The Philipstown Climate Smart Task Force is your best local source for helping you fight dirty. Knowledgeable volunteers can help you understand climate change, decipher all of the pledges, and make steps toward climate action.

Visit the Philipstown Climate Smart Community Website.

To avoid catastrophic warming and climate impacts, the Town of Philipstown is following global scientific consensus to achieve carbon neutrality by 2040. That means reducing our atmospheric carbon emissions – or greenhouse gases – to zero by 2040.

Read the IPCC report.

Greenhouse gases are gases in our atmosphere that absorb and emit radiant energy and lead to atmospheric warming. We currently have too many greenhouse gases in our atmosphere in the form of excess carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and others. In order to achieve balance in our carbon cycle, we need to reduce the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.

There are so many ways to reduce greenhouse gases in our atmosphere and get to carbon neutrality. This Philipstown Fights Dirty campaign lists nearly 100 actions we can take at the individual-level to make change happen, everything from printing double-sided and shopping less, to converting to heat pumps or electric vehicles. And we can also advocate to our elected officials nad to bog corporations to change their polluting beaviors, too. If we work together at the local level, we can achieve our goal of carbon neutrality by 2040.

Pledge

In 2019 we collected baseline community emissions data through a community survey using a consumption-based method. Using this data, we estimate that the Town of Philipstown currently emits nearly 200,000 tons of carbon a year. With roughly 10,000 residents living in our town, that means, on average, each person must reduce their emissions by 1 ton per year for the next 20 years. We use the 1 ton average for campaign efforts, but households with larger carbon footprints – with bigger houses, more cars, higher consumption – will have to do their part to reduce more than 1 ton per person if we are to reach our goal. In this baseline report, we also assessed carbon sequestration and storage of our forests, wetlands and other natural resources. Natural resources store carbon in their biomass (e.g., trees, muck, soil, etc.), which means it is not in our atmosphere. Read the executive summary or full report to learn more.

Read the Philipstown inventory report.

Estimating removal of carbon (i.e., GHG) emissions is complex and we used several sources to put an average carbon reduction number on almost 45 different actions. These sources include: Berkeley Cool Climate Calculator, CURE100, the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator and Philipstown’s GHG Baseline Inventory data. Once a resident or business/organization owner makes a pledge and it is included in the community counter, the real work of tracking actual progress over time will be conducted by Climate Smart Task Force members and will be based on actual data collected from households, businesses and organizations.

Our reductions target is based on actions we take in 2021 and moving forward. All of the important actions you might already do are critical in fighting climate change and were already “counted” in the 2019-2020 inventory estimates. Keep up the good work!

Philipstown100 is a chapter of the CURE100 project, a not-for-profit consortium of communities that seeks to reduce global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions to net zero by 2040. We recommend using the CURE100 Carbon Tracker app to determine your household carbon footprint.

Calculate my carbon footprint.

The Philipstown Climate Fund will support community-based projects or provide financial assistance to community members to take action to reduce their emissions. All donations to the Philipstown Climate Fund are tax-deductible. An independent advisory committee made up of Climate Smart Community Task Force members will review fund project applications on a quarterly basis and determine awards. Awarded projects will have a measurable reduction in emissions and will be credited to the town-wide reduction goals.

Donate to the Philipstown Climate Fund

An average household in Philipstown has a 2,000 sq-ft home and 2 cars, burns 1,000 gallons of oil a year, takes 7 airplane trips a year, eats 4 servings of meat a day and has an annual income of $100,000 ($127,000 for families). If your household is above average, you can do your part by cutting more than 1 ton per person or donating to the Philipstown Climate Fund to help your neighbors take action, too.

Donate to the Philipstown Climate Fund

You can learn more about climate change and climate action efforts on the Philipstown Climate Smart Community Task Force website. The task force has been working together since 2018, gathering information and educating knowledgeable volunteers. Please consider the Task Force your #1 resource on climate action! Learn more from the Philipstown Climate Smart Community Website