Lighting the Way report cover page.

Progress Fueled by the NY-SUN Initiative

YONKERS, NY – August 5, 2014 — The Environment New York Research & Policy Center today released a new report: “Lighting the Way” showing strong solar growth across the nation including a 30%increase in New York in 2013. The report emphasizes that it is not availability of sunlight that makes states solar leaders, but the degree to which state and local governments have created effective public policy to help capture the virtually unlimited and pollution-free energy from the sun.

New York’s progress on solar has helped fuel a surge in availability of solar energy nationwide between 2011 and 2013. In 2013, solar capacity in New York grew from 175 MW to 250 MW.

“Solar energy is emerging as a go-to energy option here in New York and across the country,” said Heather Leibowitz, Director of Environment New York. “Thanks to the commitment of New York’s leaders, this pollution-free energy option is poised to play a major role in helping us meet New York’s goal of a 44% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030.”

Democratic Conference Leader, State Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins of Yonkers, said, “Let’s make New York number one for solar energy use. We may not be in the top ten states now, according to Environment New York’s report, but we are committed with our government partners to expand solar because using the sun to generate electricity makes sense and reduces greenhouse gases.”

Solar in the United States increased more than 120-fold in the last 10 years. In the first quarter of 2014, solar energy accounted for 74 percent of all the new electric generation capacity installed in the United States. Ten states with the most solar installed per/capita are driving 89% of the solar installed in the U.S, while, representing only 26 percent of the population and 20 percent of the electricity consumption.

And as the solar industry grows, the cost for installation decreases; making it more accessible. The price of installed solar systems fell 60 percent between the beginning of 2011 and the end of 2013.  Jobs in the solar industry are also growing rapidly. In 2013, there were more than 140,000 solar jobs in the U.S., including 5,000 in New York.

“I am cheered by the belief that our collective conscience is at a tipping point, and that folks are waking up to the fact that renewable energy is the path to a healthy future for our planet, and our existence. Solar, wind, water power will guide our way,” added Weschester County Board Legislator Catherine Parker. “I believe good news is upon us. New York State while an honorable mention today for its use of solar, has paved a way for New Yorkers to embrace solar, not as an alternative energy, something to be tossed into the mix like a cherry on an ice cream sundae, but as a renewable, dependable, affordable choice for running our businesses, our homes, our cars.  We have leaders who get this, who understand that solar power is not just for states like California, Arizona, and those that have warmer climates. Those of us who see what countries like Germany have done, know that we can get there too. It just takes persistence to keep banging the drum, and Environment New York is banging that drum today.”

Another major driver for solar energy is that it produces no pollution; including climate-altering carbon emissions.  According to the report, solar power produces 96 percent less global warming pollution than coal-fired power plants over its entire life-cycle and 91 percent less global warming pollution than natural gas-fired power plants.

“Environment New York’s report on solar states identifies and fosters an open forum for discussion of the smartest next steps that states can take now to capture the value and grow the market for solar power in a manner that protects ratepayers and strengthens the reliability of our grid while boosting clean energy jobs and the clean energy economy” said Tom Thompson of New York Solar Energy Society.

Several strong policies adopted by the top 10 solar states, like New York helped encourage homeowners and businesses to “go solar:”

•  9 states have strong net metering policies. In nearly all of the leading states, consumers are compensated at the full retail rate for the excess electricity they supply to the grid.
• 9 states have strong statewide interconnection policies. Good interconnection policies reduce the time and hassle required for individuals and companies to connect solar energy systems to the grid.
• All 10 states have renewable electricity standards that set minimum requirements for the share of a utility’s electricity that must come from renewable sources, and 8 of them have solar carve-outs that set specific targets for solar or other forms of clean, distributed electricity.
• 9 states allow for creative financing options such as third-party power purchase agreements, and 8 allow property assessed clean energy (PACE) financing.

Here in New York, solar progress is attributed to a number of programs; including; Governor Cuomo’s NY-Sun Initiative.

“New York officials deserve tremendous credit for recognizing the environmental and economic benefits of solar energy and taking action to make it a reality,” said Leibowitz. “As more people see the benefits of solar energy, we’re confident clean, limitless energy from the sun will be a growing part of New York’s plan to reduce pollution from power plants.”

“The Solarize Westchester team is proud to be part of New York State’s ambitious efforts to maximize the economic and environmental benefits from solar technology,” said Nina Orville from Solarize Westchester.

“Through the Solarize Westchester initiative, we are focused on driving down the non-hardware costs of solar installations to make Westchester County New York State’s leader in solar installations.  Our efforts include assisting Westchester municipalities to adopt solar-friendly permitting and zoning policies and also leading Solarize campaigns, aggregating demand for solar installations at reduced costs, in eight Westchester communities.  We anticipate that these campaigns will result in approximately 400 installations during these 20-week campaigns. We’re proud to have the support of our funder, NYSERDA, and to work to deliver great results in Westchester County that can be replicated elsewhere in New York State.”

Environment New York is a statewide, citizen-based environmental advocacy organization.  Our professional staff combines independent research, practical ideas, and tough-minded advocacy to overcome the opposition of powerful special interests and win real results for New York’s environment. As part of Environment America, we fight to protect our air, water, and open spaces here in New York, in state capitals across the country, and in Washington, D.C.

SOURCE: Environment New York = EnvironmentNewYork.org

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Google’s prototype driverless car, a converted Prius, undergoing testing. Photo by and courtesy of Steve Jurvetson.

Dear EarthTalk: What are the environmental implications of the so-called “driverless car” that Google and others are working on right now?                                  ­– April Jackman, Barre, MA

Just a decade ago most of us wouldn’t have dreamed we’d live to see driverless cars whisking people around, but things are changing fast and analysts now think they will be common by 2020 and account for the majority of cars on the road by 2040. And with Google’s recent unveiling of its latest prototype—complete with no pedals or steering wheel—the future is indeed closer than we ever imagined.

Proponents argue that driverless cars—also called “autonomous cars”—are inherently more sustainable than their manned counterparts. For one, they say, once they are widely available many of us will forego owning our own cars in favor of car-sharing, whereby the autonomous vehicle comes to you, charged and ready to go, as needed. Thus the result could be far fewer cars on the road than today. According to Steve Gutmann of the Seattle-based sustainability think tank Sightline Institute, such a car-sharing scenario would also obviate the need for many parking spaces. Today the typical private car spends upwards of 90 percent of its time parked. Once we have more driverless cars, we’ll need far fewer parking spaces, leading to less land being paved and reducing storm water runoff and heat island effects accordingly.

The networked brains of these vehicles will also reduce inefficient routes and decrease overall driving time, leading to better air quality and lower carbon emissions. Also, the increased safety of driverless vehicles—they obey speed limits, can sense people, bikes and other cars coming toward them, and accelerate and brake much more gradually than human drivers—will mean that the cars can be lighter and require far fewer resources in manufacturing, reducing their overall environmental impact even further.

On the flip side, the advent of driverless cars means that many of us now not able to drive because of age or physical handicaps will be able to use these cars to get around, potentially leading to an increase in the number of cars on the road. And Chandra Bhat of the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Texas points out that just because a car is driverless doesn’t mean we’ll want it to be smaller, lighter and more fuel efficient. He fears that driverless cars will engender a return to larger vehicles because people will want “more comfortable space” when they are free to stretch out, relax, read, videochat, text or even nap during their trips. He adds that driverless cars could lead to more urban sprawl as car commuting becomes more tolerable without the hassle of actually driving.

Bhat also wonders what will become of the public transit systems we’ve invested so heavily in if driverless cars offer the same advantages—using the time en route to do whatever one pleases—with the added benefit of privacy and route/timing flexibility.

Today four U.S. states—Nevada, Florida, California and Michigan—allow driverless cars on their public roads for the purpose of testing; several other states are considering similar allowances. Likewise, in 2013 the United Kingdom began allowing the testing of driverless cars on its public roadways. Besides Google, several leading automakers and other companies have developed their own prototypes. Car enthusiasts can expect to see such examples from the likes of Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Nissan, Toyota, Audi, Volvo, Tesla and others at auto shows over the next few years, and can look forward to getting “behind the wheel” of one within a decade. Whatever happens, it certainly is going to be quite a ride.

CONTACTS: Sightline Institute, www.sightline.org; Chandra Bhat, www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/bhat/home.html.

EarthTalk® is written and edited by Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss and is a registered trademark of E – The Environmental Magazine (www.emagazine.com). Send questions to: earthtalk@emagazine.com.

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Photo by and courtesy of John Pasden

The most strident proponents of “net neutrality” want the Federal Communications Commission to declare broadband a utility, so the government can ensure that everyone gets equal access to the best Internet service that today’s providers can offer.

Had they gotten this wish back in 1999, there is a good chance we would all get online today using state-of-the-art dial-up modems.

The FCC is trying to walk a fine line in its regulation of broadband. By a 3-2 vote earlier this month, it advanced a proposal that seems to be a reasonable attempt. The proposal would allow large traffic generators, like Netflix, to enter into deals with Internet service providers to ensure the fastest possible service, and thus underwrite the infrastructure that their service requires. At the same time, the proposal would prevent broadband vendors, like Comcast, from blocking or severely slowing traffic from competing websites that do not pay extra to use the fast lane. New Internet sites would reach consumers at whatever speeds consumers paid vendors to provide.

Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the FCC, has emphasized that the commission’s goal is “an open Internet” and has argued that the rules respect the principles of net neutrality, suggesting that the definition of the concept is not necessarily self-evident. Ajit Pai, the senior Republican on the commission and one of the two dissenters, said that all the members shared common ground in wanting to protect a free and open Internet despite the split vote, according to The New York Times. The dissenters argued that Congress, not the FCC, should establish policy for regulating Internet traffic.

In essence, then, the dispute comes down to what “free and open” means. As Seattle Times columnist Brier Dudley observed, those opposing the FCC’s proposed rules are disingenuous or naive if they claim that the Internet is currently neutral and free. “Since the rise of the commercial Internet,” he wrote, “it’s been a place where you pay more to get faster and better service, whether you are a consumer or a company on the other end of the pipe.”

Differentiating types of Internet traffic is actually necessary in order to provide a smooth user experience. Bandwidth is not infinite, and companies that provide broadband services not only can recognize that not all Internet traffic is created equal, they should. Data packets that carry your voice call or the next frame of your streaming high-definition video must arrive exactly when expected, or you will notice the difference. The packet carrying part of the homepage of your favorite news site – or an ad appearing on that homepage – is not so time-sensitive.

This sort of logic has already played out, to some degree. Netflix has made agreements with Verizon and Comcast to allow the service to bypass congestion at hubs connecting ISPs and transit providers, despite arguing that the FCC should ban such payments. Ars Technica reported that Netflix performance speeds on Comcast improved by 65 percent after the deal.

Federal regulation preventing broadband providers from sorting high-priority traffic from less urgent demands would be counterproductive for those of us who want the state of Internet connection technology to continue to improve. And it is neither unreasonable nor unfair to want companies that push the demand for higher speeds and more bandwidth to shoulder some of the costs involved in providing it.

This is not to say broadband providers should have no regulation whatsoever. In particular, the prohibition against blocking or disrupting competing vendors’ content is an essential consumer protection. Differentiating types of traffic is useful, but protection to make sure it isn’t discriminatory due to the traffic’s content is wise. While recognizing this, the FCC seems to be taking care not to clamp down on ISPs so severely that they are inhibited from investing in new or improved services.

The FCC’s proposal will draw a big pile of comments for the next few months, while it remains open for public reaction. A lot of those comments will be critical. Net-neutrality advocates have already called the proposed rules “a stake in the heart for Internet openness” and “an insult to those who care about preserving the open Internet.” Online and offline protests have sprung up, based on distrust for broadband providers or the idea that a “fast lane” must necessitate a “slow lane” that is substantially worse than what most users see now.

But perhaps the most telling sign, to an outside observer, indicating that the FCC’s proposal is a compromise is that it has already drawn criticism from both sides, not simply the most extreme defenders of net neutrality. Verizon issued a statement warning that subjecting broadband to strict regulation “would lead to years of legal and regulatory uncertainty and would jeopardize investment and innovation in broadband.” The FCC is caught in the middle of fight in which everyone claims to want the same thing: faster, better Internet.

There may well be room for improvements in the FCC’s proposed rules, but the proposal is still a good start. If we want vendors to keep investing in ever-faster and wider pipes, then the parties who do the most to fill those pipes must at least be allowed to help foot the bill.

Larry M. Elkin, CPA, CFP®, has provided personal financial and tax counseling to a sophisticated client base since 1986. After six years with Arthur Andersen, where he was a senior manager for personal financial planning and family wealth planning, he founded his own firm in Hastings on Hudson, N.Y., in 1992. That firm grew steadily and became the Palisades Hudson organization, which moved to Scarsdale, N.Y., in 2002. The firm expanded to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 2005 and to Atlanta in 2008. 

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As troubling as the news of a major Internet security hole was, however, more troubling still was the allegation that the U.S. government’s security apparatus knew about the breach and kept the information to itself. The obvious question is: Does “NSA” stand for the National Security Agency – or the National Surveillance Agency?

If initial reports that the NSA knew about Heartbleed for years are true, the agency has given us the answer.

Last week, Bloomberg reported that two people familiar with the matter claimed that the NSA knew about the Heartbleed flaw at least two years prior to its public exposure. The anonymous sources alleged that the agency decided to keep the bug secret in pursuit of national security interests.

National Security Council Spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden responded to the Bloomberg report with a strong denial. In a statement, she said, “Reports that NSA or any other part of the government were aware of the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability before April 2014 are wrong.” She also insisted that, had the intelligence community known about the bug, it would have disclosed that knowledge to the developers of OpenSSL, the widely used open-source Internet security protocol affected by Heartbleed. The NSA, too, issued a statement directly denying that it knew about the security flaw.

These denials would have been much easier to take at face value if they had come prior to Edward Snowden’s disclosures and the subsequent fallout in which evidence mounted that the NSA has significantly overstepped its bounds.

As Julian Sanchez, writing for The Guardian, recently observed, the “NSA’s two fundamental missions – one defensive, one offensive – are fundamentally incompatible, and… they can’t both be handled credibly by the same government agency.”

If the NSA did know about Heartbleed, the agency presumably could have used the flaw to obtain passwords and other basic data, Bloomberg said. Such a decision would have prioritized intelligence gathering – offense – above the defense of millions of innocent and nonhostile Internet users in America and the rest of the world. The fact that we place our digital security in the hands of an agency that spends much of its time cracking such security is worrying, whether or not NSA mishandled Heartbleed. The agency’s inherently conflicting mandates helped give the Bloomberg report its initial credibility.

You would think that our toughest enemies use a higher level of security than a site like Pinterest. But if it turns out the NSA did not call attention to this gaping hole in a security protocol used by countless people here and elsewhere, the agency clearly put its own data-gathering priorities ahead of the commercial safety of the industrialized world. If that is what happened, Americans need to know about it.

As best we can tell, no criminal groups seem to have discovered the flaw in time to massively exploit it. But that was good luck, not good governance. While we are busy changing our passwords, we should also keep a close eye on our government’s ongoing response. The intelligence community may truly not have known about Heartbleed before the rest of us, but it has given Americans ample reason to take claims of its innocence with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Larry M. Elkin, CPA, CFP®, has provided personal financial and tax counseling to a sophisticated client base since 1986. After six years with Arthur Andersen, where he was a senior manager for personal financial planning and family wealth planning, he founded his own firm in Hastings on Hudson, N.Y., in 1992. That firm grew steadily and became the Palisades Hudson organization, which moved to Scarsdale, N.Y., in 2002. The firm expanded to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 2005 and to Atlanta in 2008. 

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The co-author of "Sex at Dawn," Christopher Ryan explores the prehistoric roots of human sexuality.

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In this thoughtful talk, David Puttnam asks a big question about the media: Does it have a moral imperative to create informed citizens, or is it free to pursue profit by any means, just like any other business? His solution for balancing profit and responsibility is bold … and you might not agree. (Filmed at TEDxHousesofParliament.)

After a much-awarded career as a film producer, Lord David Puttnam now works at the intersection of education, media and policy. Full bio »

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SpyEye infected more than 1.4 million computers—many located in the U.S.—obtaining victims’ financial and personally identifiable information stored on those computers and using it to transfer money out of victims’ bank accounts and into accounts controlled by criminals.

Ultimately, though, Panin sold his malware online to the wrong customer—an undercover FBI employee. And after an investigation involving international law enforcement partners as well as private sector partners, a dangerous cyber threat was neutralized.

How the conspiracy operated. From 2009 to 2011, Panin conspired with others, including co-defendant Hamza Bendelladj (charged and extradited to the U.S. last year), to advertise and develop various versions of SpyEye in online criminal forums. One ad described the malware as a “bank Trojan with form grabbing possibility,” meaning it was designed to steal bank information from a web browser while a user was conducting online banking. Another ad said that the malware included a “cc grabber,” which scans stolen victim data for credit card information.

Panin sold the SpyEye malware to more than 150 “clients” who paid anywhere from $1,000 to $8,500 for various versions of it. Once in their hands, these cyber criminals used the malware for their own nefarious purposes—infecting victim computers and creating botnets (armies of hijacked computers) that collected large amounts of financial and personal information and sent it back to servers under the control of the criminals. They were then able to hack into bank accounts, withdraw stolen funds, create bogus credit cards, etc.

In February 2011, a search warrant allowed the FBI to seize a key SpyEye server located in Georgia. It was several months after that when the FBI bought SpyEye online from Panin—which turned out to be very incriminating because that particular version contained the full suite of features designed to steal confidential financial information, make fraudulent online banking transactions, install keystroke loggers, and initiate distributed denial of service (or DDoS) attacks from computers infected with malware.

Panin was arrested in July 2013 while he was flying through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

The investigation into the SpyEye malware is just one initiative worked under Operation Clean Slate, a broad public/private effort recently undertaken to eliminate the most significant botnets affecting U.S. interests by targeting the criminal coders who create them and other key individuals who provide their criminal services to anyone who’ll pay for them. Much like the FBI’s other investigative priorities where the focus is on taking down the leaders of a criminal enterprise or terrorist organization, under Clean Slate the FBI is going after the major cyber players who make botnets possible.

And FBI Executive Assistant Director Rick McFeely warns potential hackers: “The next person you peddle your malware to could be an FBI undercover employee…so regardless of where you live, we will use all the tools in our toolbox—including undercover operations and extraditions—to hold cyber criminals accountable for profiting illicitly from U.S. computer users.”

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