The Carbon Offset You Can Actually See – Sustainable Finger Lakes Climate Fund

Another group of people that we've helped, there's a lot of Korean refugees from Myanmar in the Ithaca area. And most of them are living in mobile homes. And a big vulnerability about living in a mobile home is summer heat Mm, they're notorious for heating up and being untenable. So having uh these uh efficient air conditioning air pumps, air source heat pumps in their home has made a world of difference for comfort and especially keeping little babies or elderly comfortable. I just feel good about all the folks that have been helped. Uh from donations from offsets that as are as low as five or ten dollars. to uh ten thousand dollars.

Our offsetters are a real range of people from just folks offsetting family reunions and honeymoons and vacations, conference travel, business travel, campus travel Welcome to the Ithaca Local Economy Lab podcast. My name is Dea. I'm your host and neighbor, and today we're here with Gay Nicholson. who is the president of Sustainable Finger Lakes, and we're talking about the Finger Lakes Climate Fund, which is a local program. that is turning $25 donations into home energy upgrades through the magic of carbon offsets. Gay, thank you so much for joining us.

It's a pleasure to be here with you all. I appreciate it. Well, before we get into how the fund actually works, and I wanna dig into a lot of the really interesting things around it, like how you got started and stuff. But I want to start with the basics because some of our listeners might not be very familiar with with the idea of carbon credits or carbon offsets and what they actually are. Can you explain those a little bit for us? Well, the concept is that when it comes to your unavoidable emissions from your life's activities, mostly travel or your building energy.

We've always been emphasizing and helping people reduce their use of fossil fuel and reduce and shrink their carbon footprint, but you can't do it all at once. We all have budget restrictions, so it's about being on the path towards doing that. And meanwhile, try to offset some of those unavoidable emissions. So the idea is that m you fly to Los Angeles from here and That's about a ton of CO two emissions for your seat on that plane. And uh you could go in and make a donation of twenty five dollars to cover that ton's offset and then we turn around and give the money back out in a grant to help pay for work being done on somebody's home that's going to keep that ton from ever being emitted.

Because now the place is insulated or it's got a more efficient equipment in it, that kind of thing. That's fantastic. Yeah, I know for a while Oh, not recently I haven't seen it, but for a long time you used to be able when you bought a plane ticket, you used to be able to add some amount onto it as a carbon offset. So how is your program different from that? Well, those are probably the larger national international outfits set off for carbon offsets that have made a deal with the carriers. We're too small for that. Mm-hmm. But we have had a partnership with the Tompkins Airport over the years in which we uh for a while there we had uh kind of before the internet was You know, so on your phone.

We had two kiosks there that people could go and calculate the offset for the trip they were about to get on. And uh they had signage and around the place. Explaining it. But we've not been and that's one of the barriers to getting people to offset is for them to remember. Right. Unless they're prompted, right? Uh but In that case, we've just have people who've made it a habit now. It's sort of like learning to put your recycling out on the date that they're going to come pick it up It's just a an another habit that a somebody concerned with about the client, the sustainability, the need to live more sustainably is just likely to to adopt.

You started this program in 2010, is that correct? Well, 2009 we did a feasibility study in 2010. worked in climate science um for most of my career for coming this and so I'm always looking for ways to, you know make an impact as an individual because it's it's a little bit disheartening, frankly, when you read about what what coal plants do or what data centers do, for instance. When you feel like as an individual you don't have a lot of agency in this But for a long time I I have been very, shall we say, skeptical about carbon offsets. And uh we just had a huge study come out, I guess, in October of 2025 that basically said that most of the programs around carbon offsets were essentially ineffective and the money that was being spent on them was impossible to track.

It's not that they didn't do good work. They may well have done good work, but we just have no way of really tracking that. So what made you in 2009, which is quite early, I think, you know, as far as this whole carbon offset thing. What what what made you decide that you wanted to do this locally? I think that f seems like a really forward thinking kind of an idea. Well, uh we started sustain we we we used to be called sustainable Tompkins and we changed our name four years ago to sustainable finger legs So we'd already been doing a good five years worth of a lot of programming on a lot of different aspects of sustainability, engaging a lot of people here.

And meanwhile we're hearing about carbon offsets in the news and uh through our through the networks of conversation that you end up getting plugged into when you're looking at these kinds of issues. And uh The thing that bothered me was the lack of transparency about where is the money going. I remember I can't remember the name of the firm now, but it's like They sure have a lot of staff and they all seem to be on nice salaries. So how much of my money is going to help build a wind urban down in Pennsylvania? out of all of that. So I also was very aware of New York's programs through NYCERTA for low income families.

I had worked part time for a little while as the Southern Terror Energy Smart Communities Coordinator. And so I was very aware of the subsidies that are there for lower-income families are not enough. Still as a stretch for them to invest in insulation and air sealing. And this is back in the days before there were cold climate heat pumps up here So initially our work was really about insulating and air sealing our elderly housing stock and replacing, oh gosh, in some cases fifty year old gas boilers in the city of Ithaca that were just not exactly efficient.

So I was aware of that need and in a way w what I was thinking of that this was designed for was more the gap financing beyond what the state can offer you and subsidies and what your loan is going to be to pay for all the work you need done on your house. And we want to make sure that that loan payment ends up being less than the reduction in your utility bill from having made your house more efficient. So you're not behind. Right. If if you're a long income person, you can't afford that, even if it's great that my carbon footprint's lower now, but You know, now it's a struggle to make ends meet.

So that's where, you know, two, three thousand dollars comes in very nicely to bring down or even in some cases eliminate the loan that you have to take out to fix up your house. So that was why we ended up focusing more on the housing sector rather than the forestry sector or wind turbine projects because of the need and the fact that we could make this very transparent. And I worked hard to keep the overhead low. rather than, you know, a bunch of people on nice salaries, which you know, that's not me. All right. you know, and a big marketing budget, uh, to get it out there.

And then having to hire third party verifiers, uh, which you know you need for legitimacy. I've just been piggybacking on New York's Nicerta programs You know, we're using their software that they have to use to analyze the energy savings of each measure each, you know, installation that a a contractor will do. And of New York hires other third party companies to come and inspect the work of our certified installers across the state, these spot checks. And of course Nicerta is examining those work scopes that come in because NICERTA is handing out you know, maybe as much as ten thousand dollars in a subsidy on a thirty thousand dollar project.

Uh so they they're scrutinizing the l the legitimacy of the particular measure being recommended and um rejecting it sometimes like windows rarely get paid for because the return on investment is like decades long. Um, but insulation is a wonderful investment, you know, and a quick payback. So yes, we'll help you pay to insulate an air seal. I mean, just doing that on an older home, we were consistently seeing like thirty percent reductions in energy consumption. From insulating and air sealing your home. That's so significant, yeah. It really is.

It's money well spent. So uh you know, uh th I think it's great where there have been tree planting measures, especially in um lower income countries. But I were we were all quickly seeing, hey guys, you have to go out and actually water them and put some deer fences around them because you can't claim a mature forest level of offsets. if most of it died two weeks after you planted it. And a lot of that was going on in terms of kinda not people who don't know a thing about forestry out there, you know, brokering these projects and not not paying for the follow up.

You know, because most of the money's going out in the salaries for the marketing department, it seemed to me. Gosh. Yeah. Well there are there it With regard to forestry, we'll just do a little a little bit of detours. There are there are a couple of programs now that are more locally focused that are focused on I think it's called the the American Forestry uh service or uh it's not the American Forestry Service, but anyway, they have a I'll I'll find it, I'll put it up on the show notes. But it's they actually focus on training people how to do better management of their forests.

Which is great because, you know, obviously that's over disappointing. Yeah. I don't know, you know, good fifteen years, right? Uh at least, yeah. That these horror stories are coming out of it's all dead, there's nothing there. And um, you know, another arena that I would um like to have our ability to participate it would be the soil carbon offsetting to help pay this maybe a little bit of a sidebar, but over in the soil carbon arena and soil can really hold a lot of carbon And it needs to. We need more organic matter. We have all these depleted soils from industrial agriculture.

And so when some of that land comes out of industrial and wants to go organic, uh you know, it's a long time before you can be certified organic and pay you get paid more for your crop. So what about subsidizing those that are transitioning from industrial ag to organic ag? and help pay for all the amendments that they're going to have to do to build up the soil and carbon and organic matter and get better permeability and lots of other benefits from uh going organic with soil But uh we wrote uh almost a million dollar USDA grant back in the Trump the first Trump uh administration working with count three counties, soil and water and cooperative extension folks to do project to develop some metrics around our kinds of soils and our kinds of climate because all that data is from the Great Plains.

Uh and nobody's done you know, and it's like, Cornell, why haven't you already done this? Right, in terms of our soil, our climate, that uh how much can we expect in terms of soil carbon additions from these particular going to silvo pasture? you know, other methodologies. Uh we didn't win it because I think because it was about carbon offsets and the climate, Trump won. So But I don't know if someday we can get back to that or s or Cornell could do the research and we could just piggyback on it, which would be preferable. But I'd love to help some of our beginning farmers. get paid because otherwise they're not a lot of the organic farmers don't get any of the USDG USDA federal tax dollar grants.

It's all designed for the big, big, you know, bulk commodity growers and the small organic growers don't really get any help compared to Europe, where they're heavily subsidized. So I'm hoping that politically we can change that equation at some point. Well, I think we've got a rising tide at least on our side, so There's you know and there's the reality as the soils get too poor to produce. Exactly. So I wanna I wanna bring it back to the carbon offsets and uh that you're doing with the Finger Lakes Climate Fund Fund. Tell me uh kind of walk me through how how it starts.

Like if if I'm a low income home is it first of all just for homeowners or is it for renters can Can renters participate as well. Landlords can participate for sure. Landlords can, okay. Okay. Although most of our grants have gone to homeowners, low income homeowners, but it's not the homeowner that applies. It's the installer who em applies on behalf of the homeowner. Oh okay. So uh New York has certified installers that Nicerta will work with in terms of passing along those subsidies designed for low-income people. And uh and I already had met many of them 'cause I'd worked part-time for a little while is in the Energy Smart Communities program So it wasn't that uh difficult for me to try to conceptualize how this would work.

Um I had the w we had I was lucky, I had a board member at the time looking to buy a carbon calculator and Everybody wanted ten thousand dollars for one and he said, you know, I think I can make one for two thousand dollars and he did. So we we were able to have our own homegrown approach to it And then I reached out to uh the local installers, especially Snug Planet. They've now closed up shop and been absorbed into Helco, but back then they were very active. and especially kindly working with low income clients. Many of the other installers out there don't want to be bothered with the paperwork to go and get the grant money available to help low income people.

It's it is a lot of paperwork. And they they they skip it. So there's really only a few installers that are have built that into their business model that this is part of what their team knows how to do efficiently. So Sun Planet was our main partner initially. And and I'd known Don Harry for a while already. And then Halco Energy. And so I briefed them on what we were doing and asked them to, as they're working with these lower income clients, notice when somebody seems to be stalling out not responding to the, you know, contract offer for the j work that needs to be done, you know, struggling to maybe pay for it.

So then to suggest to those people that they could apply to the Fingernicks Climate Fund for a offset grant that's based strictly on the number of tons of carbon dioxide that'll be kept out of the atmosphere over the lifespan of the improvements that are being made. So rather than I didn't have the bandwidth 'cause I had a lot of other programs I was running to advertise it to uh low to moderate income people, um, the cutoff that the state uses, so we used it too, is eighty percent of the median income for your household size in your county. It varies by county.

Uh we could just then kind of piggyback on what they're already doing and how they're already calculating what is the energy j reduction we anticipate from blowing in, you know, eight inches of cellulose insulation. All of that has been well worked out over the years. And we don't have to run the calculations ourselves We just have them send us the paperwork they use for that NICERTA application and then I put it into our spreadsheet and figure out based on the fuel type that's being displaced whether they had a gas boiler or fuel furnace or a coal stove or wood stove and then knowing the average lifespan of a heat pump water heater or a heat pump or a high efficiency gas stove back in the f uh bat uh gas furnace rather back in the day before heat pumps were around, uh then I can turn that into pounds of CO two that will be kept out of the air over that ten years or fifteen years or twenty year lifespan of the improvement that was made.

So you just add up all those improvements and the lifespans and You get your your tons of CO2 at $25 a ton and there you have your offset grant for the applicant. We had started out at $20 a ton, now we've known all along that m the true cost of emitting a ton of CO two from your lifestyle is uh used to be like a hundred and then it was a hundred and twenty five. I think the EPA was estimating more closer to a hundred and fifty. The further along we get into climate warming, the more expensive, the more extreme the damage that we're doing. So therefore the cost of an offset should go up.

But my goal has always been to make this a community endeavor and to keep it affordable for even students to be able to offset a car fit back home, for example. you know, cost them five dollars that they could afford. But if it was fifty dollars to offset their you know, most people couldn't afford that on on their budget. You know, and here the goal is really about This is a local carbon offset fund, although we have now given grants in fifteen counties of the Finger Lakes region. We are the Finger Lakes Climate Fund. Most of them have been Tompkins County because this is where we grew out of.

But the important piece of this is that by having it be local, you can see where your offset dollar went. We make um stories and videos of our awardees and These are not charity cases in our minds. These are climate heroes. These are the people who are getting their houses fixed up And reducing their CO two emissions. And uh we treat them as, you know, the celebrities they oughta be by sharing their stories. Right. And at the same time then celebrate our installer partners. who are doing this work and filing the paperwork on their behalf and making the cycle complete.

And when we have surveyed the people who offset with us Really helping others locally in their own community edges out climate. They're still very concerned about climate, and that's why they're offsetting their missions, but they love the fact that in doing that, they're helping people in their own community improve their quality of life, their comfort, healthier indoor air quality for many people. You know, lots of benefits are accruing beyond reducing CO two emissions. And those ongoing savings in the reduced utility bills means lower income people can spend have money to spend on, you know, more money to spend on essentials like food or uh medical care.

Uh so it yeah, and with with the way that the the energy bills have been so high for folks these d recently, I mean just skyrocketing I I just uh Wednesday hosted a webinar on future proofing the grid part one with uh a speaker from NISO, New York Independent System Operator, the nonprofit that runs our grid. And then the uh executive director of Pulp, the Public Utility Law Project. They're the ones that help low-income consumers and have been doing that since 1981 in terms of dealing with the utilities, the investor-owned utilities. And uh we also just held a press conference in front of the Lansing Town Hall about the data center proposed there on Wednesday night.

Uh we had a petition that has over 20,000 signatures. asking that it not be permitted. And, you know, Lai spoke for a few minutes about the grid and how all the three major components of the grid of generation and transmission and then distribution, all three are in trouble because of short-term investor thinking. by the utilities and uh how their business models are skewed to not necessarily be in favor of their customers and uh generation problems where Twenty-nine percent of the fossil fuel generating plants in New York are over fifty years old and ten percent are over seventy years old.

So they're prone to breakage and outage Hard to get parts for more generation powers going off the grid than coming on the grid. So that's where this data center issue comes in of like New uh Tomkins County's uh electric consumption is 87 megawatts and they want to add uh before it was 400 megawatts, now they're ratcheting it back to 300 megawatts, but you can never trust what they w might hope to get away with. But the reality is is that's is not there. It's not there on the grid. It's not available even though they claim it is. I'd rather listen to NISO than uh, you know, terrible In terms of then a f then someone with a profit incentive.

Yes. To get it wrong. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But Going back to the climate fund, uh I think it has worked really well that we've been able to keep our overhead down by piggybacking on what the state does, what the contractors are already doing. We're just one more little component there and Then can feed in grants from our maximum grant right now is three thousand dollars. Um, love to be able to have even more in the fund that we could, you know, raise that because now that we're putting in Heat pumps, the the work scopes for low-income homes are much more expensive now.

Before when we started out, we saw a lot of ten thousand dollar projects and then our two thousand dollars was a yeah, hey, twenty percent. We're helping out in a good way. Now they're like thirty and thirty five thousand dollar projects if you're gonna do the building envelope and the heating system, heating and cooling system. So now as It's like, whew, can we patch together enough subsidy to make this work? And one of the things that has been a terrible result is that we've had this policy paralysis at the state level that even though we passed the CLCPA in twenty nineteen, the uh the climate law in twenty nineteen, we have not dealt effectively with the planning and implementation to really facilitate the addition of new clean energy onto the grid um and coordinate that with all the electrification going on and the switch to electric vehicles.

So now it's one of the problems on the grid is we've been too slow to add capacity while people are uh embracing getting into especially heat pumps that are so much more efficient and uh some are cooling as well, you know. Uh and uh it still makes a lot of sense for people to do that if they're getting off fuel oil or propane, but a gas has been so cheap that uh because of the rise in the delivery fees by our you investor owned utilities. That that price on our electric bills has gone up a hundred and ten percent since twenty twenty. You know, that hurts That hurts.

Uh we also are seeing major complaints and and litigation around what seems to be software and hardware problems and going to the smart meters and in their billing procedures at NISEG I mean some really obviously ludicrous, wrongful billing that then you can't speak to a human being about getting it corrected and tens of thousands of people were had their power disconnected in twenty twenty five And I wonder how many of those were from false billing that they could get a human being to respond to. Or to come out and and check the meter with someone who is going to be honest about what's wrong. with that meter.

And I know enough about, you know, energy bills that I can see that and these are from people who don't even heat with electricity. And and what was their two hundred dollar The month bill is now two thousand dollars month. You know, it yeah, clearly wrong because they haven't added any it's not like they added heat lamps everywhere or any kind of load. And these are oftentimes maybe elderly people who are they're not buying new equipment. So there is so much wrong with the system and that's why part of the reason for How many of us are adamant about keeping data centers off of our grid for right now, if not forever, because we are not prepared to be adding that kind of load when we're already facing reliability issues.

And their NISO is predicting brownouts and blackouts. Downstate, they could easily this summer experience some of that. And then you know add in the the Just where we're at right now. So without any new data like no new data centers, just what we've got right now, we're already expecting brownouts and blackouts this summer. Precisely Because we don't have the capacity. So we don't have the capacity. Yes. And and there's a a lot of in the uh webinar that we hosted, uh Kevin was saying had slides on how many uh clean energy projects have been approved for interconnection, but like only one is under construction because of other factors like inflation and supply chain problems. where they're not getting getting going on building it and we'll and then of course offshore wind, having Trump intervene and spend our tax dollars to pay them to stop building our offshore wind farms and instead go spend money on fossil gas production.

Very it's not very logical. I think our our energy policy at the moment is really not science based and it's not logic based at all. It's very profit-based. It's very profit-based. And and political lobbying and leaning on people to l to let it happen. Uh we're very concerned about Governor Hokel taking so much in the way of campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, crypto, AI interests, uh at a time when the people of New York are vulnerable to great disruption. Um on to we already have to deal with the weather changes and these extreme storms knocking things out and that costs money to to get things back up.

And we haven't been tough enough. on the utilities about their tree maintenance programs and uh you know their own planning for capacity for distribution. because their business models evidently are often focused on they get a lot of money when they have to build new capital improvements and they get to charge us for them rather than it coming out of their share of the budget. come it comes straight to us. And so now they're way behind on that. And it's kind of essential that they catch up because it's all breaking and and vulnerable, which You know, is it s fair that they are still guaranteed a ten percent return on their shares when they haven't done the right maintenance and due diligence for a really long time?

They've been pulling the money out. It's going to Iberdrola from Spain, bought NYSEG and RG<unk>E, and the major shareholders there are BlackRock. in the UAE. So the money, the profits being funneled to those entities like that, and low-income people can't even begin to pay those electric bills And now gas has gone up considerably because of the Iran war and the uh diminishment of supply. So price has gone up. So i even anybody that's heating with gas or all of us, all the picker plants are gas. So Anytime it's a really hot day, those have to come online and they're more expensive now.

So your supply side of the beal will also be going up besides the distribution side, which is the utilities So uh this this is definitely away from the carbon credit com conversation, but that's okay because it's all intertwined, it's all connected. And you know, I mean that's how we get here. We're not really going off on tangents, we're just exploring different aspects of of the problem, really. Right. And you know, we feel a lot of guilt really for We've been helping low-income people get onto heat pumps, not only with the Finger Lakes Climate Fund, but I've also w won two large uh NICERTA grants and one uh large federal grant to get heat comps into low income homes with extra nice fat subsidies um from the federal and state uh funds.

And uh we've uh recently helped a lot of people that in our mobile homes. We had one project was all mobile home based. The other was based for low income renters. You know, helping people who never get any help, you know, get in and and meanwhile also doing all the envelope work so that, you know, they're more efficient homes and, you know, snugged up. Keep that cold air in the summer inside and not have it leaking out But now they're faced with these ridiculous electric bills that uh I could not believe the PSC approved those rate cases. We were aghast And I think there's been enough of an outcry now that maybe the PSC will be receiving some different marching orders.

In fact, one of the slides in our webinar on Wednesday uh from the pulp director was about the uh huge uh rate increase another rate increase they've asked for and they were given this temporary like one percent rate increase. Uh meanwhile, because of the scrutiny that finally We're all complaining enough and our representatives at the state and federal levels are complaining enough that there's scrutiny going on of just where is this money going? And I believe that was also in some of the proposed bills that in terms of much more oversight, these rake there are like five rake cases pending that are about scrutinizing closely. these capital projects.

You're gonna have to give us a lot more detail and we're gonna be analyzing it ourselves. We're not just gonna rubber stamp, you know, and say yes anymore because you're taking too much money. And too much profit out of the stream, frankly. Yeah. So I I was in graduate school a million years ago and one of the things that we did was we went in and we looked at public grants that were given to to organizations and these organizations had to yeah demonstrate how they were using the money, that they were being effective using the money, you know, they had to give us like data and s and and show us that that it was something that uh was actually worth the public's money.

Yes. And where has this accountability gone to? People like I Irene Weiser, who's now on our county legislature, and Brian Eden, they've been involved in these rape cases for a long time. And They said part of the problem is that the PSE has also lost a lot of the staff that held the knowledge. Now what is the PSE? I'm sorry. New York State Public Service Commission. The staff is the Department of Public Service and these are seven people appointed by the Governor to make decisions on rape cases. And then the utilities show up with an army of lawyers and engineers and make it all as complicated as possible, I think, to understand.

And if nobody can deconstruct and analyze his complexity uh at the state level, then there's a tendency to just nod your head because, hey, what are we gonna do? We need NISAG to do his job. You know, we how do we say no You know, to these utilities that we've allowed to have a monopoly without very much leverage over them. I in that monopoly situation. We oughta have a lot more control and leverage The New York Power Authority, NIPA, is a publicly owned entity. They uh manage the hydro power out of Niagara. And I think other things. And a lot of people have been calling for moving a lot more under NIPA's control rather than investor owned utilities.

Especially private hedge phones that don't have any sense of responsibility to anybody out there, it seems. Right. Yeah. Meanwhile the people who are actually using the electricity, using the energy and paying for it are suffering. What was interesting in the webinar was Kevin was talking about what they call behind the meter solar. That like at my house I have 13 kilowatts on uh my house rooftop and the and the woodshed. And so I'm pretty insulated from these rate increases because I'm producing so much uh pretty much covering my annual c my annual usage.

And I didn't realize how much we've grown that behind the meter solar to the fact that we're shaving off the peaks. in these hot summer days considerably and helping everybody else save money in you know in terms of not having to buy that really high priced peaker plant, gas peaker plant, uh electricity. So the more we can do that, get more people having their own solar, the better. Because this is especially as it keeps getting hotter and we have more heat waves and we have more peak load days, uh, you know, when the grid goes down And uh in the heat wave, you better have some charged up fans of your own and charged up lights and be ready until they can bring it back online.

And uh one of the other graphs in the webinar was how many times how m how much more often they're having to do demand response measures of call up like the steel factory in Auburn and, you know, turn yourself off because Everything is about to go down, you know, and overload and they're having to do that more and more and more, which means fragility. Very easily bumped off And then our hospitals, our schools, our homes, our local businesses. This is why I don't want to see rich billionaires putting in data centers. Um on our grid using our water uh and making noise, incredible noise, uh for all the people around them not to mention Toxicity in the case of TerraWolf, the toxicity of the dust cell stir up on at that old coal plant site.

It's just the noise pollution Oh the noise. Yeah, we're we're doing some sound studies and uh we know it will be all everybody on the other side of the lake and everybody nearby. And this infrasound from the misters and the uh and the equipment just travels quite long distances, that low infrasound, and is proven to be harmful to people's health Uh and then your property value goes down because if you need to leave because you have migraines and nausea all the time, well who wants to buy your house It's so unfair, just so that more money can go to a billionaire.

And for the fact that that data center is most likely making AI slop or uh possibly replacing human labor, reducing the need for We're using jobs for humans. Well, and I I think too, this is just a little bit of an aside, but uh China demonstrated last year already that they can run AIs uh with like a cell phone. You don't need You needed the big data centers. Maybe there was an argument when you had to crunch through all of the learning stuff, right? But once you've actually got that in place and you're just running it. You can do it on your home desktop.

It's not it's truly not necessary to have these big data centers. And so then one wonders Well, you know, n we can get into the whole like surveillance state and collecting new data and all of that sort of thing. But I mean that's that's the that's what what we're looking at actually for those kinds of things. And that's why it's concerning that one of their clients is Core 42, which is UAE um UAE surveillance software. Right. Why why should we be harmed to support that? Right. Harmed locally. So I do so we did have the um The New York State budget was just passed within the last couple of weeks after several significant delays.

I think it was quite late. Everything had to be done in like the last ten days of session. Right. And there was and there was a some pretty significant changes to the climate aspect of that budget. So d is any of that affecting the climate fund and the grants that you're able to give? Or How are you how are you in Probably W. It probably will. But we've already been affected for the last two years. We have not had as many applicants applications from the contractors because the subsidies that are really the main part that helps a low income family get this work done have disappeared.

Or the rules have changed. Two or three years ago when I was running the heat pump pilots for mobile homes and rentals. They had changed everything so much that the back up what used to you be two weeks to get an approval for a project so you could go forward was four months, six months, you know, so people were just having to drop out and go find some other solution than waiting to be able to do a heat pump. And then um last summer Uh all of a sudden there was no money left in the Empower program to help with anything. And yet we were putting money over in a a nuclear speculation program statewide.

We had money for that But we didn't have money any money left to help low income people in New York. One of our we had an application which we approved for a young couple to add solar, rooftop solar. And they were supposed to get a ten thousand dollar credit from the New York Sun program. I think that's the name of the program And then our subsidy would help them be able to pay for that. And just as they were about to, you know, do the paperwork, it would the fund was empty and no more money Uh wait until next year. And so what's being put in this year, I know some money got set aside.

I know of at least a hundred and fifty million that is in the budget that's supposed to come to the empower program But we could use a lot more than that, you know. We don't want to run out again in six months. You know, it's a matter of prioritizing um programs and there's there's a lot of naivete at the political level, I think. Having done worked with the contractors and the low income homeowners and renters, et cetera, over all these years. I'm aware of what the barriers are to actually getting things done and implemented. And uh it's not just money.

There's you know, timelines and the rest of that as well. And so one of the things that passed in this omnibus data center bill, which was this mishmash of the four bills that we were working on on data centers is this idea that we would let the data center developers off the hook by having them have some kind of community fun that's supposed to compensate people for the harms that they're doing. And uh that it would be like grants to help low income people fix up their houses and reduce their energy needs. And it's like Did any of you ever go and like consult with anybody about how expensive that route would be and what kind of oversight you would need to make sure the money wasn't misspent and and pulled off by middlemen all along the stream here.

You know, and then that comfortably lets the data center, Oh, I did my community fund thing that you wanted me to do. It's not my fault that, you know, hardly anything happened and the money's gone You know, it and it also is doesn't seem fair to me that everybody else who is, you know, at eighty-one percent of median income just has to pay the bill of the data center on the grid. You know, it's not a fair s And it and it probably wouldn't hardly work. So I just wish that there was, you know, more careful work being done. So hard for us as individuals to take responsibility for these kinds of things.

But it truly matters. And I think one of the lessons of the last year and a half or so, at least that I hope people are taking away is that phone calls and letters to government officials and to and to companies actually work. They really truly do. And you know, we got the new thing. It makes a difference fast. We did that in five months, our the statewide coalition that I'm part of as a result of this. Unheard of to be able to take something to pass the assembly and the Senate in just five months and not be knocked over into the next, you know, twenty twenty seven session.

And it's because data centers are a political issue now across this entire nation. And it's bipartisan. You know, people are realizing, hey, I'm on the short end of the deck, you know, of having this monster come in And we can see in data clusters like in Virginia where, whoa, the bills really go up in the surrounding area from You know, even a modest increase in demand c when top supply is tight, you know. I mean, just look at what happened with uh gasoline prices. with Iran Moore, how quickly those went up. And that was before we ran out of gas.

Exactly. Exactly. And I think like You know, we're at the national level, I know our our representative here in Tompkins County, uh, Josh Riley, has kind of made it his signature uh issue uh of the the price of electricity. Yes. And I think other representatives across New York State could be enticed to do the same, whether they are Republican or Democrat. if they if enough people call and say. You know, because the f the federal government subsidizing these these kind of programs is really important. I mean the state can do a lot Uh but, you know, honestly, this it's nothing compared to what the federal government can do and has done in the past.

And so I think it's important for us to to really push for those kinds of things. And it what is it? It's a it's a letter, it's an email, it's a it's a phone call. Write a letter to the editor. It literally takes like two minutes. out of your day to do it. Right, right. And if you do it, call after hours and leave a message. Like if you don't want to talk to somebody. That's my secret trick. Right, right. We we we did a lot of Phone banking and uh calling all of all these groups that I'm the as I said, there's a statewide coalition on stopping data centers And it's because of everybody responding to people like me putting out emails of here's the phone numbers, this is what you gotta say this time and next week we're gonna say this and push on this and people were doing that And it got the attention of the elected officials and it uh passed and it uh resulted in more and more people becoming co sponsors of the Senate and the Assembly Bills.

And then passing quite well. A lot of Republicans did not vote, but they're a minority in both of the houses uh at the state legislature. But I do hope that we could do some educating of the people that live at their districts could uh be making more phone calls to like Senator O'Mara to the southw west of us who voted against the omnibus bill. You know, for people there's a lot of low income counties, you know, in his district. So Why isn't he defending them is uh is the question they should be asking him. A lot of people, but especially people who are are lower income. are so overwhelmed with just life in general.

Struggling and it's just really hard to keep on top of general life these days. And I'm a politics nerd, so I follow politics all over the place and I know like state assembly, state house assembly, all of these different sort of government entities, your your county entity. But a lot of people don't think about those. It's not part of their their d everyday sort of consciousness. But those are the people that can actually make a difference in your in your immediate community too, at the state level, at the local level, county level. I can give you example of our our local coalition, finger leg strong, that's fighting the terror wolf proposal.

And uh no data center FLX dot com is our uh website that uh some young women created and we put together a petition thinking it would just kind of circulate locally asking the Lansing Planning Board to uh reject the application and not give a permit for Terra Wolf. And it went viral and went across the entire state and into Ontario and into New Jersey and all over the place But there are over 17,000 signatures from people who live in New York and it's distributed across the state with of course a big concentration around the Cuga Lake watershed. the the impacted zone.

And of course it's just a petition. It's not like it's some, you know, careful census uh approach. It's you know, it went viral. But it speaks to how many people have data centers on their minds, know it's something they don't want. So even these people from across the state who don't live in the Cugu watershed sign this petition out of concern, you know, to s to say no. And yes, there are some local people who think somehow those tax dollars that Lansing will get will solve all their problems who don't seem to care what other problems are being created for other people or the fact that everyone in zone C of uh the grid is going to see an increase in the supply price of their electric bill that I suspect will be more than any a reduction in their town taxes that they would see.

But I I do think a clear majority is opposed to data centers. And we just need to get that message across politically Food and Water Watch has been a wonderful partner in this because they create the infrastructure. So all the uh you know, not not everybody has to create the hotline call to Governor Hokel. asking her to sign the day to send a moratorium bill. All that number, there's a little spiel telling you what's this about, what what am I supposed to say? You know, and then you get connected to the governor's office and you say, you know, please sign the bill.

I'm from so and so uh such and such a place and as a New Yorker I want you to sign the bill. So that makes it nice and easy. They also have a petition that you can sign. So that she gets a petition from people statewide and there's an organizational sign-on letter. So businesses and organizations can sign on to a letter asking her to to sign that bill sooner rather than later So that all the ones that are in the queue can't get their permits and then therefore escape the moratorium, which I'm sure they're all trying to do. She has until December to sign it, but we'd like to see her sign it this summer.

Yeah. Why wait, really? Why wait? And and we also don't want to see any chapter amendments that are harmful to the interests of the people of New York. You know, any amendments that get done need to be making it better for the people of New York, not better for the data centers. Right. Not smoothing their way, but focused on protecting us because we're already suffering. Absolutely. And I I want to emphasize too that this opposition to data centers, a lot of it may be emotional. For people just they don't like it. But there is hard science around this.

So Harvard has completed a study looking at data centers water usage and electric usage across the country. and they found that there that they were definitely not what they said that they were, that they were very very negative actually. So there are studies. Although the data centers are very good at obfuscating their their data uh at their actual usage. We see it even with this uh data center here at Cuga Lake where they have different companies that are sort of layered in so they make they they sort of shift Right. Yeah, they're nested LLCs, exactly.

So they they shift usage and they sort of shift blame and oh it's not us, it's this person to that person or they split it off. So it it's really, really, really hard to tell what the water usage is or the electric usage or whatever it is. Even though as a claim how incredibly wonderfully transparent they have been. What the sales shot that they did repeatedly in Lansing last fall, now that the application came before the Lansing Planning Board, things are different in this application and it was deemed incomplete by the Lansing Planning Board.

The person that they sent seemed very unfamiliar with the material, couldn't answer questions. All the maps seemed to be different, you know, and didn't line up. It was a surprisingly um you know unprofessional job uh in terms of bringing in their application. And so they've been told to go and fix all these errors and come back. And then we'll take a look. And w what we're pushing our Lansing Planning Board to do is to do a full uh environmental impact study. on all aspects of it and pay for the sound studies and the water studies and uh the toxic uh metals that are in the soil there and affecting the Cuga wildlife management area.

That's right adjacent to it. You know, the old Bell Station posed nuclear power plant site from the seventies. Lots of birds there that'll be that'll just leave if that data center is there, making that kind of noise and light all night long. So it needs to be thoroughly studied And uh Terra Wolf would have to pay for those studies and they get to choose who does the study, but if we can show If any of their studies are inadequate or biased, then they'll they could be told to go and do it properly, which will cost them more. But uh we've been trying to help our Lansing Planning Board members.

You know, I've sent them links to webinars on noise studies so they can learn more about noise and be familiar, conversant at least, with the specific issues. so that they are smart evaluators of what's put in front of them. And um I'm hoping that we will also, you know, have the town go get the independent help as needed to help them rather than the planning board members trying to evaluate some report paid for by Terra Wolf that you find an independent environmental attorney or whoever, sound expert. uh to to take a look and uh poke holes in their sampling methods and some of the stuff is just done with modeling.

Here's what we think might happen. Here's our model. Don't look at too closely at our parameters and algorithms in our model, but it'll be fine. Right. Instead of reality. So modeling is like statistics with with fancy graphics behind it, basically. Yeah. And and how's the public supposed to know? Yeah. If they say the bomb won't reach across the lake. You know, because they they make those kinds of claims and then Talk about how wonderful and and concerned they are and community-minded. You know, they really have the PR rhetoric down. Yeah Uh um it was very effective on on some of the Lansing residents who see it as a source of tax revenue that would maybe make their personal taxes. property taxes go down and it would affect I guess the school and town taxes.

But again, they're not looking at who's harmed, how the neighbors' property values will go down and everybody's utility bills go up You know, I I would hope that they wouldn't be so short sighted or selfish in their perspective as they learn more about the impacts and not just out of ideology get on a bandwagon that is not the right one to be on As a community member. One of the themes that keeps coming up through all of this is the idea of transparency. And whether we're talking about carbon credits or carbon uh carbon offsets or uh Data centers usage or or energy usage in in a broader sense, the idea of transparency and how these things are used and and expanded or contracted as or really comes down to what happens at the local level, what happens with people.

And so with with the climate fund, which you're running with the the idea of climate credits We know that it works because there are actual human beings in our community that now have a 30% reduction in their energy usage in their home. And we can go and knock on their door, talk to them at the gym or at the library or whatever. And we see and we feel that change for them. Yeah. And that's so powerful. And to know that because I gave twenty five dollars or fifty dollars or a hundred dollars to this fund, that I was a part of helping this this family function a little bit better in our in our community.

We share those stories and make those little videos. One of my favorite stories, and this is a few years back, a single mom. who bought this 1850 farmhouse out in Hector. And, you know, any of us who know the old buildings know how leaky they are. They're a little drafty She had a little small farm operation going, but she also was had a little daycare for an in-home business. Well, in the winter time Yeah, they were it was so cold and grafty they were having to shut off the second floor and all cluster into the living room on a a wood stove And you know, she couldn't do a day, you know, legally do a daycare under those conditions, so that lost her her her business.

So It was so great when uh she got in touch with Helco and they really insulated that basement and attic and installed heat pumps and made this made her be able to open her business again And her her children also to be in a comfortable, safe home. It just was a godsend to her. And there's been a lot of our awardees. are single parents, um and uh four elderly retired on modest social security incomes. And uh some first time home buyers and lots of young families, grad students, you know, that have started their families And it's just been wonderful to help every single one of them.

Another woman that comes to mind she has cerebral palsy and um Uh and she needs her with her autoimmune disease she needs a constant temperature. So that's why a he uh a air source heat pump was like the right thing. to be able to keep her always in her range. And, you know, her mom had recently died and she was now all alone in the world. Um and, you know, how you gonna pay those electric bills or take care of yourself? So it was just wonderful to see how happy she was. in the interview video that we did later, to have all that sorted out for her by caring people and to not have it be a financial burden.

You know, and so uh another group of people that we've helped, there's a lot of Karen refugees from Myanmar in the Ithaca area and most of them are living in mobile homes And we all know mobile homes are we think of them as affordable, but they are like 70% more costly per square foot. to heat than uh a regular house because there's poorly insulated thin walls, they just um are expensive to live in. So we have helped a number of those families get more comfortable. And a big vulnerability about living in a mobile home is summer heat. And they're notorious for heating up and being uh untenable.

So having uh these efficient air conditioning air pumps air air source heat pumps in their home has made a world of difference for comfort and especially keeping little babies or elderly comfortable. I just feel good about all the folks that have been helped. Uh from donations from offset setters are as low as five or ten dollars to uh ten thousand dollars. Our offsetters are a real range of people from just folks offsetting uh family reunions and honeymoons and vacations, uh or conference travel, business travel, campus travel. But we also have a program called FLECA, Finger Lakes Enterprises for climate action that they can then be part of and receive a little bit of publicity from us, you know, as as uh people business is doing the right thing Colgate University has been a repeat member of that.

They were one of the first campuses to completely offset all of their campus emissions. And they have done that all around the world and they added us in a few years ago and they learned about us through their students. And so we do projects in Madison County using some their offset dollars. Then we also have um AC, American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. I always have to like, what do the three E's stand for? And they Uh last year sent eighteen thousand dollars to catch up on their national organization's travel for several years and then did just Helco energy, one of our dearest friends and staller friends consistently do a five thousand dollar offset with us to offset some of their fleet. uh emissions.

Many of the business and then we local businesses like Sun Juneer Solar or Carol Bushberg Real Estate offset there. Yes, they get some publicity through us, but I think they also just love helping folks reduce their energy bills, reduce their carbon footprint, improve the health, the healthy indoor air quality and just comfort and well being that comes with not suffering from the heat or feeling chilly all the time. Which made me think of this one of the first immigrant families that we helped. Uh they were so excited by their first home in the United States.

And then they were like having to wear their coats inside the house in the winter time. It's like, oh, why didn't they tell us this when we bought it? So uh so, you know, Stug Planet did a bunch of insulation and then they were comfortable again and so happy. So happy. Yeah. So if if you're listening to this and you're a a student and you can donate, you can throw five or ten bucks towards something to help local community members and help the climate at the same time. Social justice and climate change is kind of a kind of a double whammy hit there for you.

Go to the website if you're a business. This is also a great opportunity for you to show how much you care about the community in a very effective and and sustainable way. And if you are a low income person who is looking to get a little bit of relief from your energy bills perhaps Go ahead and reach out to Helco. Also, a lot of people are going to travel somewhere this summer, right? Yeah. So absolutely. If you're thinking of a trip, be sure to make that part of making your arrangements as I always offset uh going to visit my family or travelling somewhere on an airplane or by car.

And when I'm the host and they have to come and see me, I offset the uh the travel of people flying to see me. Either way, it's a way to participate in this uh community based uh local um carbon offset fund. I remember that you had asked before about uh scalability of uh a local carbon offset program like ours. And I have probably briefed over thirty organizations from around the Country. Oh fantastic. Yeah, that of the Hearabout Us. I think we might be the oldest local carbon offset fund now in in the country The other ones that we discovered in our feasibility study seem to have folded up since then.

Uh we've been the persistent ones that keep going. So I've I've uh uh educated and briefed a lot of different groups on how to do this and answered all their questions. I know of two that actually went on and did it because A lot of people like the idea but they're not connected to the state's programs or they don't know any contractors. So they've got homework to do to bring all this together and online and get a carbon calculator uh and and get it rolling. But up down in the lower Hudson Valley and out in Durango, Colorado, I know those two went forward. not sure about Naperville, Illinois if they ever got it going.

Uh but just the Finger Lakes Climate Fund. So we're not really gonna be trying to go statewide or anything like that. I'd rather see people do something that's at the local regional level. Because that's where the you can have the relationships that make this work. The trust the trust relationships. Took a while to have the trust between the nonprofits uh pushing on climate with the installers because they've they're businesses and then with the state. So you you have to Earn that trust and maintain that trust. And that takes a little while and some commitment.

But I do think all of this is scalable. And we did it on a shoestring and really just It's kind of relationship based in terms of the speed at which we were able to get up and going with it. Right, right. Yeah. So if you're if you're listening and you're out in Oklahoma or Colorado or Arizona And you think this sounds like a great idea or Texas, it's definitely doable. As Gay was saying, it's very relationship based, it's very trust based and You're willing to give people some support and some some hints as to how to do it so they can reach out to Sustainable Finger Lakes and and get some ideas about how to start get started because we definitely need this kind of local involvement uh because people just really respond to it and and it's the way that we can move forward because we just can't people have lost faith and trust in the larger organizations.

They've just shown time and time again that they they can't they can't do it at the local level anymore. They're t they're too profit oriented for the most part, I think. I think so too. And that's what's nice about We're a modest little small nonprofit and keeping the overhead low so that almost all of it goes straight into somebody to pay a contractor to fix your house. Right. So you don't have all this middlemen taking little tiny cuts here and there that adds up and and takes away everything that you're trying to build. Yeah, but because of lack of transparency, we don't know.

Right. Well, gosh, thank you so much, Gay. This has been such an amazing conversation, really wide-ranging. I so appreciate all of your wisdom and and energy and insight into all of this. Thank you so much for sharing your stories with us. Um thank you again for thinking of us and bringing us onto your show. We appreciate it. And if folks want to get in touch, info at sustainablefingerlakes. org. We have a website that you can look up and Instagram and Facebook and all of that usual stuff that you can see what we do and get plugged in. And it's fingerlexclimatefund. org if you want to go make an offset Which you definitely want to go make an offset.

Definitely. Practically Real Enterprises LLC, and brought to life by an amazing team, including technical advisor Jake Gribschaw, Associate Producer Stacey Cornelius, Content Strategist Sonia Simone, and Creative Advisor Erin O'Shaughnessy. Yen Ospina is our artist, and the music is by Carsie Blanton. Until next time, take good care.