Legislators in Colorado, historically a major coal state, have passed more than 50 climate-related laws since 2019. The liquor store in the farming town of Morris, Minnesota, cools its beer with solar energy. Voters in Athens, Ohio, imposed a carbon tax on themselves. Citizens in Fairfax County, Virginia, teamed up for a year and a half to draft a 214-page climate action plan.
Across the country, communities and states are accelerating their efforts to fight climate change as action stalls nationally. This week, the Supreme Court curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, one of the largest sources of pollution from global warming — the latest example of how the Biden administration’s climate tools are being used. wiped out.
During the Trump administration, which aggressively weakened environmental and climate protection, local efforts gained in importance. Now, experts say, local action is even more important for the United States — which ranks second to China in emissions — to have a chance to help the world avoid the worst effects of global warming.
This patchwork approach is not a substitute for a coordinated national strategy. Local governments have limited reach, authority and funding.
But as the legislative and regulatory options available in Washington, DC, become increasingly limited: “States are really critical to helping the country as a whole meet our climate goals,” said Kyle Clark-Sutton, analysis team manager for the United States. program at RMI, a clean energy think tank. “They have a real chance to lead. They have been leading.”
For example, New York and Colorado are on track to reduce electricity-related emissions by 80 percent or more by 2030, compared to 2005 levels, according to new scorecards from the RMI.
By removing partisan politics from community discussions on climate policy, it is sometimes possible to reach a consensus that has been difficult to achieve at the national level.
That’s what happened in Morris, a Minnesota town of about 5,000, not far from the South Dakota border. There, the University of Minnesota Morris campus leans politically to the left, while the surrounding farming communities lean to the right. But both communities support – and helped shape – the “Morris Model,” which calls for a 30 percent reduction in energy use by 2030, locally producing 80 percent of the county’s electricity by 2030 (ensuring that it comes from renewable sources) and eliminating landfill waste by 2025.
“We’ve never focused on climate as something to talk about because it’s not necessary,” said Blaine Hill, the city manager, noting the benefits of lower utility bills and more local economic activity from the locally produced power. “You can get around that and just start working on things.”
Morris has solar panels on his community center, library, liquor store and town hall. It has installed an electric vehicle charging station at the supermarket and is working on a composting program. The university has solar panels on poles, high enough for cows to graze underneath, and two wind turbines.
The Biden Administration’s Environmental Agenda
President Biden is pushing for tougher regulations but faces a narrow path to achieving his goals in the fight against global warming.
The University of Minnesota’s West Central Research and Outreach Center uses wind energy to make fertilizer for crops growing beneath the turbines — bypassing the traditional, emissions-intensive process of making fertilizer, which is normally extracted from petroleum.
Mike Reese, the research center’s director of renewable energy, said it didn’t matter that he had political differences with Troy Goodnough, director of sustainability at the University of Minnesota Morris.
“Troy is on the more liberal side, I’m on the more conservative side,” said Mr Reese. “But we also share the same philosophies when it comes to climate change, resilience, but most importantly, generating wealth and improving our community for generations to come.”
Mr Goodnough said the campus often helped showcase technologies that were later adopted by the city. That has helped residents consider options they would otherwise have rejected.
“I have people come up to me and say, ‘Hey, how did you do that solar system on your roof?'” Mr. Hill said. “‘That looks pretty cool.'”
One advantage of community strategies is that they can be adapted to the needs of the local economy – in Morris’s case, agriculture.
A sprawling, hot and car-dependent city, Phoenix has focused on using electric vehicles and mitigating the effects of life-threatening heat waves.
The city has allocated $6 million to plant trees in mostly poor neighborhoods. It has installed 40 miles of cool pavement, which can lower nighttime temperatures. And it has a plan to bring 280,000 electric vehicles on city roads by 2030.
The city council committee that developed that plan includes elected officials as well as representatives from utilities, automakers and environmental justice groups. It hosted a meeting between housing developers — who were reluctant to install electric vehicle charging stations in new buildings — and representatives from Ford and General Motors. Councilor Yassamin Ansari said the session seemed to help developers realize that installing chargers was in line with market trends.
As conversations move from the municipal to the state level, they tend to become more partisan.
Colorado only passed sweeping climate legislation after Democrats took control of both houses of the legislature in 2018. gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, was elected that year on a platform to achieve 100 percent clean energy in the state by 2040, and the pivot — the 2019 HB 1261, which called for emissions to be 90 percent below levels by 2050. 2005 – was passed without Republican support.
But outside of the state legislature, that law and dozens of subsequent laws have received support from some unlikely places.
KC Becker, who served as Speaker of the Colorado House from 2019 to 2021, said meetings with unions representing oil and gas workers “were a big part of getting something done.” (Mrs. Becker, now a regional administrator for the EPA, spoke in her capacity as a former legislator, not on behalf of the agency.) A temptation: the creation of an Office of Just Transition to help fossil fuel workers find new jobs. Lawmakers have allocated $15 million to it this year.
Colorado’s largest electricity suppliers, Xcel Energy and the Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association Inc., were also on board. Both plan to shut down their last coal plants in the state by 2030.
Between the election and inauguration of Mr. Polis, Xcel voluntarily pledged to cut its CO2 emissions by 80 percent by 2030. Lawmakers then offered an incentive for other utilities: If they submitted a plan that would hit the same figure, the state air commission would reduce their 2030 emissions.
“The vast majority of them ended up going beyond what the rules require,” said Will Toor, the executive director of the Colorado Energy Office. “It created a dynamic where everyone could declare victory.”
Colorado still has a lot of work to do. RMI found that while it was on track to meet its 2030 reduction target in the electricity sector, current policies would reduce its total emissions by just 33 percent by 2030 — less than the 50 percent it has pledged. (That projection doesn’t take into account some recent legislation.)
The gap is in sectors such as buildings and transportation, where it is more difficult to reduce emissions “because a large number of individual households have to make decisions to buy an electric car or an electric stove or just more efficient appliances,” Stacy says. Tellinghuizen, the climate. policy manager for Western Resource Advocates, a nonprofit that operates in Colorado and six other states.
The climate plan in Fairfax County, Virginia, is unusual in part because it was drafted by several dozen community members rather than county officials. In most cases, such programs come from top to bottom.
One of the goals of the plan, approved in September, is to educate county residents about eco-friendly choices they can make. Other plans include solar panels on provincial buildings and a pilot program for electric buses.
“If the community doesn’t get involved, you’ll get to write a nice plan and leave it on the shelf and collect dust,” said Jeffrey C. McKay, the chairman of the County Board of Supervisors.
A group of more than 50 residents heard from experts, researched data, debated and voted on recommendations. The document identified 12 broad strategies in five areas: buildings and energy efficiency, energy supply, transport, waste and natural resources. The strategies were divided into 37 recommended actions and scores of smaller ‘activities’.
Deb Harris, senior director of climate planning at the consulting firm ICF, said Fairfax County was not an example of a specific model that every community should adopt, but rather of tailoring a process to a community. Fairfax is affluent and highly educated, with committed residents who can spend months slicing through policies, she said.
In many other places, money and resources are major constraints.
“The lack of funding to help this work is the main barrier,” said Marianne MacQueen, a councilor in Yellow Springs, Ohio, who uses 80 percent renewable electricity and is trying to plan for reductions in other sectors. . “Our staff is so stretched.”
In the absence of much federal action, the task of helping local governments act on climate falls to independent groups.
Yellow Springs partners with Power a Clean Future Ohio, a nonprofit that does not charge local governments. “The desire to do it and actually perform it is quite another,” said Joe Flarida, the group’s executive director. Local governments have so many immediate concerns, such as road repairs and public safety, that “climate goals will fall on that list if you don’t find a way to close that gap for them.”
When the gap is closed, it can be powerful.
In Athens, a college town in Ohio, in 2018, 76 percent of voters agreed to pay a carbon fee of 0.2 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity used, generating annual revenues of about $100,000 for renewable energy projects. . A survey of greenhouse gas emissions in Athens found that they were among the lowest per capita in the state.
“We’re talking about states that are the labs of democracy, and I think the same probably goes for local jurisdictions,” said Ms Tellinghuisen of Western Resource Advocates. “States can create these templates or examples and show the federal government that progress is really possible.”