2026-02-24 multi-town climate gathering
Jim Snyder-Grant
jim@snyder-grant.org
Good evening. It’s great to be here. My deep thanks to Sustainable Stow, the First Parish Climate Task Force, and Stow’s Green Advisory Committee in putting this event together.
A bit about me: As far as I know there are only two Snyder-Grants: my wife, Dana, who used to be named Dana Snyder, and me: I was Jim Grant back in the previous century. We’ve lived at New View Cohousing on Half Moon Hill in West Acton for all of this century and a bit more.
Six years ago, I made the awkward transition from climate activist to Select Board member. https://jimforacton.info/ In three months I’ll be off the Board and back to being one of those people that shows up at Select Board meetings to tell them how to do their jobs. I look forward to this with an impish delight.
Tonight I want to talk a little bit about Acton’s path towards addressing the climate crisis. This talk, along with many links, is available at greenacton.org/Feb24
Between Acton’s first emissions inventory covering the year 2017 and the latest inventory covering 2024 and completed just a few weeks ago, our townwide greenhouse gas emissions have gone down by almost 25%. (https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/9dad1694db2f464387715460b3acbd07 has the summary of the results, but the latest inventory hasn’t been published quite yet)
I am both very proud of what Acton has been able to do, and scared that it’s nowhere near enough. We are people who care about keeping our climate within the bounds needed for civilization as we know it to continue, so we often need to find ways to motivate ourselves to move forward in the face of unknown but large odds. That’s why it’s so important that we gather like this to cheer each other on, to learn from each other, and stay motivated.
So what has Acton done to get these reductions?
Two years ago, we stopped digging the hole deeper on emissions from new buildings. Town Meeting approved banning the use of fossil fuels piped into new construction. State legislation allowed up to 10 towns to opt in to this fossil fuel free construction pilot. Maybe we’ll hear from Jamie about when and how other towns can participate.
To deal with the other 98% of our buildings that aren’t new, we’ve provided a lot of education, training, and persuasion. Our most successful program is the FREE clean energy coach program where a dozen volunteers have been trained to provide coaching on electrification including solar, heat pumps, Electric Vehicles, batteries , to residences and businesses. That group has helped more than 350 households so far, and the program is going strong.
To reach more people with general information, a number of dedicated activists work on an effort called Energize Acton, in cooperation with the Town. Part of this effort is built on a web software platform from the non-profit Mass Energize. Our volunteers have built a website with detailed information on actions that people can take. Now, I should say that right now, the website is undergoing a technology transition, so the information is old, but new info will be available in just a few weeks. They have have organized many events, around one a month, including our popular EV petting zoo where people can talk to EV owners and see their cars. There have been home tours, book readings, plant-based food potlucks, and more: https://www.energizeacton.org/events (click on “past events”) Over there is Karen Root Watkins, who is the lead organizer for Energize Acton. Talk to her for more information.
These Energize Acton events also help build community, and as I said before, good connection with community is foundational for being able to move forward.
Partly because of educational efforts, and partly because of general trends, our biggest emissions reductions have been in transportation. Purchase of hybrids continues to rise and the purchase of pure electric vehicles, while still smaller than the number of hybrids, is catching up to the Hybrid numbers.
After installing a series of level 2 vehicle chargers at Town buildings and the Train station with grants from Eversource and the state, last year Acton opened up its first level 3 fast DC chargers at the corner of 2A and 27.
How did we get to be able to do all these great things in the last few years? I wanted to sketch out the path Acton took. In 2010, after enthusiastic lobbying by activists, Acton joined the state’s Green Communities program. A couple of years after that, the town committee that worked with the Green Communities program on grant requests, the Green Advisory Board, commissioned the Town’s first emissions study
Our first joint project of activists and town staff in local climate-related work that I can remember was our participation in Solarize Acton in 2012, a program to add a lot of solar to businesses and residences, through the late, great state-funded Solarize program.
A few years after that, in 2019, Green Acton, our town’s umbrella environmental group, decided to work on passing a climate emergency declaration at an Acton town meeting. That led to organizing dozens of groups into the Acton Climate Coalition which then led to an overwhelmingly positive vote for a strong declaration at town meeting. That declaration, in 2020, called for a target date of 2030 for reaching net zero in Acton. I remember feeling at the time that that was both ridiculously ambitious, and at the same time, maybe not enough if climate tipping points kept cascading.
Just months after that declaration passed, our (relatively new, relatively young) town manager John Mangiaratti came to the Select Board and said that it was becoming clear to him how much the people of Acton (and the Select Board) wanted to make real progress on climate, and that he needed to find a way to get a full-time staff person to work on this. He rearranged some budget items, worked with staff to get some grants, and hired Andrea Becerra who became our amazing sustainability director.
With support from both climate activists, town staff, and a majority of the select board, the programs that are mentioned above, and many others, kept coming. The town was especially good at grant writing to keep moving forward in the midst of typical Town constraints on spending. We’ve gotten useful grants for climate-related projects from a whole variety of state agencies, and also from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), and from state and federal legislative earmarks.. We also use an energy efficiency fund established in 2012 that had money flowing in from solar projects that were making payments in lieu of taxes. This fund has been key in funding insulation, air sealing, and electrification projects in Town buildings.
Keeping up with grant requirements also helped move us forward with creating an “EV first” policy for the town, where departments must consider if an electric vehicle would meet the town’s needs before buying new vehicles. The town also has had a series of projects to plan and then implement the electrification of town buildings. Our new fire station and our newest School are both all electric with ground source heat pumps, providing heating and cooling at significantly reduced operating costs. Our recent progress has allowed Acton to be one of the state’s first participants in the Climate Leader program, a follow-on to the Green Communities program. A big issue at our next Town Meeting is paying to replace the failing heating and cooling system at Town Hall. A state grant from the new Climate Leader program has made all the difference in the finances.
Our town’s climate action plan, and the climate action tracker, developed by staff with support from a grant from the MAPC and lots of public outreach involvement, sketches out where we need to go from here. Three major goals include
- Reducing the impact of town-wide electricity use by continuing changes in our Town’s electrical aggregation program, called Acton Power Choice.
- Working with the state and the utilities in planning and implementing a transition away from natural gas use in Acton.
- A successful implementation of our gas-leaf blower ban, which starts taking effect next year.
The climate action plan acknowledges that many of our future plans require significant state and federal support. The state does what it can — it’s been really helpful — but the biggest programs will require legal and financial support from the federal government, and that support has been largely turned off.
The Plan, and the Climate Declaration, also acknowledge that Acton is just one town among many, so that success in the long run requires coordinating and cooperating with other towns, and allowing and encouraging the spread of good ideas and the mutual encouragement of each other’s goals. I’m so glad that this event and others like it are helping to move things forward amongst all the challenges we face. Thanks.