What Your City Can Do to Tackle Climate Change

Pasadena City Hall on a hot day (Photo – Gnawme).

The U.S. federal government has not provided much hope to climate advocates. The GOP administration has launched a full-scale assault on climate policies. But even under Obama’s administration, the level of action to tackle greenhouse gas emissions was not on pace with what’s needed to avert catastrophic warming.

By Ethan Elkind

But fortunately cities and states can do a lot on their own. America’s Pledge, an initiative co-founded by California Gov. Jerry Brown and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, recently released a report that provides “bottom-up” strategies for cities, states, and businesses to address climate change. As Utility Dive summarized, the ten opportunity areas include the following:

1. Expanding renewable energy
2. Accelerating retirement of coal power
3. Retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency
4. Electrifying buildings’ energy use
5. Accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles
6. Phasing out the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs)
7. Preventing methane leaks from gas wells
8. Reducing methane leaks in cities
9. Increasing carbon sequestration on land
10. Establishing state and regional carbon markets

All of these areas do not necessarily require federal policy support (although it would be helpful), and many involve limiting emissions from powerful “short-lived climate pollutants” like methane and HFCs (I would also highlight land use and transit policies to promote smart growth as an important area of focus).

Local policies

Straightforward examples at this level of policy making include developing energy efficiency building codes, steering municipal utilities to procure more renewable energy and energy storage, and providing incentives for electric vehicle adoption, such as through more charging stations and municipal fleet purchases.

But developing these policies at the state and local levels is more than just an effort to salvage climate policy in the face of federal inaction. We should be pursuing these policies anyway, for multiple reasons. Specifically, state and local action:

• Creates a decentralized web of climate policies that can’t be reversed with one bad national election that might deliver Congress or the presidency to climate deniers — producing more policy stability overall.
• Fosters local innovation that might result in successful programs or technologies that can scale nationwide or globally.
• Provides more accountability and flexibility on policy implementation, since decision makers will be in close proximity to those affected by the policies, both good and bad.

So while federal inaction on climate change can be a source of frustration and potential peril, it may also provide us with a good excuse to take action that needed to happen anyway — a silver lining on an otherwise dark storm cloud.

Ethan Elkind directs the climate program at UC Berkeley Law, with a joint appointment at UCLA Law. His book “Railtown” was published by the University of California Press.