Appalachian Carbon Partnership Launched

As our friends at the Rural Blog have reported, the Appalachian Carbon Partnership has launched a resource to pair individuals, families, companies or organizations with landowners who are practicing sustainable management techniques to store carbon on their forest land. ACP is a joint project between MACED (KY), Rural Action (OH) and Appalachian Sustainable Development (VA). According to the Partnership website, 90% of forestland in the region is privately owned with less than five percent under any sort of management plan. Appalachian forests are under tremendous development pressures, with forest- land being converted to roads, suburban development and mines at the average rate of one square mile per week. Because these forests are among the most diverse on the planet, and provide significant ecosystem services like clean water and habitat locally, as well as carbon sequestration and rich biodiversity globally, this conversion rate is particularly alarming. Through the Partnership, people or organizations that are interested in lowering their carbon footprints can retire Appalachian Forest Offsets. When the offsets are retired, the money goes directly to the family forest owners who have made long-term commitments to practice sustainable forest management. Depending on the location of the land, forest owners will work with one of the three partner organizations. Ultimately, MACED serves as the official aggregator for the carbon offsets. The Partnership hopes to simplify the process for connecting family forest owners to the carbon markets, allowing revenues to support the long-term protection of the region's significant forest resources. About Kristin TraczKristin...

Education and Jobs are the Key to Reducing Poverty

A recent New York Times Op-Ed made a plea for policy makers to implement policies and programs that we know work to reduce poverty. “‘To make a difference, we have to do things that actually work,’ said Gordon Berlin, the president of MDRC, a research organization that pioneered the use of randomized trials to evaluate poverty-fighting strategies.” “The two most important interventions seem to be education and jobs. Schooling programs pay off from early childhood all the way through community college. And jobs programs lift entire families.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/opinion/25kristof.html?th&emc;=th This seems so simple, but despite reams of good data that support investments in education, starting with early childhood education and care and going up through workforce development and jobs programs, we fail to make needed commitments in these areas. MACED did some work to try to determine key problems and potential solutions to challenges around Child Care in Appalchian Kentucky, particularly the difficulty providers face in making ends meet in a low-income market. The potential payoffs to investments in child care are substantial, but in already distressed areas, the resources will have to come from improved policies and increased public investment. We are beginning to unpack the workforce development basket and offer some thoughts in our recent report Investing in Kentucky’s Working Families: A Path to Shared Prosperity in the Commonwealth. Plans to strengthen education and workforce development systems will be essential to building new economic opportunities in Central Appalachia. We look forward to hearing more from folks in the...

KY Home Performance Program Unveiled

Kentucky officials capitalized on the captive audience gathered at last week’s 2010 Midwest Regional Energy Star Conference in Lexington to announce the unveiling of the KY Home Performance program. The statewide program will serve as a resource for homeowners interested in lowering energy bills, by providing access to a comprehensive home energy audit, a list of Building Performance Institute-certified contractors, and where possible tax credits and rebates supported by the federal Department of Energy’s Home Performance with Energy Star program. According to the KY Home Performance program, the first 1,000 homes participating in the program can qualify for a $350 rebate towards a whole-house energy audit once the program is fully underway in July 2010. The audits must be performed by a BPI-certified Building Analyst to qualify for the program’s incentives. Unlike the Kentucky Energy Efficient Appliance program, whose rebates become available April 22, the KHP takes a whole house view of energy efficiency—looking for opportunities to reduce energy use and improve efficiency by replacing windows, adding insulation and sealing air leaks, and if necessary, updating furnaces or boilers providing a complete energy assessment and efficiency plan. In some cases, homeowners may choose to install renewable energy systems like solar panels or solar hot water heaters. Participating in this program is likely to maximize the federal and state tax incentives available for making such improvements. Using the results of the Home Performance program implemented in other states, program staff expects that a typical homeowner can save 20% or more...

Broadband Internet – Reaching Central Appalachian Rural Communities?...

There has been a lot of discussion about increasing access in rural American communities to broadband internet recently both by the federal government and by a household-known tech company — Google. Geographical challenges of land topography are one barrier to access in rural mountain towns. Another is that sparse, low-density populations mean the lines for internet access have to travel farther to reach people. Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, commonly known as the "stimulus package,"$7.2 billion was allocated for the purpose of expanding broadband internet access to unserved and underserved communities. Some of the money, through USDA's Rural Broadband Program, is reserved specifically for rural communities. Another grant round for the money is set to close tomorrow. You can read more about it here. Google announced in February of this year that it would begin offering high-speed internet in a few "test" rural communities. The showcase network will offer extremely fast broadband access through the use of fiber optic cables. Google hopes that the program will benefit rural communities and encourage investment in higher-speed internet throughout the country. The announcements about where the test communities are should be posted in the next few weeks, as community applications are due tomorrow – March 26th. Technology has long offered both challenges and opportunities related to economic growth in rural areas. Many hope that better internet service will help drive job creation and connect rural areas to better services, such as enhanced medical service access through the use of telemedicine....

Census: What the New Count Will Mean for Appalachia in the 21st Century...

It’s Census time! People have received their forms, 20% have returned them already and the official Census date of April 1 is fast approaching. The Census is vitally important to our democracy as it determines political representation and federal funding for programs large and small. But data geeks are worried about what new census procedures will mean for rural communities. Some of us who participated in last week’s Appalachian Studies meetings talked about other efforts to measure progress in the region, but we all share some concern about census changes. The more detailed information that public and private agencies use to establish need for more specified programs like housing rehabilitation, weatherization, food supports and public transportation will be collected from now on by the American Community Survey on an annual basis. Sounds great! Yearly data on all these important, if minute, factoids. Not so much for small rural communities. For these communities 3-year averages or, in the case of really small locales, 5-year averages will replace the decennial data point. This sounds nice. We won’t have to wait ten years between data sets. But it means there will be a lag in the mesaures and that the numbers will always contain 3-5 years of history. Moreover, small sample areas will suffer from reliability problems that may make some of the data useless (if too few complete the surveys–the error margins are too large for the data to be useful). Why should we care? Those working on transitioning Appalachia to...

Spending Money to Save Money: Investing in Energy Efficiency

Our colleagues at the Kentucky Sustainable Energy Alliance have highlighted the findings of a recent report by the Consumer Federation of America, showing how energy efficiency can save families–in Kentucky and elsewhere–money through investing in home retrofits. The lead author of the report, Mark Cooper, estimates that Kentuckians investing in efficiency measures could enjoy a net savings of $60 a year on natural gas bills. The full story is available here. About Kristin TraczKristin Tracz served MACED’s Research and Policy team from 2009-2012 working on clean energy policy, energy efficiency programs and the Appalachian Transition Initiative. She joined MACED after finishing her Master of Environmental Management degree at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. She now lives and works in Washington,...

FCC’s National Broadband Plan

Previously we covered a new national effort called Dial-Up Rocks, which asked people to sign a petition for the creation of a National Broadband Plan by the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC recently announced its National Broadband Plan to bring broadband Internet connections more homes and businesses in the United States. Mandated by the 2009 stimulus legislation, the plan outlines policy recommendations to increase the portion of people with high-speed Internet connections from 65 percent to 90 percent over the next decade, while increasing the connection speeds of homes with such service. A proposal to create a free wireless network for lower-income users to access the Internet is included. The plan recommends the following six goals over the next decade. Goal No. 1: At least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and actual upload speeds of at least 50 megabits per second. Goal No. 2: The United States should lead the world in mobile innovation, with the fastest and most extensive wireless networks of any nation. Goal No. 3: Every American should have affordable access to robust broadband service, and the means and skills to subscribe if they so choose. Goal No. 4: Every American community should have affordable access to at least 1 gigabit per second broadband service to anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals and government buildings. Goal No. 5: To ensure the safety of the American people, every first responder should have access...

Federal Reports Examining Mountaintop Mining in Central Appalachia Issued...

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued two reports examining mountaintop mining in Central Appalachia over the last few months. GAO is an independent, nonpartisan agency that provides information to Congress about how the federal government spends taxpayer dollars. GAO aims improve the performance and ensure the accountability of the federal government. Report 1: "Characteristics of Active and Reclaimed Surface Mine Sites in Kentucky and West Virginia" (December 9th, 2009) The report stated that "there is limited public access to information on the size, location, and life span of (mountaintop surface mining) operations, or on how the land can be expected to look afterward.” The report also found: -Post-mine land use in Kentucky was most commonly for fish & wildlife purposes, while in West Virginia it was for forestland. -Kentucky and West Virginia have collectively approved more than 2,000 fills totaling at least 4.9 billion cubic yards of excess spoil in them. Report 2: "Financial Assurances for, and Long-Term Oversight of, Mines with Valley Fills in Four Appalachian States" (February 16th, 2010) The purpose of the study was to determine whether or not regulatory agencies that are supposed to ensure that Central Appalachian coal mining companies fulfill financial expectations outlined in the Surface Mining Reclamation and Control Act (SMCRA) are effective. Under SMCRA, mine operators must provide financial assurances to ensure that previous mine sites can be reclaimed and the impact on streams mitigated. The report found: – Reforestation efforts at some reclaimed surface coal mine sites needed improvement;...