I am Judeth Gilmore Van Hamm and I am working on two initiatives to serve you.
To help you, I would like to ask you to
– Go to town meeting Monday, May 2, at 7 p.m. at the high school and vote for a non-binding resolution to learn more about Solar Personal Rapid Transit, including how it might help each of us, where it might go, and how we might use the town’s share of revenue from Solar Personal Rapid Transit, which is built with private investment instead of taxes, and to come back with a proposed plan to be voted, for or against, at a future town meeting.
– Vote for me to serve you on the light board. Voting will be at Hull High, on Monday, May 16, between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m., or contact the town clerk to find out your other options for how to cast your vote.
Hull Light has been doing its basic job well. It has been keeping its rates affordable and the electricity on. Hull Light charges 16 cents per kilowatt-hour and a service fee of $6.41 a month plus $7.00 per month for the batteries that ensure our lights stay on. For comparison, Hingham Municipal Light Plant charges 17.7 cents per kWh and $8.86 per month, and Braintree Electric Light Department charges 14.5 cents per kWh and $5.12 per month. The wind storm last October caused parts of Hingham and Braintree to lose power, and the snow storm at the end of last January caused Cohasset and many other National Grid and Eversource towns to lose electricity for more than a day, while Hull’s lights stayed on.
But these are not ordinary times. A major catastrophe is looming over us and is already underway in many places. When they are healthy, forests help remove carbon from the atmosphere. But the current issue of National Geographic reports, “Heat and drought are killing our forests … we need to break our fossil fuel addiction, quickly.”
The increase in temperature from greenhouse gases is causing melting of ice at both poles. Near the North Pole, the loss of ice is exposing leaks of methane, which does even more damage than carbon. Near the South Pole, melting of ice under ice shelves is threatening to cause large sections of ice, such as the Thwaites ice shelf, to break off and melt. The result of these changes at both poles is a prediction of a 10-foot sea-level rise, some say by 2065 and others say by 2100. If that happens, many homes in Hull will no longer be viable as a place to live, a possible future that the Metropolitan Area Planning Council recognizes.
Hull has an opportunity to inspire the world by getting to 100% clean energy quickly. The Hull Light Plant can play a role in helping you and every customer use 100% clean energy for electricity, heating, and transportation, starting with energy conservation.
