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With Game of Thrones finale, sewage finally gets the primetime treatment
Disney World’s literal nuclear option, explained
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This casino’s microgrid might be the future of energy
This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As the Fukushima disaster unfolded in Japan, the Blue Lake Rancheria, in Northern California, was dealing with its own crisis. Several miles inland and uphill from the Pacific Ocean, the 100 acres of tribal land had turned into a haven for roughly 3,000 coastal dwellers who were fleeing a feared tsunami from that same earthquake. A huge line of cars assembled at the Rancheria’s gas station; one young woman ran in circles, holding her baby and weeping.
Local inundation ended up being relatively minor. But the Blue Lake Rancheria was shaken. “That was an eye-opener,” says Jana Ganion, sustainability and government affairs director at the Rancheria. “We need to prepare for the disasters that are reasonably foreseeable here.”
Tsunamis for one. But also the massive earthquake that’s going to devastate the Northwest. And California’s annual wildfires, made ever more vicious by climate change. These disasters all have one thing in common: They threaten to cut the Blue Lake Rancheria off from the grid for days, maybe weeks. Tucked behind the state’s “Redwood Curtain,” the Rancheria’s rural placement affords it few access points, and roads may be inaccessible in the aftermath of a disaster.
The answer was to help pioneer what could be the future of energy in California and beyond. Working with scientists at the Schatz Energy Research Center at nearby Humboldt State University, and the local utility PG&E, the Rancheria developed its own solar-powered microgrid, allowing it to disconnect from the main grid and run off Tesla battery power. The setup powers six buildings, including a 55,000-square-foot casino and 102 hotel rooms — over 140,000 square feet of total building space.
The tribe — which tallies just 49 members — is under constant threat from wildfire, along with many other communities in California. In autumn, seasonal winds rustle electric equipment, showering sparks onto dry brush below. State officials have blamed PG&E for starting 17 of California’s 21 major fires in 2017 alone, as well as for last year’s devastating Camp Fire, which virtually destroyed the town of Paradise, leveling almost 20,000 buildings and killing 85. If the utility had cut power when winds near Paradise became particularly intense, that deadly blaze might never have ignited. But concerns about local hospitals and other emergency facilities tend to prevent utilities from taking such preemptive actions. Switching to microgrids during especially dangerous wind storms could keep the state’s mountain towns much safer.
But take it from the Blue Lake Rancheria: Building a microgrid isn’t so easy as throwing up a bunch of solar panels, bolting batteries to the ground, and saying au revoir to the grid at large. It takes a whole lot of time and expertise and money, about $6.3 million for the Rancheria so far — $5 million in R&D money granted by the California Energy Commission in 2015, and the rest coming from the Rancheria itself. But that research money is an investment that communities throughout California could soon benefit from.
Construction of the Rancheria’s microgrid began in May 2016, and a little over a year later, PG&E gave its blessing to begin operation. In an ideal world where the sun always shines, the Rancheria could power itself indefinitely, recharging its batteries using more than 1,500 solar panels during the day and depleting them in the evening. But on a gloomy day, such as the one on which I toured the grounds, the panels struggle to collect photons—they’re generating 120 kilowatts, compared to 420 kilowatts when the sun is cranking full-blast. On a typical day the Rancheria still draws a small amount of power from PG&E’s grid to stabilize the system. But if they lose that connection for whatever reason, those six core buildings could theoretically last for months on solar power, with backup generators kicking in at night or during periods of cloudiness.
At the entrance to the Rancheria’s offices, Dave Carter, managing research engineer at Schatz Energy Research Center, shows me a pair of flat screens. One displays a family-tree-looking diagram, with lines connecting the utility and microgrid to buildings like the hotel and casino and offices. The other screen displays a graph of energy pricing throughout the day. Noon to 6 p.m. is when electricity costs the most, so the system charges the batteries in the morning, so it can be discharged in the afternoon when the utility has its peak pricing.
The Rancheria is building out its system even further. It just added 167 panels above the pumps at its gas station, which it will switch on this summer. Behind the station, electricians are installing another Tesla battery pack to store that extra energy. And so long as they have the money, the tribe can add still more panels and batteries to boost its capacity and hedge against cloudy days.
Building out a microgrid, however, is no easy task for any community. “All of those buildings are going to be in various states of repair, they’re going to have various vintages of electrical systems and diesel backup generators,” says Ganion, who oversaw the project for the Rancheria. “So what we learned very quickly is that the controller on the diesel generator wasn’t smart enough to talk to the microgrid system. We had to do a bunch of work in the middle.”
Ganion hopes to turn the Rancheria’s hard-fought lessons into “a one-stop shop for communities who want to develop microgrids.” Think of it like the evolution of the personal computer: The Rancheria is basically operating as if it’s the 1980s, having to assemble a PC on its own, while one day other communities may be able to buy a microgrid that works more or less right out of the box, like a sleek modern laptop.
That might sound like something that utilities like PG&E would try to prevent. (PG&E declined to comment for this story.) Their business, after all, is in keeping customers dependent on their services. But as the world slowly moves away from fossil fuel energy plants, the utilities of the future will start to look less like energy producers and distributors, and more like just distributors. “It’s the future of the grid in California,” says Peter Lehman, founding director of the Schatz Energy Research Center.
Utilities won’t just operate power lines and other infrastructure for ferrying around electricity. Helping to develop microgrids could become part of their core business. The Rancheria’s microgrid is still in constant communication with the grid at large. “You have to work really closely with the utility on that,” says Carter, of Schatz Energy Research Center.
That interdependence means that utilities have a natural role to play in a microgrid world. The alternative is business as usual: a labyrinthine statewide network of power lines that utilities are loath to disconnect, even during high-wind events that cause and fuel wildfires, because of the liability involved in losing power to critical services.
The challenge for small, isolated communities, though, is the cost — Tesla recommends installing two of its Powerwall batteries to ensure even a small home can go a week off the grid, a system that will set you back $14,500 just in equipment costs. “What would it cost to do this, and who should be paying for it?” asks Richard Tabors, president of Tabors Caramanis Rudkevich, an energy consulting firm. “Initially, to be absolutely honest, the state of California should be paying for it.” The state is, after all, suffering an unprecedented wildfire crisis. It’s a matter of saving lives, but also of smart investing: Last November’s Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive in state history, caused over $16 billion in damages.
The Rancheria describes its experience with PG&E in positive terms, but others hoping to install home solar have not been so fortunate, says Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association. “The sad thing is the utilities just have a stranglehold on policymaking and regulation making,” she says. “They absolutely are giant barriers to people being able to even just do the simple self-generation.”
Yet as California moves toward powering itself with 100 percent clean energy by 2045, making solar installations easier will become paramount. The challenge will be largely one of management, such as determining who’s responsible for maintaining different parts of the grid. Because maintenance comes with liability — you don’t want to be the one whose mismanaged equipment sparks the next deadly wildfire.
Meanwhile, the Schatz Energy Research Center is helping design a microgrid for Humboldt County’s regional airport down the road from the Blue Lake Rancheria, which will include a nine-acre solar array. And the Rancheria will keep iterating on its own microgrid, adding capacity and streamlining the overall process.
Ganion walks me through the parking lot and says the Rancheria is planning to add car shelters with solar panels. Behind the hotel and casino we find the two-acre solar farm — panel after panel soaking up photons through the cloud cover. In its next experiment with the future of energy, she says the Rancheria might start toying with a simple form of carbon sequestration, encouraging the growth of plants underneath the panels to suck carbon dioxide out of the air.
“When you come back, we might have an herb garden growing under there,” says Ganion. “It would beat the weeds, for sure.”
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There are glimmers of a Green New Deal in Inslee’s big new climate plan
The little-known governor of Washington state just unveiled the ambitious second phase of his climate plan, and there are more pieces of the puzzle to come. That’s no surprise to those familiar with his platform: Jay Inslee is running as the climate candidate.
Some of Inslee’s fellow presidential candidates have embraced a progressive climate plan called the Green New Deal. A resolution outlining that plan, introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey, points to some vague and rather massive policy ideas. But AOC’s policy plan isn’t expected to roll out until next year. Until then, Inslee’s plan is beginning to look like the closest thing we have to a road map.
Much like the Green New Deal, Inslee’s plan (the parts of it we’ve seen so far) offers a federal jobs guarantee, a 10-year mobilization on clean energy, and even healthcare benefits for impacted coal workers. Inslee wants to spur a $9 trillion investment that will fight off the worst of climate change and enable workers to find gainful employment in the transition to renewable energies.
One of the advisors to New Consensus, the think tank building out the Green New Deal, saw positive similarities between the two. “I think what Governor Inslee is doing very well and what the Green New Deal does very well is approach the problem through not only an environmental lens but also an economy lens,” said Brandon Hurlburt, who served as chief of staff to Stephen Chu, secretary of energy under President Obama. “We need people to understand the type of job that they can have in the mobilization effort that Governor Inslee is talking about.”
Inslee isn’t shy about drawing parallels between his plan and the history that inspired the Green New Deal. “Eighty-six years ago this month, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt laid out the details of the New Deal in a radio address,” the first line of Inslee’s plan reads. “Just as it did in the 20th century, America must rise to this 21st-century challenge with a bold plan.”
Here’s how his Evergreen Economy Plan aims to make that happen:
A $9 trillion investment in infrastructure, labor, green industries, and new technologies. That doesn’t mean that Inslee expects Congress to cough up $9 trillion on his first day in office (the same goes for Beto’s $5 trillion climate plan). The plan leverages money to jumpstart investment: $300 billion in average federal spending plus an additional $600 billion more from the private sector every year.
A green bank. Inslee calls this the “Clean Energy Deployment Authority” and it’s like an ATM for green spending. The bank will get start off with $90 billion to invest in low-cost solutions that the private sector has been ignoring.
Helping out rural America. Inslee aims to accomplish this by providing debt relief to struggling communities, starting clean electricity coops, funding energy efficiency upgrades, and investing in regional authorities. It’s a bottom-up plan that lets rural states maintain control of the energy transition.
Under Inslee’s plan, federal agencies will have to purchase 100 percent clean energy by 2024 using union labor. The plan will also spend $3 trillion on upgrading and building more resilient infrastructure, another opportunity, Inslee says, for good-paying jobs. Some of these skilled-labor positions could clock in at $25 an hour.
A G.I. bill for workers affected by the transition to renewables, particularly folks employed by the dying coal industry. That includes: securing retirement benefits for impacted workers by stabilizing the nation’s retirement system, guaranteeing access to healthcare for qualifying workers, educational stipends and income support for workers who want to transition to new jobs, and more.
There’s a lot more in Inslee’s plan: a Clean Water For All initiative that invests in upgrading the nation’s crumbling water infrastructure, grants for smart grid networks, investments in public transit systems (helllooooo, MTA). Almost every piece of the Evergreen Economy Plan provides opportunities for thousands of new jobs.
“We need to have a jobs program that makes sure everyone has a shot at these good jobs in terms of training and otherwise,” Inslee told Grist in an interview in April. “When we’re defeating climate change, what we should be doing is increasing economic equality. That’s invested throughout this whole system.”
Unlike many of the now 23 presidential hopefuls, the governor of the Evergreen State actually has some achievements under his belt to point to as he makes a case for why America needs to tackle climate change full-on.
But Inslee is polling at a paltry 1 percent. His involvement in the 2020 presidential race, however, could have the effect of inspiring other, more established candidates to roll out their own climate plans.
New Consensus advisor Hurlburt pointed out that thanks to candidates like Beto O’Rourke and Inslee, voters will have a wide array of choices. “If Democrats are trying to outdo each other by proposing the most ambitious policy to meet the scale of the problem, that’s a good way to start addressing [climate change],” he said.
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There are glimmers of a Green New Deal in Inslee’s big new climate plan
Forget the hype. Here’s the state of clean energy in 6 charts.
The world isn’t putting its money where its mouth is to fight climate change.
That’s the depressing takeaway from an annual report the International Energy Agency released on Tuesday. Worldwide investment in renewable energy fell slightly last year, and the proportion of money budgeted to low-carbon energy has stagnated at 35 percent. The report shows that, despite all the rousing pledges to embrace clean power, governments around the world are still spending most of their investment money on new ways to burn fossil fuels.
“[I]nvestment activity in low-carbon supply and demand is stalling, in part due to insufficient policy focus to address persistent risks,” wrote EIA Executive Director Faith Birol, in the preface of the organization’s World Energy Investment report.
The following five charts from the EIA provide a sense of what is happening.
Here’s the big picture: Since 2105, the world had been pouring smaller amounts of money into all kinds of energy investments — coal, natural gas, and renewables. In 2018, instead of dwindling further, energy investments levelled off. Why? Because the money going into coal mining and oil drilling offset decreases for other projects. Investment in coal supply crept up 2 percent, the first rise since 2012.
There is some good news if you dig down far enough. For instance, the number of electric cars and buses on the roads is shooting up. And they’re displacing vehicles running on oil: “Globally, electric cars and buses sold in 2018 are expected to offset 0.1 million barrels per day of transport oil demand growth,” the report’s authors wrote.
But that’s just a drop in the oil barrel: The report also notes that fracking in the United States alone produces 6 million barrels of oil a day.
We’d need to really goose investment in low-carbon energy to keep the goals of the Paris Agreement in sight, according to this report. In 2018 spending on energy efficiency and nuclear power stayed flat from the previous year, while money for renewable power dropped. Money for batteries grew by almost half, but that’s not as significant as it sounds because we’ve never spent much on batteries.
You know what hasn’t stagnated? Demand for energy. More people around the world are installing air conditioners and gaining access to basic creature comforts like thermostats.
And we’re not building enough low-carbon electric plants to keep up.
“Energy investment is misaligned with where the world appears to be heading, and also far out of step with where it needs to go,” the authors of the report wrote. The graph below suggests that the world needs to double the amount it’s investing in low-carbon energy systems every year to have a reasonable chance of avoiding 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels.
At least the amount of government money flowing to science is increasing. And funding for energy research and development is going up.
But even that silver lining has its cloud: The money going to research isn’t keeping up with economic growth in many countries. Even though Europe’s overall economy grew last year, the European Union put a smaller percentage of its money into energy inventions.
These days politicians mostly agree that the risks of climate change are dire, but policies haven’t shifted with the rhetoric. In this snapshot, global movement toward a carbon-free energy system looks more like a tentative tiptoe than a sprint.
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Forget the hype. Here’s the state of clean energy in 6 charts.
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After Standing Rock, protesting pipelines can get you a decade in prison and $100K in fines
Cherri Foytlin and her fellow protestors spent much of last summer suspended 35-feet in the air in “sky pods” tied to cypress trees. They were hoping to block the Bayou Bridge Pipeline from running through their part of Louisiana.
At the time, Energy Transfer Partners was building the pipeline to move oil between Texas and St. James Parish in southern Louisiana, crisscrossing through the Atchafalaya Basin, one of the largest swamps in the country. Foytlin and others with the group L’Eau Est La Vie (“Water Is Life”) set up wooden platforms between trees along the proposed path of the pipeline. The construction crew couldn’t build the pipeline with a protestor dangling above.
Though the protesters were on private land with the landowner’s permission, some were eventually arrested by St. Martin’s Parish Sheriff’s deputies in mid August. The pipeline was completed in March, yet Foytlin could still face up to five years in prison and $1,000 in fines.
That’s because Louisiana’s Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, signed HB 727 into law last spring, making trespassing on “critical infrastructure” property a much more serious crime than garden-variety trespassing. What was once a misdemeanor is now a felony. The law takes a broad view of what’s “critical”: pipelines, natural gas plants, and other facilities, as well as property on a proposed pipeline route, even if the pipeline isn’t there yet.
Foytlin is one of at least 16 people in Louisiana who’ve been arrested and charged with felonies under the new law, according to Loyola University law professor Bill Quigley, who’s representing Foytlin. All of them were jailed and had to post bonds, some as high as $20,000 to get out. The district attorney hasn’t officially charged any of them yet, Quigley said.
“These are people saying let’s make sure we have something left for future generations in the most beautiful swamp in the world,” Foytlin said. “And for that we were charged with felonies, we were beaten, we were stepped on, I was choked.” To her, the law allows the state to jail people for unpopular political views. (Messages left with the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Office weren’t returned.)
The effort to punish pipeline protestors has spread across states with ample oil and gas reserves in the last two years and, in some cases, has garnered bipartisan support. Besides Louisiana, four other states — Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota and Iowa — have enacted similar laws after protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline generated national attention and inspired a wave of civil disobedience.
Just last week in Texas, House lawmakers passed a bill that makes interfering with some oil and gas operations makes interfering with operations at oil and gas facilities a third-degree felony — on par with indecent exposure to a child.
Lawmakers in at least seven other states, including Minnesota, Kentucky, and Illinois, are considering similar legislation.
All these efforts have garnered broad support from the oil and gas industry. And many of the bills bear a startling resemblance to model legislation being pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative nonprofit backed by the Koch Brothers.
They have a lot in common. For starters, they heighten penalties for damaging oil and gas infrastructure and for trespassing with the intent to disrupt operations. Some mete out punishments of up to 10 years in prison and $100,000 in fines. Others would penalize organizations that “aid” protesters, making environmental groups liable for the actions of their members.
“This law is unnecessary,” said Elly Page, an attorney with International Center for Not for-Profit Law, a group that has been tracking this legislation around the country. “Trespass is already a criminal offense under the law. Damaging private property is already a criminal offense. These create really egregious penalties for conduct that’s already penalized.”
The forces behind the scenes
By the beginning of 2017, hundreds of protesters at Standing Rock had spent months clashing with law enforcement and private security guards hired by the pipeline company Energy Transfer Partners. Videos of law enforcement blasting protesters with water cannons had gone viral, and the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe filed suit to block the pipeline. Inspired by those protests, a coalition of Native American and environmental activists in Oklahoma announced they planned to stop construction of the Diamond Pipeline, which would carry oil from Cushing, Oklahoma to Tennessee.
That February, a Republican member of Oklahoma’s state House, Representative Mark McBride sponsored a bill raising penalties for trespassers on property with oil and gas infrastructure and holding any “person or entity that compensates or remunerates a person for trespassing” liable. McBride said at the time that the idea for the bill came from protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. When asked how he would define “compensates,” he punted, saying it “would be for the courts to decide.”
Gov. Mary Fallin signed McBride’s bill into law three months later, along with another piece of legislation that created penalties for protesting near facilities considered “critical infrastructure.” Protesters in Oklahoma can now face a fine of up to $1,000 and six months in jail, and organizations that “compensate” them are liable for up to $1 million.
That caught the attention of ALEC. The influential group takes corporate money and drafts ready-made legislation for lobbyists and lawmakers. It has been behind the effort to exempt Big Oil from having to disclose chemicals in fracking fluids and pushed so-called ag-gag laws, which stymie undercover investigations of agricultural operations.
At a national conference organized by ALEC in December 2017, the group’s Energy, Environment, and Agriculture task force proposed a model bill titled the “Critical Infrastructure Protection Act.” A few months later, ALEC’s board signed off on the bill, and it soon appeared on the organization’s website. Bills with similar language then began cropping up in state legislatures.
In March 2018, then-Louisiana State Representative Major Thibaut, a Democrat, introduced HB 727, the one that landed Foytlin in jail. That same month, Wyoming and Minnesota passed similar legislation which was later vetoed by their governors.
Oil and gas lobbyists have also been backing legislation penalizing protestors. In state after state, representatives for Big Oil were an overwhelming majority of those testifying and registering as lobbyists in support of the proposals.
This January, a lobbyist working with the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers wrote to Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant’s policy advisor promoting legislation “to provide for criminal penalties for those who wilfully and illegally trespass, disrupt, destroy” oil and gas facilities. The lobbyist noted in his email that he was “expecting a bill from Chairman [Angela] Cockerham and Chairman [Sally] Doty,” two members of the state’s legislature representing each side of the aisle. Doty and Cockerham introduced bills that fit his description in the Mississippi House and Senate that week.
The second wave
Environmental advocates who’ve been tracking these anti-protest bills say 2019 has ushered in a second wave of them. And ALEC appears to be cheering them on. In February, as a cold snap gripped the Midwest and Northeast, ALEC’s Grant Kidwell sent an email to members of the group’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture task force noting that Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, and Wyoming had introduced legislation with similar language to their model bill. “The frigid temperatures brought by the polar vortex this week serve as a reminder of the important [sic] of energy infrastructure,” he wrote. “Thankfully, states have recognized the important [sic] of critical infrastructure and are moving to protect it.”
[Copies of the ALEC newsletter and emails by lobbyists were obtained by Documented, a watchdog group that tracks corporate influence on public policy, and provided to Grist.]
Texas has seen a handful of prominent pipeline fights in recent years, including ones opposing the Trans-Pecos pipeline near the Texas-Mexico border and the southern segment of the Keystone XL pipeline. Environmental groups and landowners are currently trying to stop construction of the Permian Highway pipeline, a 430-mile conduit to move natural gas from West Texas to the Gulf Coast.
The legislation could have a chilling effect on private landowners who’ve played a large role in fighting pipelines in Texas, said Judith McGeary of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, an advocacy group for independent farmers.
Valero has been building a pipeline through McGeary’s 165-acre farm in central Texas. A few weeks ago, McGeary, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, said she found a swastika painted on the pipeline on her property. Suspecting that members of the construction crew were involved, she locked the gates to her farm and demanded that Valero send new workers. McGeary said Valero responded by threatening to sue for up to $500,000 in damages for interfering with construction. (Valero did not respond to a request for comment.)
“This was a horrible experience for us as it was,” she said. “We look at this legislation and they could’ve been threatening to have the sheriff come and pursue us for third degree felonies — for locking the gate for a weekend. It’s an incredible overreach.”
Environmental advocates see a key difference between the states that considered such bills last year and this year. In 2018, the vast majority were Republican-controlled and had significant oil and gas resources. Now the effort is spreading to states run mostly by Democrats, like Illinois, and devoid of large oil and gas deposits, like Kentucky. Illinois, for instance, is considering a bill that would make trespassing on critical infrastructure property a Class 4 felony, in line with obstruction of justice, criminal sexual abuse, and parental kidnapping.
‘Damn it, we’re going to go all in.’
Activists and First Amendment advocates are fighting back. In South Dakota, after Governor Kristi Noem championed bills that prohibit “riot-boosting” and enable the government to collect damages from protesters, the Oglala Sioux Tribe told her she’s “not welcome” on their reservation.
“These are our lands and our water,” the tribe’s president, Julian Bear Runner, wrote in a letter to Noem. “If you do not honor this directive … we will have no choice but to banish you.”
The ACLU has also filed suit challenging South Dakota’s new law on behalf of a handful of environmental and indigenous rights groups. Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney with the ACLU, pointed to one provision that allows the government to collect damages from protesters and use the money to cover the expenses of law enforcement.
“Meaning, essentially, if you protest the pipeline and are held liable under this law, you have to pay damages, and you are in fact funding this thing that you protested,” Eidelman said.
Quigley, the law professor representing Foytlin, said he plans on challenging Louisiana’s law as unconstitutional in federal court. “The law infringes on the First Amendment right to protest by being so vague that it can be used in an arbitrary and discriminatory manner as it was [with Foytlin],” he said.
For her part, Foytlin says such laws won’t deter her or other advocates from protesting pipelines. In fact, they might backfire.
“People will continue to go to prison.” she said. “They think that by upping the punishment they’re going to keep people from protesting, but what will happen is we’re going to do things that are more worth getting the felony. Because now if we’re going to jail, then damn it, we’re going to go all in.”
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After Standing Rock, protesting pipelines can get you a decade in prison and $100K in fines
New map shows all the cities leading the world in climate action
Have you heard about the A list? It’s harder to clinch a spot on it than it is to score an invite to the Met Gala. And your city may be on it.
An environmental impact nonprofit called the CDP (formerly known as the carbon disclosure project) just released a list of cities that led the world in environmental performance last year. Only 43 metropolises got As in the organization’s first-ever assessment, and nearly half of them are in the United States!
Twenty-one cities in the United States made the list. And a whopping nine cities in the San Francisco Bay area got As, too — making up 21 percent of all the cities on the list. Cities all across the map — like Cape Town, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, and Paris — qualified as A-listers, as well.
So what kind of policies get you on the A list? Five of the U.S. cities are on the path to carbon neutrality by 2050 — a target that is emerging as the gold standard of decarbonization: Boston; Indianapolis; Seattle; Washington, D.C.; and West Palm Beach, Florida. Those cities may be leading the charge, but they are not alone: the Sierra Club’s Ready For 100 campaign has calculated that more than 90 U.S. cities have set or are in the process of setting 100 percent renewable energy targets.
The CDP determined the way each city scored by looking at things like climate risk and vulnerability, whether the city in question had a climate change adaptation strategy, how many emissions that city produces, and more. Of the 596 cities the nonprofit ranked, it only publicly disclosed the cities that got an A.
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New map shows all the cities leading the world in climate action
Watch John Oliver explain the Green New Deal like only he can
In typical John Oliver rapidly-switching-between-serious-and-satirical style, Last Week Tonight’s latest episode discussed the Green New Deal. And by ‘discussed,’ what we really mean is: He considered riding a sled pulled by 400 hamsters, made Trump jokes, and explained why carbon taxing may be an important tool in the climate fight.
In the nearly 20-minute piece, Oliver covered a lot of ground. He first described the Green New Deal and the frenzy of media coverage from both sides that has followed.
“However bumpy its rollout was, to its eternal credit, the Green New Deal has succeeded in getting people talking,” Oliver said. “But that won’t mean anything unless that talk turns to actions, and putting a price on carbon could be one of them.”
He then dove into carbon pricing. Using science icon Bill Nye the Science Guy to explain the concept, Oliver tried to make the idea of introducing a new tax a little more feasible and innocuous.
“[A carbon tax] will not be enough on its own by a long shot,” Oliver said in one of his moments of gravity. “We’re going to need a lot of different policies working in tandem, and we have to take action right now!”
And then, with an angry flourish, Bill Nye took a torch to a model of Earth.
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Watch John Oliver explain the Green New Deal like only he can
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Which cities have concrete strategies for environmental justice?
This story was originally published by CityLab and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Just as it is now, Fifth Avenue has long been home to expensive shops drawing not only wealthy New Yorkers, but moneyed visitors. In 1916, when the shop merchants in the Fifth Avenue Association voiced concerns about congestion and declining land values affecting their profits, New York City introduced zoning as a legal apparatus. It was a new concept.
The merchants felt that their land values would be affected by the tall skyscrapers being built near Fifth Avenue to house the garment industry. And they didn’t want the people working in the garment industry to mix with their wealthy shoppers. Zoning’s beginnings had a lot to do with the exclusion of low-income people from certain areas of the city, and in the intervening century, zoning has continued to be used to confine low-income people and people of color to particular areas of a city.
Environmental hazards like hazardous waste facilities, fossil fuel storage, and transportation sites, and other polluting industrial facilities are disproportionally located in communities of color and low-income communities. But a new report from The New School’s Tishman Environment and Design Center shows how tools to enact environmental justice can come from the toolbox of injustice.
The report notes that, “examples of racial zoning are ubiquitous in planning history.” These same local zoning codes and land-use policies are now being used to address both existing and future pollution sources concentrated in low-income communities and communities of color. The report’s authors write: “If zoning and land use policies got us into this mess, they have the potential to get us out of it.”
So, what are these policies that promote environmental justice and where are they being implemented?
Bans on specific land uses and industries
In 1910, Baltimore, Maryland, became the first U.S. city to pass a residential segregation ordinance. After a 1917 Supreme Court ruling against racial segregation in housing, Baltimore employed other strategies to “exclude people of color from the financial benefits of homeownership,” according to the report. These actions laid the groundwork for today’s racial disparities in the city. In 2018, environmental justice advocates, including local neighborhood groups and national environmental groups with local chapters, successfully pushed for a ban on new crude oil terminals in Baltimore. Although federal law doesn’t allow municipalities to completely regulate commercial rail traffic, Baltimore was able to use its jurisdiction over land use and zoning for the city’s ban.
Baltimore is one of six cities (Chicago, Portland, Oakland, Seattle, and Whatcom County are the others) that the report identifies as prohibiting outright certain land uses and industries determined to be harmful for public health and the environment. Although locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) are often associated with residents trying to guard property values and “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) sentiment, the report argues that, in communities which face environmental injustice, LULUs “take on a wholly different meaning in the context of structural racism, patterns of uneven development” as well as the disproportionate impacts from pollution.
Broad environmental justice programs
New York City, San Francisco, and Fulton County, Georgia, have all enacted broad environmental justice policies and programs, the study’s authors find.
In 2000, San Francisco launched an environmental justice program. Since then it has earmarked more than $12 million in grants for local community projects serving environmental justice areas, and allocated resources to address health inequities, air quality, and renewable and efficient energy.
New York City’s policies, adopted in 2017, required a study of environmental justice areas and established an interagency group to create an environmental justice plan.
And in 2010, Fulton County started an environmental justice initiative that resulted in policies requiring the health impact on minority and low-income populations to be considered in decisions about land use planning and zoning.
Environmental review processes
Most municipalities already have processes, through planning and zoning boards, in which they review new development or expansion proposals. However, not all cities consider the effect of these development proposals on vulnerable or historically overburdened communities as part of the process.
Fulton County, Georgia; San Francisco, California; Camden and Newark, New Jersey; and Boston University have processes in place to review at least some types of new development through an environmental justice lens.
Proactive planning
Some cities also further environmental justice proactively through comprehensive plans (also called general plans, master plans, or land-use plans) that guide future development and establish new standards. Eugene, Oregon; National City, California; Washington, D.C.; and Fulton County, Georgia, all used their comprehensive plans or master plans to devise goals for working toward environmental justice. For example, in 2011, Washington, D.C. added a section in their comprehensive plan with policies that aim to protect all communities from “disproportionate exposure” to hazards as the city grows.
Seattle’s Public Utility Agency, which has significant land assets in historically overburdened communities, worked to make targeted investments to lessen pollution in these areas. And Los Angeles, California, used the concept of “green zones” in a 2016 policy called Clean Up Green Up Ordinance, establishing a Clean Up Green Up district within Boyle Heights, Pacoima/Sun Valley, and Wilmington, where the city applies more strict development standards for new construction and works to reduce negative health impacts. In 2017, Minneapolis, Minnesota, put forth a city council resolution aimed at green zones in order to improve heath and promote sustainable economic development.
Targeting existing land uses and public health codes
Although the above approaches are helpful for furthering environmental justice in future development, they don’t typically apply to existing land uses harmful to public health and the environment.
Huntington and National City, California; Washington, D.C.; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission all have policies targeting existing land uses. For example, National City grappled for a long time with “an excess of polluting industries due to mixed-use industrial and residential zoning,” according to the report. Now, National City has an amortization ordinance, which phases out industries near sensitive areas and includes a process for relocating businesses.
Additionally, San Francisco and Richmond, California; Chicago, Illinois; Detroit, Michigan; and Erie, Colorado have all used public health codes to protect people from air pollutants. San Francisco, for instance, passed a public health code article in 2014 that strengthened ventilation requirements in buildings within air pollution exposure zones.
The report also notes that when it comes to decisions about where pollution and environmental hazards are located, it’s mostly up to local governments. “This localization of efforts opened up the opportunity to hold local leaders and agencies more accountable,” the authors write. “The insights gained from these policies will fuel a new era of environmental justice policies taking a holistic approach to achieving environmental justice.”
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Which cities have concrete strategies for environmental justice?
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