Dear friends,
I hope you soaked up some sunshine on the first weekend of spring. It was great to see Brooklyn neighbors out playing in the park, enjoying picnics, and stomping in puddles.
Today is the last day to submit a comment to the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation to stop the expansion of the Liquefied Natural Gas facility in North Brooklyn. Some of you have been keeping up with this protracted — and winnable! — struggle. The opposition to the project is reaching a crescendo, and we need to add our voices:
The opposition to the North Brooklyn Pipeline is part of a series of struggles against the building of fossil fuel infrastructure amid the climate crisis, similar to fights across the country over the Keystone XL, Dakota Access, and Line 3 pipelines, as well as several successful attempts to shut down coal-fired power plants. In this case, as in so many others, vulnerable communities of color will suffer the most impacts from dirty-energy pollution.
On Thursday night, at the fourth and final public hearing on this issue, there was unanimous opposition to the expansion.
Please write a new comment on the Liquefied Natural Gas permits; the talking points are provided and the whole process takes a few minutes. If you only have a minute, adapt mine (the third and fourth comments are new!).
Today, NYC public high schools are reopening for hybrid learning. Just before the weekend, the mayor and the new schools chancellor announced that, because of revised guidance from the CDC allowing distancing of just 3 feet, they will offer families another opportunity to opt back in for in-person/hybrid instruction. This is good news for many families who were shut out when the mayor broke the promise to allow students to opt in at mid-year. Unsurprisingly, this announcement creates fresh confusion for school administrators, who may need to reprogram significantly if large numbers of the students who are currently remote opt back in.
[w]here community spread is high, the CDC advises that middle and high schools either enforce six feet of distance or implement a “cohorting” model, in which a group of students remain together throughout the school day.
The uncertainty around how and when to reopen is legitimate. The governor, who is consumed by scandal, is eager to declare victory over the virus. Decisions made about opening gyms and increasing capacity in restaurants have direct bearing on the safety of reopening schools.
The uncertainty surrounding reopening [the city] is compounded by virus variants that have appeared more prominently in the city in the past few weeks.
It is difficult to say how widespread any of them are because so far the city has sequenced fewer than 1,000 samples each week since early February, out of a weekly average of more than 18,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the past four weeks.
But two of the variants appear to be increasing steadily in the samples that have been sequenced (a sample size, the city cautions, that is still very small and may not convey the full extent of the problem).
What effect the variants might have on the spread of the virus remains unclear.
It is clear, however, that demonizing teachers and their union for the pace of reopening schools, as Andrew Yang has done, is unhelpful at best.
Have a great day!
with love,
L