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It’s that time of year! We’ll be holding our annual meeting on Wednesday, March 30th at 6pm on Zoom. Join us to hear about our work in 2021, our plans for 2022 and, if you’re a member, vote for our annual board of directors!

Register online today at bit.ly/cleanair2022

Members can vote for board candidates at bit.ly/3BvXZTJ

Not a member? Need to renew? No problem! 

Renew your membership or join us as a first time member today! Check out our membership handbook below!

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Have you heard of “cryptocurrency mining”, aka, Proof-of-Work Blockchain operations? Did you know that this industry consumes more power than it takes to run all the refrigerators in the United States? Did you know that Erie and Niagara County have a disproportionately large number of Proof-of-Work Blockchain operations?

Help us to Knock Out POW! Join us Thursday 2/17 at 5:30pm for an online meeting where we will review this topic, and take action in support of a statewide moratorium on Proof-of-Work Blockchain operations to allow for the state to study this industry and develop regulations.

Register for this meeting at bit.ly/3IYxHvK

Can’t make it? You can also learn more and take action independently by visiting bit.ly/takeactioncrypto

We found this video from Grist.org particularly useful in understanding this issue:

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Are you a member of another organization or business? Sign our letter urging Gov. Hochul to amend her NYS Budget proposal to include environmental and worker justice!

Have you heard about the CLCPA, or Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act? This revolutionary legislation, passed and signed into law in July 2019, is already greatly changing the lives of each and every New York resident and has also influenced national legislation related to climate change. 

The CLCPA sets goals of net-zero emissions by 2050 and 100% renewable electricity by 2040– that’s huge! It’s due in part to a mixture of the CLCPA, grassroots organizing, and market forces that NY no longer has any coal-powered electricity generation, a huge win not only for climate justice but also for environmental justice, as so many of these older inefficient facilities were located in the heart of marginalized communities.

The reverberations of the CLCPA are being felt all throughout NY governance, and currently there are a number of related public comment periods for supportive documents – for example, the DEC is accepting comments through February 7th on air permit processes and on how the CLCPA will be integrated into the day-to-day activities of the DEC. Even more notably, the full CLCPA Draft Scoping Plan is undergoing a 120 public review comment period right now, and there will be hearings in multiple locations throughout the state in April – we will be sure to let you know when one is planned for Buffalo!

We still have a long way to go, though, towards implementing the CLCPA – and we’ve already seen new industries like Proof-of-Work Blockchain Mining emerge that threaten to undermine efforts to reach the benchmarks of the CLCPA even before the initial legislation is fully funded. Organizations statewide are joining together in support of the passage of a slate of bills and legislative actions, called the “Climate Can’t Wait” platform, which will support the implementation and goals of the CLCPA.

We encourage our members to visit the Climate Can’t Wait website to read more about each and every one of these bills, and then take a moment to contact your Albany representatives to let them know you support the passage of this slate of legislation. As Buffalo and WNY residents, we especially encourage contacting Governor Hochul’s office by calling 518-474-8390 or visiting https://www.governor.ny.gov/content/governor-contact-form.  

To find your state senator’s contact information, visit https://www.nysenate.gov/registration/nojs/form/start/find-my-senator. To find your assemblymember’s contact information, visit https://nyassembly.gov/mem/search/. 

Learn more about the CLCPA by visiting these resources:

• https://www.nyrenews.org/
• https://climatecantwait.org/ 
• https://climate.ny.gov/
• https://climate.ny.gov/Climate-Resources 
• https://nysclimateimpacts.org/ 
• https://www.dec.ny.gov/energy/99223.html
• Grist.org – “New York’s ambitious climate and environmental justice laws are in effect. Here’s what’s next.”
• Grist.org – “One year later, what has New York’s landmark climate law accomplished?”
• Grist.org – “2 years after passing a landmark climate law, New York has no plan to fund it”
• https://www.thejustice40.com/
• Bloomberg Law – “The Impact of New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act”
• Environmental Advocates of NY CLCPA One-pager
• NY Renews CLCPA One-pager 
• NY Renews CLCPA and CAC Implementation Toolkit

Did you know that the Department of Environmental Conservation posts reports related to each and every Brownfield and Superfund clean up in NY on their website? As fantastic as this resource is, it can take a bit of practice to know how to use it – in this short guide, we’ll walk you through the process for finding the documents.

Step one – navigate to the DECinfo Locator website at https://gisservices.dec.ny.gov/gis/dil/. 

• If you lose this link, you can also find it by using a search engine like Google and searching for the term “DECinfo Locator”, or by navigating to the DEC’s main website, https://www.dec.ny.gov/, and searching from there.
  
  

• The DECinfo Locator page on the main DEC site also has navigation resources, including a YouTube video.

Step two – in the panel on the right, select the “Environmental Cleanup” window. Notice that these two layers are not yet active.

Step three – zoom in on the location of the Brownfield or Superfund site you are looking for documents on. You will need to zoom in before these layers will become visible. In our example, we are searching for the documents on the Tonawanda Coke Brownfield and Superfund areas.

Step four – in the panel on the right, click on the boxes next to the remediation parcels and sites layers. (or just one or the other, if only one is applicable to what you are searching for.)

Step five – Zoom in closer, if needed. Click on the parcel of the site you are searching for, then read the pop-up.

• In this example, the Superfund areas have a link to a “site record”, which gives a general overview of the history and status of the superfund area.

Step six – to find the full list of public records related to the site, click on the site icon instead, and then click on “document folder.”

• Clicking on “online database” in the pop-up will bring you back to the same “site record” site linked before.

Step seven – look through the documents linked. It helps to look at the file name for dates and for keywords. Before downloading any, be sure check the size, as some are quite large – in this list, for example, one is 97mb!

Note that in this example, as with many of our campaign sites, there is both a brownfield and a superfund site clean-up ongoing. You will need to repeat the above steps with the other icons on the site to find the brownfield documents.

Not all sites have a document folder linked, especially for complicated sites like the area around Tonawanda Coke – this is because these documents should be consolidated in the main folder.

Sometimes a site will have several pages of site records that you can find by clicking on the arrow at the top of the pop-up – but some of the site records linked will be the same as in prior pop-ups. For example, the site record in this first bubble links here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, and the fifth here – the first, second and fifth are linked to the same page, but the third and fourth link to different pages.

Try out the site yourself, and let us know if you have any issues navigating! We find it easiest to bookmark the document folder after we find it through DECinfo Locator. For example, here’s the direct link to the documents for the Brownfield areas of Tonawanda Coke, and here’s the direct link to the documents for the Superfund areas.

On January 18th, Governor Hochul released her first  State Fiscal Year (SFY) 2022-2023 Executive Budget Proposal: A New Era for New York. The proposal includes many long needed investments in New York State’s environmental protections, green jobs training and climate resiliency. New York has long been a leader in the global fight against climate change, and we are hopeful that under Governor Hochul’s leadership we can continue to pave the way for a just transition for all of our communities. 

While we are largely pleased with the Governor’s budget proposal, we are very concerned about her administration’s lack of community voice in her proposal to extend the New York State Brownfield Remediation Tax Credit program. While we support the Governor for proposing to add environmental justice, job growth and climate resilience into the goals of this program, the proposed language needs to go further. Without including real mechanisms to obtain these goals, the program will continue to miss the mark.

Governor Hochul’s budget proposal does not go far enough to protect environmental justice communities and our brothers, sisters and siblings in organized labor in the proposed extension of the Brownfield Cleanup Program. Investments that assure a fair and equitable transition need to be baked into our state budget. If done right, the Brownfields Cleanup Program is an incredible opportunity to do this.  Despite previous reforms of the program, sites often still sit in limbo for years, while community health is put at risk. The program currently also allows an escape for polluters to avoid clean up liability.  Furthermore, though this program is funded by the public, it does not require developers to pay family sustaining wages because it is currently not considered under the definition of “public work”. 

We also join the call shared with other organizations statewide for the inclusion of $15 billion for the implementation of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, or the CLCPA, including a requirement that 40% of funds be directly invested in disadvantaged communities – the CLCPA puts NY as the leader of the nation in climate legislation, but we have failed to fund this just transition, which utterly undermines any legislative actions.

In order for our communities to bear the oncoming storms of climate change, more must be done to support communities of color and poor and working class communities across the state who have already had to endure decades of abuse, neglect and indifference by New York State’s prime polluters, big and small. If we are to weather this storm together, we have to do all that is necessary to invest in the health, wellness and wealth of our communities by cleaning up the hazardous waste left behind by industries in our backyards. 

Clean Air members, supporters, allies and friends, we urge you to help us in reminding Governor Hochul where she comes from. Clean Air will be honored to support New York’s commitment to environmental justice and climate resiliency, but unless and until the reality of our communities is honored, we will remain opposed to the current budget proposal. 

It is with great excitement and joy that we announce that together we have met and exceeded our year end fundraising goal!

After a year of uncertainty and transition we set a bold goal of raising $75,000 in individual contributions and we asked you all to imagine that another world is possible with us. We told you how we and our campaign members are imagining more for Delevan Grider, Tonawanda, Seneca Babcock and the Tesla workers. We shared our personal stories of what motivates us to organize for justice and health for our communities. We developed our skills and trained me

mbers on the necessity of funding our own movements through grassroots fundraising so we can be independent and accountable to our mission. You delivered and joined us in imagining more and raising a total of $76,250!

Meeting this goal has put Clean Air in a stron

g position to continue our grassroots organizing and leadership development of our members this year. We have a small but very capable, passionate, and motivated staff and have been busy planning great things for 2022. We cannot wait to see you and share more at our Virtual Annual Meeting for which we will be announcing a date very soon.

Thank you for imagining a new world with us!

Join us for the second American Axle Community Advisory Group meeting!

This Wednesday, January 12th at 6pm, members of our community will meet with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) and property owner East Delavan Properties for an update on the slow going cleanup work at the former American Axle site on East Delavan.

The Delavan-Grider community has been organizing for decades to see real action on the contaminated site in our backyard. The CAG meeting will give community members a chance to ask their questions and give their feedback directly to those in control of the speed, scope and openness of this historic cleanup.

The meeting will be held on Zoom. You can access the meeting by clicking the link below or by calling in with the number, meeting ID and passcode provided.

Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87105154904?pwd=OWFQQTlhVzhqRGZaSmZFZS9adkU1Zz09

Call: 1 929 436 2866 US

Meeting ID: 871 0515 4904

Passcode: 506600

Dear Clean Air community,

At the end of this year, I will step down from my role as Community Organizer with Clean Air. In the nearly three and a half years I have been a staff member, and the 7+ years I’ve been part of the organization’s work, I have had the privilege to work alongside some profoundly talented, visionary, and courageous people I will appreciate and learn from for the rest of my life.

It’s been a chaotic ride – particularly as we’ve adapted to the pandemic, but for folks who’ve been in this fight for the long haul, we know the work has never been easy: I’ve been inspired, angry, grief-stricken, hopeful, and everything in between. I’m deeply proud of the work we’ve done together, building a powerful movement for justice through rigorous organizing, caretaking, and principled struggle. The time I’ve spent working alongside Clean Air leaders and members has been a gift.

In early October, my partner and I (and our dog and two cats) relocated to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she hails from. Since then, I have continued to work remotely for the organization as we’ve onboarded new staff (welcome Bridge and Chris!) and as I’ve gradually started a new beginning in the midwest, the Clean Air staff has emerged as a powerful and exciting new formation. 

I know the Clean Air staff and members will continue to organize with care, joy, vision, and determination, creating the world we’re fighting for along the way. I’m eagerly awaiting updates on the creative and brilliant ways our powerful movement and small-but-mighty organization will be holding feet to the flames and winning justice, dignity, health and so much more. We’re currently fundraising for 2022, and for the duration of the campaign, every dollar you give will be matched twice, making your donation go three times as far! Will you join me in making a gift of $10, $25, or $50 today?

In love and rage and motion, 

Linnea Brett

P.S. Please consider making a sustaining gift of $5, $10, or $20 a month to ensure Clean Air is always ready to take on the challenges ahead. Thank You!

We Imagine More at Huntley! 

Our team member Jim Jones summarizes where our Huntley team stands at the close of 2021 thusly – Working towards fundamentally clean air has always been at our core at the