Clean air is essential for healthy, happy lives. Clean, renewable energy helps ensure clean air. NRCM works for policies and initiatives that will improve Maine's air quality and reduce global warming pollution throughout the state and region.
NRCM’s climate and clean energy work is focused on where we can have the greatest impact: cleaner cars and trucks, clean and renewable energy production, and greater energy efficiency.
Our work in these key areas is critical to reducing health and environmental problems already plaguing our state. These include high asthma rates, more “bad air days,” rising sea levels due to climate change that threaten coastal communities, and threats to our fall foliage, skiing, and our vital tourism-based industry.
NRCM makes certain that Maine's elected officials and decision-makers are kept up to date about information related to climate change pollution, clean energy technologies, and steps Maine can take to ensure clean air.
CMP Plans to Bury Proposed Transmission Line Under Kennebec Gorge
In a concession to opponents, the power company says it would drill under the scenic canyon instead of stringing power lines overhead if it wins approval for the 145-mile transmission line project. by Peter McGuire, Staff Writer Portland Press Herald news story Central Maine Power wants to bury the portion of its planned electrical transmission Read More
Mainers Overwhelmingly Oppose CMP Transmission Line
CMP’s desperate gambit doesn’t change that Statement of Dylan Voorhees, Clean Energy Director, Natural Resources Council of Maine “In a desperate gambit to try to salvage its controversial power line proposal, Central Maine Power (CMP) today acknowledged that its proposed 145-mile transmission line across Maine would cause significant harm to the Kennebec Gorge. But this small Read More
Scores Speak Out to Regulators about Impact of CMP’s Transmission Line Proposal
More than 70 signed up to speak at the hearing and most who testified in in the first three hours voiced concerns about the impact the project would have on the environment and tourism. by Rachel Ohm, Morning Sentinel Portland Press Herald news story HALLOWELL — The Maine Public Utilities Commission heard hours of testimony Read More
New Study Shows CMP Transmission Project Would Not Reduce Climate-changing Carbon Pollution
Reveals Hydro-Quebec’s financial incentive to “green-wash” power News Release Natural Resources Council of Maine, Sierra Club, and Maine Renewable Energy Association (Augusta, ME) A new analysis released today by environmental and renewable energy organizations concludes that the transmission line through western Maine (NECEC) proposed by Central Maine Power (CMP) and Hydro-Quebec would not reduce carbon Read More
Report Challenges Environmental Benefits of CMP Project
The report says hydropower from Quebec would merely be redirected to a new U.S. market and will not affect emission reductions regionally, a claim Hydro-Quebec refutes. by Tux Turkel, Staff Writer Portland Press Herald news story Hours before a much-anticipated public hearing on the merits of a new transmission line through western Maine, an analysis Read More
Climate Impact Key to Maine Power Line Decision
We need to know how Hydro-Quebec will meet all of its energy contracts. Portland Press Herald editorial The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report last week should put every planning decision in sharp focus. Ninety-one of the world’s top climate scientists say that we have about a decade left to radically change our consumption Read More
Sobering New U.N. Report Validates Climate Science, Economics
A price on carbon and an internationally coordinated and enforceable effort are surely the way forward. by Michael Jones, Brunswick resident and associate professor of economics emeritus at Bowdoin College Portland Press Herald op-ed BRUNSWICK — The news Monday proclaimed two remarkable, and related, events. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations committee comprised Read More
U.N. Climate Report is Our Pearl Harbor Moment
The politics of division won’t work to fight a threat like global warming. Portland Press Herald editorial The events of the last two years show that Americans know how to choose up sides and fight each other. But if we had to, could we put aside our differences and fight together? We are about to Read More
Reject CMP Power Line because Hydro-Quebec Facilities Damage Ecosystem
Wintertime discharges from the company’s dam reservoirs are warming the Gulf of Maine, starving its fisheries and may be a key factor in the decline of Arctic sea ice. By Stephen M. Kasprzak, resident of Cape Porpoise Portland Press Herald op-ed CAPE PORPOISE — I am writing to ask the Maine Department of Environmental Protection Read More
