Audubon taps into people’s love of birds to protect them from climate change.
Baltimore Oriole, a species vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Photo: Shari McCollough/Audubon Photography Awards
Audubon works with federal decision makers both in the nation’s capital and at home in their backyards to achieve common sense solutions to climate change. We engage with our 1.7 million members and the 45 million Americans who consider themselves birders to make complex environmental impacts tangible.
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Natural solutions rely on living things that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, like forests, prairies, sea grass, and soil. We call these features carbon sinks because they remove more emissions from the atmosphere than they emit. The restoration of these places, as well as diversified agricultural practices like soil sequestration and responsible livestock and land management, can draw down emissions while simultaneously improving critical bird habitat.
Providing farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners with incentives to capture and store greenhouse gases will help rural economies, fight climate change, and improve habitat for birds.
This legislative session, the Evergreen State can help lead the way in using its own natural resources to capture and store harmful emissions
Saving birds on America's working lands.
While we currently rely on fossil fuels to generate the majority of our electricity, there are a number of options that do not emit greenhouse gases as they operate, like wind turbines, photovoltaic solar panels, and geothermal energy. Replacing fossil fuel-burning power plants with cleaner alternatives, including energy storage, is essential to reducing emissions.
State and federal standards that require electricity suppliers to provide 100% clean electricity can drive this change. Audubon supports the expansion of renewable energy that avoids, minimizes, and mitigates impacts to birds and their habitat.
As 2019 comes to a close, Congress has one more chance to pass legislation that will help fight climate change.
Initiatives in a proposed infrastructure framework would mitigate the effects of climate change for both birds and people.
Raptors and wind energy have a fraught history. Could these innovations allow them to co-exist?
Examples of economy-wide solutions include placing a fee on carbon emissions, which would require businesses to pay for each metric ton of carbon emitted. With a price on carbon emissions, sources that continue to emit emissions would either pay for their impact or find a new way to do business that is less harmful to the climate. Revenues could be invested in clean energy innovation, returned to consumers, or put to any number of productive uses.
The Congressman from South Florida has introduced his own carbon tax, a political compromise that aims to reduce emissions on a national scale.
The Market Choice Act marks an important opportunity to advance the conversation on climate solutions.
The proposal, which was discussed at the White House last week, takes a conservative approach to climate action. But it runs into a problem central to all carbon taxes: deciding how to spend the raised funds.
Many of the solutions we will need to achieve a zero-carbon future have already been developed, but there are still gaps—for instance, in the wide deployment of energy storage—where technological innovation can further increase effectiveness or drive down costs. We must dedicate resources to institutions and researchers who are working to answer questions like how to make the electrical grid more secure and reliable, whether it is possible to design more efficient electrical generation units, and whether it is possible to capture greenhouse gases from the air and permanently sequester them.
A slate of bipartisan bills proposed in Congress could go a long way to support energy storage research and development.
WASHINGTON — “This package presented a missed opportunity to make meaningful bi-partisan progress in modernizing our energy system,&rdq
As Congress makes plans to recover from the COVID crisis, they must plan for the future by supporting legislation that saves and creates jobs, while also creating a cleaner and healthier world.
Speak out against the Yazoo Backwater Pumps which would drain 200,000 acres of crucial bird habitat.
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