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Bye bye, community compost program budget. Hello, delays in curbside organic waste collection.
For the past 30 years, New York City has funded community-based programs that spread the gospel of compost. What started as a few education and outreach sites at the city’s botanical gardens has grown into a vast network of more than 200 neighborhood food scrap drop-off locations where devoted New Yorkers enthusiastically deliver bags of rotting waste each week. Today, the programs employ 115 people and divert more than 8.3 million pounds of organic waste from landfills each year.
Now, with the stroke of Mayor Eric Adams’s pen, they will likely have to shut down.
Adams eliminated all funding for community composting, totalling $15 million over the next four years, in a round of budget cuts announced last week that are meant to offset the rising cost of aid to migrant asylum seekers. This comes in spite of the fact that the city’s publicly run — and much more expensive — curbside composting program is still not fully functional more than a decade in.
“It feels very dire right now,” Christine Datz-Romero, the co-founder and executive director of one of the oldest community compost groups, the Lower East Side Ecology Center, told me.
Adams’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Few services have escaped the strain caused by the flood of asylum-seekers fleeing poverty, violence, authoritarian governments, and climate change. In September, Adams asked all city agencies to prepare to cut their annual budgets by at least 5% to address a projected $7 billion fiscal shortfall. The plan released last week shows the Department of Education losing about $1 billion over the next two years, which threatens the city’s free preschool program and will eliminate hundreds of non-classroom positions. Cuts to library budgets will force many locations to reduce their hours.
Community composting organizations knew budget cuts were coming. They were already bracing for a decline in funding because of the city’s plans to scale up the Department of Sanitation’s curbside organic waste collection program, which picks up food scraps right at people’s doorsteps, similar to recycling.
“We built all the support for it,” Justin Green, the executive director of Big Reuse, told me. “Now that the city is rolling out curbside, to be cut without warning is pretty galling.” Even that rollout is no longer assured — a planned expansion to Staten Island and the Bronx will now be delayed until next October. Originally budgeted for around $24 million a year, the curbside program saw its budget slashed by $4.8 million between now and 2025.
Curbside composting has been a holy grail for New York mayors since Michael Bloomberg, but has long remained mired in the bureaucratic swamps. Former Mayor Bill DeBlasio managed to get a voluntary program off the ground in 2013, but it was criticized for poor management and only serving wealthier neighborhoods, and participation was notoriously low. In 2020, the service fell victim to the pandemic.
On the campaign trail in 2021, Adams vowed to bring curbside collection back as a way to cut emissions and solve the city’s rat problem, and in February announced plans to relaunch voluntary curbside pickup in every borough. (For now it’s available in Brooklyn and Queens, plus parts of Manhattan and the Bronx.) The city council then went a step further, passing an ambitious zero-waste package in June that will make food waste separation mandatory as curbside collection grows.
Organic waste is the city’s third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after buildings and transportation, producing about 20% of New York’s total climate pollution. Composting doesn’t fully eliminate food waste emissions, but it has the potential to reduce them by up to 84%, according to a recent study.
It’s unclear how much real composting the curbside program will do. Currently, most of the organics picked up by the sanitation department go to wastewater treatment facilities in New Jersey and Brooklyn, where the scraps are mixed with sewage and put through an anaerobic digester. The process breaks down the solid material and separates out methane gas, which is then injected into gas pipelines and carried into people’s homes. Or at least, that’s the idea — a few weeks ago, Gothamist reported that the system was undergoing maintenance and the gas was being burned off on site.
Datz-Romero hopes the city will eventually invest in real utility-scale composting facilities. It’s a chicken and egg problem — the wastewater treatment facility is already there and has capacity to manage the waste, and the city can’t justify spending millions on its own site until there’s robust public participation in food waste separation.
“What do you create first, the infrastructure or the need for infrastructure?” Datz-Romero said. During the DeBlasio administration, the city was shipping organic waste to private processing facilities. It did build one large composting facility on Staten Island, but that has limited capacity.
Low participation is one reason community composters say they still have a crucial outreach role to play, even as curbside pickup expands. They are in communities every day talking to people about food waste, teaching them about composting, and bringing tangible benefits like soil restoration to their parks and street trees.
“People can actually engage with that, and they can also understand on a whole other level why separating food scraps out is so important,” said Datz-Romero. “Even if composting is mandatory tomorrow, people are not going to wake up and say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s what I always wanted to do — separate my banana peels.’”
Green and Datz-Romero said they will have to lay off the staff that run their food scrap pick-up sites and outreach and education programs. Though they do get some funding from foundations, Green said that without the support of the city, those other sources could dry up.
The coalition of community composting groups started a petition urging the mayor and city council to reverse the decision. At time of publishing, it had more than 20,000 signatures.
Community composting might not be making a significant dent in carbon emissions, Green told me. But it has helped people feel empowered to do something about climate change.
“People are hungry for things that they can do together as a community. This is one step that they could do to be like, ‘Okay, I’m taking my compost to the farmers market, and I can volunteer to apply the compost to street trees in my neighborhood.’ I think that was valuable. When people are feeling so much hopelessness around climate, it gives them something active to do.”
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And more of this week’s top policy news around renewables.
1. Trump’s Big Promise – Our nation’s incoming president is now saying he’ll ban all wind projects on Day 1, an expansion of his previous promise to stop only offshore wind.
2. The Big Nuclear Lawsuit – Texas and Utah are suing to kill the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s authority to license small modular reactors.
3. Biden’s parting words – The Biden administration has finished its long-awaited guidance for the IRA’s tech-neutral electricity credit (which barely changed) and hydrogen production credit.
A conversation with J. Timmons Roberts, executive director of Brown University’s Climate Social Science Network
This week’s interview is with Brown University professor J. Timmons Roberts. Those of you familiar with the fight over offshore wind may not know Roberts by name, but you’re definitely familiar with his work: He and his students have spearheaded some of the most impactful research conducted on anti-offshore wind opposition networks. This work is a must-read for anyone who wants to best understand how the anti-renewables movement functions and why it may be difficult to stop it from winning out.
So with Trump 2.0 on the verge of banning offshore wind outright, I decided to ask Roberts what he thinks developers should be paying attention to at this moment. The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Is the anti-renewables movement a political force the country needs to reckon with?
Absolutely. In my opinion it’s been unfortunate for the environmental groups, the wind development, the government officials, climate scientists – they’ve been unwilling to engage directly with those groups. They want to keep a very positive message talking about the great things that come with wind and solar. And they’ve really left the field open as a result.
I think that as these claims sit there unrefuted and naive people – I don’t mean naive in a negative sense but people who don’t know much about this issue – are only hearing the negative spin about renewables. It’s a big problem.
When you say renewables developers aren’t interacting here – are you telling me the wind industry is just letting these people run roughshod?
I’ve seen no direct refutation in those anti-wind Facebook groups, and there’s very few environmentalists or others. People are quite afraid to go in there.
But even just generally. This vast network you’ve tracked – have you seen a similar kind of counter mobilization on the part of those who want to build these wind farms offshore?
There’s some mobilization. There’s something called the New England for Offshore Wind coalition. There’s some university programs. There’s some other oceanographic groups, things like that.
My observation is that they’re mostly staff organizations and they’re very cautious. They’re trying to work as a coalition. And they’re going as slow as their most cautious member.
As someone who has researched these networks, what are you watching for in the coming year? Under the first year of Trump 2.0?
Yeah I mean, channeling my optimistic and Midwestern dad, my thought is that there may be an overstepping by the Trump administration and by some of these activists. The lack of viable alternative pathways forward and almost anti-climate approaches these groups are now a part of can backfire for them. Folks may say, why would I want to be supportive of your group if you’re basically undermining everything I believe in?
What do you think developers should know about the research you have done into these networks?
I think it's important for deciding bodies and the public, the media and so on, to know who they’re hearing when they hear voices at a public hearing or in a congressional field hearing. Who are the people representing? Whose voice are they advancing?
It’s important for these actors that want to advance action on climate change and renewables to know what strategies and the tactics are being used and also know about the connections.
One of the things you pointed out in your research is that, yes, there are dark money groups involved in this movement and there are outside figures involved, but a lot of this sometimes is just one person posts something to the internet and then another person posts something to the internet.
Does that make things harder when it comes to addressing the anti-renewables movement?
Absolutely. Social media’s really been devastating for developing science and informed, rational public policymaking. It’s so easy to create a conspiracy and false information and very slanted, partial information to shoot holes at something as big as getting us off of fossil fuels.
Our position has developed as we understand that indeed these are not just astro-turf groups created by some far away corporation but there are legitimate concerns – like fishing, where most of it is based on certainty – and then there are these sensationalized claims that drive fears. That fear is real. And it’s unfortunate.
Anything else you’d really like to tell our readers?
I didn’t really choose this topic. I feel like it really got me. It was me and four students sitting in my conference room down the hall and I said, have you heard about this group that just started here in Rhode Island that’s making these claims we should investigate? And students were super excited about it and have really been the leaders.
Kettle offers parametric insurance and says that it can cover just about any home — as long as the owner can afford the premium.
Los Angeles is on fire, and it’s possible that much of the city could burn to the ground. This would be a disaster for California’s already wobbly home insurance market and the residents who rely on it. Kettle Insurance, a fintech startup focused on wildfire insurance for Californians, thinks that it can offer a better solution.
The company, founded in 2020, has thousands of customers across California, and L.A. County is its largest market. These huge fires will, in some sense, “be a good test, not just for the industry, but for the Kettle model,” Brian Espie, the company’s chief underwriting officer, told me. What it’s offering is known as “parametric” insurance and reinsurance (essentially insurance for the insurers themselves.) While traditional insurance claims can take years to fully resolve — as some victims of the devastating 2018 Camp Fire know all too well — Kettle gives policyholders 60 days to submit a notice of loss, after which the company has 15 days to validate the claim and issue payment. There is no deductible.
As Espie explained, Kettle’s AI-powered risk assessment model is able to make more accurate and granular calculations, taking into account forward-looking, climate change-fueled challenges such as out-of-the-norm weather events, which couldn’t be predicted by looking at past weather patterns alone (e.g. wildfires in January, when historically L.A. is wet). Traditionally, California insurers have only been able to rely upon historical datasets to set their premiums, though that rule changed last year and never applied to parametric insurers in the first place.
“We’ve got about 70 different inputs from global satellite data and real estate ground level datasets that are combining to predict wildfire ignition and spread, and then also structural vulnerability,” Espie told me. “In total, we’re pulling from about 130 terabytes of data and then simulating millions of fires — so using technology that, frankly, wouldn’t have been possible 10 or maybe five years ago, because either the data didn’t exist, or it just wasn’t computationally possible to run a model like we are today.”
As of writing, it’s estimated that more than 2,000 structures have burned in Los Angeles. Whenever a fire encroaches on a parcel of Kettle-insured land, the owner immediately qualifies for a payout. Unlike most other parametric insurance plans, which pay a predetermined amount based on metrics such as the water level during a flood or the temperature during a heat wave regardless of damages, Kettle does require policyholders to submit damage estimates. The company told me that’s usually pretty simple: If a house burns, it’s almost certain that the losses will be equivalent to or exceed the policy limit, which can be up to $10 million. While the company can always audit a property to prevent insurance fraud, there are no claims adjusters or other third parties involved, thus expediting the process and eliminating much of the back-and-forth wrangling residents often go through with their insurance companies.
So how can Kettle afford to do all this while other insurers are exiting the California market altogether or pulling back in fire-prone regions? “We like to say that we can put a price on anything with our model,” Espie told me. “But I will say there are parts of the state that our model sees as burning every 10 to 15 years, and premiums may be just practically too expensive for insurance in those areas.” Kettle could also be an option for homeowners whose existing insurance comes with a very high wildfire deductible, Espie explained, as buying Kettle’s no-deductible plan in addition to their regular plan could actually save them money were a fire to occur.
But just because an area has traditionally been considered risky doesn’t mean that Kettle’s premiums will necessarily be exorbitant. The company’s CEO, Isaac Espinoza, told me that Kettle’s advanced modeling allows it to drill down on the risk to specific properties rather than just general regions. “We view ourselves as ensuring the uninsurable,” Espinoza said. “Other insurers just blanket say, we don’t want to touch it. We don’t touch anything in the area. We might say, ’Hey, that’s not too bad.’”
Espie told me that the wildly destructive fires in 2017 and 2018 “gave people a wake up call that maybe some of the traditional catastrophe models out there just weren’t keeping up with science and natural hazards in the face of climate change.” He thinks these latest blazes could represent a similar turning point for the industry. “This provides an opportunity for us to prove out that models built with AI and machine learning like ours can be more predictive of wildfire risk in the changing climate, where we’re getting 100 mile per hour winds in January.”