The Clean Energy Transition Institute ended last year on strong footing, thanks to our supporters who helped make 2021 a very successful year. We are now executing on an ambitious agenda focused on accelerating building and industrial emission decarbonization in the Northwest with several exciting projects in the works.
We kicked off the year by releasing the Operation 2030: Scaling Building Decarbonization in Washington State white paper. Nearly 150 participants attended a webinar during which building decarbonization veteran Poppy Storm of the 2050 Institute walked listeners through the paper’s key findings and answered questions. We have just posted a detailed Q & A addressing many of the questions that were brought up in the webinar. Throughout the year, we aim to work with key stakeholders and produce Issue Briefs to advance the steps needed to get Washington on track to hit its aggressive 2030 decarbonization target.
The Washington Department of Commerce released our 2021 analysis of the state’s industrial emissions this month. Working with SEI US, we broke down (download) the upstream, process, and downstream phases for the state’s top nine emitting industries; identified the dominant emission sources and data collection for each stage; and suggested other data-collection methods. We also drafted a case study on green cement.
In collaboration with the Washington BlueGreen Alliance, the University of Washington’s Carbon Leadership Forum, and SEI US, we are organizing a Clean Industrial Economy Summit for June 2022. Policymakers, labor leaders, industry representatives, and environmental advocates will be invited to develop a shared vision for a clean, robust, and equitable industrial economy. Four working groups will meet in advance of the summit to frame discussions about competitiveness, workforce development, energy supply, and measuring progress.
On January 26, we gave a presentation to the University of Washington’s Environmental Law Society on the status of regional decarbonization efforts. The next day we met with the Stoel Rives Climate Change Working Group to discuss how to achieve Washington’s ambitious emission targets and the possibility of establishing an interconnected electricity grid across 11 Western states.
Natural climate solutions (NCS) are becoming an increasingly important decarbonization strategy, particularly for achieving net-zero emissions targets. NCS involve enhancing soil, grasslands, and wetlands to increase carbon storage or avoid greenhouse gas emissions. Conservation, restoration, reforestation, and improved land and marine management are all examples of NCS. Seth Zuckerman, Executive Director of the Northwest Natural Resource Group, describes one such NCS—shifting to longer timber logging rotations to sequester more carbon—in a blog that we re-post with permission.
We are thrilled to welcome several new and returning members to the CETI Team. Ruby Moore-Bloom joined the staff as a Researcher at the start of the year. Ruby received her bachelor's degree in anthropology and Middle Eastern studies from Brown University in 2017 and speaks Spanish and Arabic. She spent the three years prior to joining us living in Jordan teaching history at King’s Academy.
Our new Research Fellow, Mariah Caballero, is providing research and analysis for our Equitable Rural Building Decarbonization project. Mariah graduated from Vassar College with degrees in biology and geography; worked for the Center for Disease Control and the Environmental Protection Agency; is a doctoral student in Vanderbilt University’s Community Research and Action program; and serves as a Research and Development intern for Sandia National Laboratories.
Claire Buysse is a Research Consultant focused on the equitable development of a clean energy workforce in the Northwest. She has a master’s degree in atmospheric sciences from the University of Washington, where she studied urban air quality and climate change, and a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the College of Saint Benedict.
Our expanded research team joins Ben Hagen, our Development and Digital Communications Coordinator, as well as our retainer contractors, Poppy Storm, who is overseeing Operation 2030; Brendan McLaughlin, who is providing communications and marketing support; Jessica Plumb, a filmmaker investigating the clean energy transition in rural communities through our Claiming Power project; Jeremy Hargreaves, our decarbonization pathways modeling consultant; Nicole Chevalier, our development advisor; Caleb Smith, our web design consultant; and Jessica Adair, our accountant.
I sincerely thank all our donors who really stepped up in 2021. We began the year with 68 individual donors and ended with 104, who collectively gave $266,000 (compared to $88,000 in 2020). We deeply appreciate the Stolte Family Foundation’s general operating grant of $150,000 and contributions from the Sustainable Path and Vandeventer Family foundations, which both donated $10,000.
We look forward to honoring this support, which enabled us to invest in our team, by providing high-quality work throughout 2022 to accelerate deep decarbonization in the Northwest.
