Committee Reboot

In the pre-Covid days, the Esplanade Environmental Study Group (EESG) was formed by residents who were and remain deeply concerned about accelerating global warming and wished to learn what we could do to help our building reduce its carbon consumption.  We became able to inform residents about improvements our building management had made in the efficiency of the Esplanade’s heating, chilling, and water pumping systems. We arranged a visit from a representative of our public utility’s “Mass Save” program, enabling many residents to sign up to get free energy-saving LED lights for their units, although the onset of Covid disrupted and delayed the fulfillment of their orders.

In the last two years, however, the EESG has understandably not met regularly or undertaken many initiatives.  However, we continued to prod Esplanade management to study what could be done to install the infrastructure for numerous charging stations for electric vehicles – a challenge that has been stalled by the utility company’s failure, so far, to get the expected funding for subsidizing the electrical power installations that would be required.  Global warming, meanwhile, has only intensified. And the City of Cambridge has started to implement policies demanding major reductions in carbon fuel use by multi-unit residential buildings such as ours.

The time is ripe for a re-boot of the Esplanade Environmental Study Group.  Can we interest you?  The Study Group seeks new members, new ideas, and more research into opportunities for improvements.  Most residents, I suspect, are in fact concerned about climate change. Quite a few of you, I also suspect, have expertise or connections in science, engineering, real estate, environmental policy or other fields that would re-energize the committee’s original commitment --- to learn about best practices in other residential buildings for reducing  their carbon footprints,  and to help our management explore adoption of those practices.  

If so, I urge you get in touch with me, send me your contact information, and – assuming I get a good response – attend a meeting of the re-booted EESG that I am eager to  arrange.

Bob  Kagan,  203W, email: rak@ Berkeley.edu

617-301-0861