He's the power behind All Our Energy environmental group

The more people George Povall talks to about energy and waste, “the more that we find out that people are ready for change.”

And Povall talks to a lot of people: As executive director of All Our Energy, an organization focused on renewable energy, climate solutions and environmental advocacy, he spends much of his spare time on public outreach, working on initiatives and forming coalitions with other organizations to counter the effects of a changing climate.

“Climate change is the issue of our time — and we’re not acting on it with the urgency needed,” said Povall, 53, a Point Lookout resident and construction supervisor in Manhattan. “I wouldn’t be able to look my wife, son, family, friends, and even strangers in the eye ever again, unless I did everything I could to change that trajectory — that’s why I do what I do.”

As founder of All Our Energy, Povall has worked to curtail single-use plastics and increase the use of renewable energy in New York.

Calling Povall “a very effective advocate” who has built an impressive grassroots organization, Jennifer Congdon, deputy director of Beyond Plastics, said the two have worked together on public education rallies and getting signatures on letters to legislators for waste reduction campaigns, and most recently held an advocacy day and rally in Albany on Tuesday.

“He has a huge heart and is doing it for all the right reasons: He doesn’t seek glory; he really is just seeking to make the world a better place,” said Congdon, whose Vermont-based organization works to end single-use disposable plastics around the Northeast.

Povall manages to make rather technical issues seem fun, like when he used a game show format at an online event, “Ready-Set-Go Zero Waste!” last year to teach people about extended producer responsibility — policies that make producers responsible for the full life cycle of all packaged products except bottles and cans, Congdon said.

“He’s taken the issue and made it accessible to people to learn about and to become passionate about and help them figure out the ways to take action on that,” Congdon said.

Getting it done

Though he always cared about the environment, Povall recalls his interest was piqued when he attended a massive Earth Day event in Central Park in the late 1980s.

“Ever since then, I was really pretty aware of it,” he said, adding that he bided his time, assuming there were plenty of people more knowledgeable than he was advocating for the environment.

Then, in the 2010s, after seeing films with environmental themes, he had an epiphany: Wind, an incredible renewable energy source, he felt, was being underutilized and not enough was being done to change that.

“Unless I started to actually take action to see it happen, I couldn’t be assured that it would,” he said.

In 2011, Povall began a blog called “All Our Energy” in which he tackled renewable energy matters. Three years later, he incorporated it as a nonprofit organization, and in 2015 it became a 501(c)(3) corporation.

At the time, Povall acknowledges, he was very much a neophyte in the nonprofit world.

“I used to joke, ‘I don’t really know what we’re doing, but we’re doing it anyway,’ ” he said. “That sums up my attitude about it, but also the fact that we’re taking action and trying to get the public involved in environmental causes.”

Povall and members of his fledgling group began to take action. In 2015, for example, they opposed a proposed liquefied natural gas terminal off Long Beach known as Port Ambrose. The group opposed the terminal because members believed there was no need for it and feared its potential for spills and adverse impact on sea life.

At the rallies against Port Ambrose, Povall and crew figured out how to run successful events: ones that worked cooperatively with similar groups, gained news coverage, and enlisted elected officials, starting with the Long Beach city council and working their way up to bipartisan state legislators. The efforts paid off and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo vetoed the project in November 2015.

“That was when we really learned what we needed to do and, most of all, move forward and do it — not wait for somebody else,” Povall said. The group began to concentrate its efforts on issues that it felt had been overlooked by other local environmental organizations.

Beth Fiteni, who along with Povall received Long Island Sierra Club’s 2017 Environmentalist of the Year Award, praised Povall for his leadership style.

“George works hard and is a great organizer, and is not afraid to call leaders out to make change,” said Fiteni, founder/director of Green Inside and Out, a Huntington organization that promotes low environmental-impact living.

In October 2016, All Our Energy worked to get the City of Long Beach to put a 5-cent fee on all grocery bags, which, Povall said, “eliminated millions of checkout bags just in the city of Long Beach per year.” As part of its efforts, the organization collected 3,000 signatures on a petition in favor of the fee that it presented to the City Council.

In January 2017, Long Beach became the first locality in Nassau to charge a fee for plastic bags. A countywide plastic bag fee went into effect a year later in Suffolk. The movement to eliminate plastic bags moved on to the state level, with Povall’s group contributing its efforts, and New York State officially banning stores from distributing carryout plastic bags in 2019. (Plastic bags for produce and food deliveries were exempted from the legislation, noted Povall.)

ENLISTING ALLIES

Helen Dorado Alessi, executive director of Long Beach Latino Civic Association, recalls Povall asking how he could involve the Hispanic community in the Long Beach bag campaign, resulting in her joining Povall’s board of trustees.

“This was a novel idea and his reaching out to us was extremely important for Long Beach Latino Civic Association,” Dorado Alessi said. “All Our Energy provided bilingual training and programming, including a viewing of the compelling movie ‘Bag It,’ with Spanish subtitles, followed by a wonderful call-to-action conversation.”

Working with Hempstead Town, All Our Energy also ran monthly beach cleanups starting in 2017 at locations including Point Lookout and Lido Beach, but COVID-19 disrupted that initiative.

“Over the time that we were there, we’ve removed well over 5,000 pounds of marine debris and trash,” Povall said, adding that, due to funding constraints, they’ve had to take a step back from this work, but the Town of Hempstead, in conjunction with the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society, is continuing the cleanups.

Aside from resulting in noticeably cleaner beaches, organized cleanups demonstrate to participants the impact of water pollution.

“Overall, it really did get quite a few people involved in environmental, if not activism, at least being conscious of the environment and what’s happening,” Povall said.

Acknowledging Povall’s beach cleanups and aid in helping her organization get a ban on the intentional release of balloons in the towns of Hempstead in 2019 and East Hampton in 2021, Brien Weiner, president of Freeport-based South Shore Audubon Society, said, “that helps us protect the endangered and threatened species that nest on our beaches, like the piping plover, because otherwise they ingest plastic, they get tangled in it.”

All Our Energy coalesced the opposition that helped stop the 2021-22 Extended Producer Responsibility Act that would have put control of New York’s recycling regulations into the plastics and packaging industry’s hands, a move Povall described as “the fox guarding the henhouse.”

“We brought together 80 organizations against that concept,” said Povall, adding that it took about a half-year to build the coalition, starting with community groups outside of the environmental movement, then working with their core environmental and community organizations to draw up language, and finally reaching out to the larger environmental movement.

Actively following New York State’s Climate Action Plan process, a framework for meeting climate mandates finalized in 2022, Povall, working with allied organizations and experts, filed comments and recommendation during the final comment period, has been pushing against rate increases for new natural gas installations he deems unnecessary because he predicts obsolescence by 2040.

As people switch from gas, those who still use it will have to pay more and more to support the system, Povall explains.

“We’re trying to make a managed transition off of that, that will not harm low, middle income people and retirees and will help people transition to heat pumps and air-sourced heat pumps,” he said.

The organization is now supporting the All Electric Buildings Act, which would mandate that new buildings in the state be built with renewable energy and electrification, and the New York Heat Act, which would protect people from incurring high costs in the transition from fossil fuels.

For offshore wind energy — the original impetus for All Our Energy — the organization is now pushing to ensure that its installation is environmentally sound.

“We’re sort of being a watchdog, but at the same time we’re sort of ushering it through,” he said.

“You’re never going to stop the people who are against it from being against it,” Povall said. “It’s just making sure that people who are in the middle don’t get swept up in misinformation about it.”

An almost all-volunteer organization, All Our Energy has at times employed part-time staff. For his part, Povall was compensated for about 200 of the 1,500 hours he worked for the organization last year. Funded by grants and public donations, the organization’s 2023 budget is $45,000.

The nonprofit has nine volunteers working on climate, energy and zero waste, plus a seven-member board.

A retired attorney, Karen Zilber of Kings Park, who has done both volunteer and paid work for the organization for about eight years, noted its grassroots efforts.

“A lot of what we do is we try to educate the public and get them to join us so that we can fight for things to happen that will benefit our environment,” she said.

Reuse, not single use

The organization’s latest campaign is helping food service businesses, institutions and organizations switch from single-use items to those that are reusable.

“It could save them money, uses less water to sanitize and reuse than to make new plastic, and eliminates that needless waste from being incinerated into our air, which causes climate impacts and creates toxic ash,” Povall said.

Through his advocacy, Povall has become hopeful about the future.

“The public, when you talk to them, are mainly in agreement, and a lot of the things that we’re talking about are just common sense,” he said.