexibility to choose the measures that work best for them. Those measures add up to a certain amount of savings over the previous version of the code. However, we are limited in the mechanical space due to federal issues, so we are looking for federal leadership to adjust standards to support energy efficiency and resilience.

 

Ensuring Win-Wins Advance Environmental Justice

Jacqueline Patterson, Senior Director, Environmental and Climate Justice Program, NAACP

• Pushing for systemic solutions is critical to addressing the root causes of the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate and economic crises, and racial inequalities.
• We must collectively reject the myth of scarcity and embrace the reality of abundance, whether it be regenerative systems of food, regenerative design that we need for our buildings, or the regenerative nature of energy through clean energy.
• Our society was founded on practices of exploitation, extraction, domination, and displacement. We have to shift to a society rooted in principles and practices around regeneration, cooperation, and interdependence.
• As we work to dismantle the system built on the consequences of extraction, exploitation, and oppression of certain people, we must do so in a way that well-intended efforts do not have unintended consequences. The only way we can do that is by making sure that we have everyone at the table.
• National policies and programs must support local visions and leadership.
  • Groups like the Gullah/Geechee Nation are working with groups like Climate Central and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to develop an app to assess their risk for sea level rise and how they can plan for that. Echo in Mississippi is working with communities, like Turkey Creek, which are under threat from wetlands development.
• Federal policies must strengthen the natural protection systems that frontline communities have to protect them from encroaching waters.
• Intersectional policymaking can create solutions that work across multiple sectors. To paraphrase what writer Audre Lorde said, we cannot have single issue solutions because we do not live single issue lives.
  • Wetlands restoration and preservation policies need to work in concert with development policies, permitting, and development. National flood insurance policies must intersect with housing programming that protects people and their wellbeing, as opposed to only protecting properties or budgets.
• We can reconfigure our budgets so that we have enough investment for managed community retreat. There needs to be resources for maintaining communities and not have them be divided while moving back from the shoreline.
• The key to energy democracy and forward-looking state and local-level leadership—like the Portland Clean Energy Fund, the Future Energy Jobs Act in Illinois, and the offshore wind bill in Maryland—is having everyone at the table and developing policies using an intersectional process.
  • We must look at energy through multiple perspectives, such as the lens of economic justice. This can mean ensuring that there are provisions for local hiring and fair chance hiring as well as including racial justice and disadvantaged business enterprise provisions.
• We need to think aspirationally: we need to go beyond making things better for marginalized communities and toward eliminating barriers.
  • Regarding food systems, this can mean following the example of Soul Fire Farm and the EarthSeed Land Collective, as well as federal programs like the Farmers Market Promotion Program and the WIC Farmers Market Program.
• Regarding transportation, we can follow the leadership of groups like the Transportation Equity Network. National policies and programs can strengthen inter-city transportation infrastructure to increase equal access to jobs and healthcare.
• Federal assistance needs to support increased municipal infrastructure around vehicle electrification. This will help reduce air pollution exposure experienced by frontline communities located near highways.
• When it comes to labor, the Homeboys Industry in Los Angeles includes employees who were formerly incarcerated in energy efficiency retrofits. We have national leading networks on these issues, such as the NAACP’s Black Labor Initiative on Just Transition and the National Black Worker Center Project. These are the groups whose leadership we have to rely on when we think about federal policies and how to transition workers from the fossil fuel economy to a clean energy one.
• While we have local leadership around zero-waste policies, nationally we need to make sure that we are supporting the zero-waste transition. We need to transition away from burying and burning waste, as well as reduce toxic waste. At the federal level, we need to make sure that we follow the same principles around just recovery.

Q: What are the main unintended consequences that we should be aware of as we implement win-win policies? How could we improve our decision-making to be more inclusive and equitable to prevent unintended negative consequences and maximize the positive consequences and multiple benefits?

• Patterson: I will always remember when I was on a call about the Clean Power Plan back in the day. Someone on the call said something along the lines of, “I think we can all agree that emissions reduction in the aggregate is a good thing.” Everyone was nodding along, but I said, no, we cannot agree on that because emission reductions in the aggregate could mean increased emissions in certain places. If we do not focus simultaneously on the aggregate and on particular places, then we could end up creating unintended consequences and affecting communities. Part of the problem is that everybody else was kind of nodding and going along with the conversation. If I had not been there that day, then no one would have been there to bring up that point. That is a learning moment to ensure that in any of those conversations, we have an inclusive table where we eliminate the margins. We need to make sure we have safe spaces for these conversations so that people can put an idea out there and bring different perspectives on what the unintended consequences would be. We need to ensure that what is being said is heard and that measures are being put in place to address concerns.

Highlights compiled by Rachel Snead and Celine Yang