Like much of the county, New York is facing an energy crisis. And like much of the country, how we, as a community of New Yorkers, choose to address this energy crisis will have short- and long-term ramifications for our families and our environment. We can choose to consume energy with a surmounting, voracious appetite – increasing the number of power plants and their impacts on the Hudson River and increasing our detrimental contributions to global warming, or we can choose to use energy wisely – decreasing our reliance on dirty energy and decreasing our wasteful behaviors that directly impact the River and the environment that we will soon hand over to our children.

Energy has given us some of the most important advances in all humankind – but it’s also come at a terribly high price. If we are to continue to make improvements to the River we love and the world in which we live, Riverkeeper sees only one sustainable option available: Smart Energy production and use. We now need to strive and put all our resources into the effort to reduce the costs of energy production and energy use on our environment and on our health. That’s what Reenergizing New York is all about – using state of the art technologies to meet our energy needs and simultaneously benefiting our local communities and the environment we need to survive.

Click here to read the article, "Reenergizing New York for the 21st Century," by Lisa Rainwater that appeared in Riverkeeper's Fall 2006 newsletter.