Category Archives: Environment

Rinaldo Del Gallo’s efforts to ban Styrofoam and single use plastic bags garnered tremendous media attention including radio, print and television. His efforts have been chronicled at the website https://berkshiregreen.wordpress.com/. Del Gallo has written a number of columns on the subject published in the Berkshire Eagle such as “Styrofoam must go,” “Dispensing Myths about Styrofoam,” and “End blight of Styrofoam/single use plastic bags.” Del Gallo also wrote a column, “My Styrofoam ban experience” that was published in the Greenfield Recorder. After a three year effort, Del Gallo was able to get Styrofoam banned in Pittsfield, which you can read about Read more…

As does Bernie Sanders, Rinaldo Del Gallo believes in putting a price on carbon. What is a carbon pricing?  Wikipedia has a reasonable definition: Carbon pricing — the method favored by many economists for reducing global-warming emissions — charges those who emit carbon dioxide (CO2) for their emissions. That charge, called a carbon price, is the amount that must be paid for the right to emit one tonne of CO2 into the atmosphere. Carbon pricing usually takes the form either of a carbon tax or a requirement to purchase permits to emit, generally known as cap-and-trade, but also called “allowances”. Read more…

From my many conversations, I see that there is great confusion out there regarding “the pipeline”.  Let me clarify names and pipelines. Kinder Morgan describes itself as “the largest energy infrastructure company in North America”. They have pipelines that transport, among other things, crude oil and natural gas as well as other products. Kinder Morgan has a subsidiary company, the Tennessee Gas Pipeline Company. It gets more complicated—we are not just talking about one pipeline when we talk about “the pipeline”. In the Berkshires, there are two pipelines of concern, both of the Tennessee Gas Pipeline Company. For this reason, Read more…