It didn’t come as much of a surprise last month when Donald Trump ceremonially pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord claiming that reducing greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to avert the worst impacts of a warming planet would simply be too expensive. That’s just the kind of divorced from reality logic we’ve come to expect from a man obsessed with rolling back all of his predecessor's accomplishments at any cost.
President Obama signed onto the Paris agreement in 2015 and pushed through his signature climate policy, the Clean Power Plan, to help make the transition away from coal-fired power plants a reality. Upon taking office, Trump killed the plan and immediately pushed to expand oil drilling and fracking making it clear he has no fucks to give about climate change and zero qualms about isolating the United States as the only country on the planet unwilling to commit to keeping global temperatures from reaching 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels–the tipping point climate scientists say would lock the planet into an apocalyptic tailspin of irreversible climate chaos eventually wiping low-lying places like most of Florida’s coast right off the map by the end of the century.
“I’m not sure what’s going on in your country but this isn’t a conspiracy theory,” Piers Forster, an irritated atmospheric physicist at the University of Leeds told me at the start of the 25th annual United Nations Climate Change Summit in Madrid last week. “This is the best scientific forecast available based on what the latest data is telling us.”
And it’s getting worse. Much worse. 2019 saw the hottest summer in 140 years of record keeping. Sea ice in the arctic and antarctic shrank to historic lows and wildfires raged across the globe. To anyone paying attention, things are not going well at all. This was the state of affairs as the UN convened for the first two weeks of December to attempt to iron out a rulebook for cutting carbon emissions before 2020 without the US on board. Despite the hundreds of thousands of climate activists who have brought the issue into public consciousness this year by staging a steady stream of protests and “climate strikes” in cities around the world, global leaders failed to move forward in enacting concrete action to meet the goals of the Paris Accord.
Complete tragedy on the global stage, but there are slivers of hope locally. Despite Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Accord, hundreds of state, county, and city governments in the US have stepped up under the banner of #wearestillin to pledge to keep their fossil fuel reduction targets under the UN agreement. “We came to Madrid to reassure the world that no matter what you hear from the federal government, there is climate action taking place all over the US,” declared Elan Strait, director of the We Are Still In an initiative with the World Wildlife Fund.
The WWF claims that more than 3,800 mayors, county executives, governors, business, faith, and university leaders have signed on to the pledge to support climate action to meet the Paris Agreement requirements. “These are local leaders taking steps to reduce their emissions and they really add up,” emphasized Strait. “It’s possible to get within striking distance of the US target under the Paris Accord without the federal government.”
What precise steps these local players are taking to reduce carbon emissions vary greatly. Locally, both Tampa and St. Petersburg have signed onto the We Are Still In pledge but thus far only St. Petersburg has enacted a plan to get there. The city’s Integrated Sustainability Action Plan adopted in April sets an ambitious agenda for transitioning to 100% clean energy and includes an inventory for city government & community-wide energy use, measurable targets, and a preliminary assessment of vulnerability to extreme weather and sea-level rise.
The plan has won praise from local environmental leaders for working with the community to develop comprehensive solutions. “St. Pete was the first in the South to pledge to transition to clean, renewable energy by 2050,” said Phil Compton, Senior Organizer with the Sierra Club. The Pinellas cities of Largo, Dunedin, and Safety Harbor have followed suit.
Meanwhile, across the bay, Tampa is struggling to catch up. After an initial resiliency study a decade ago, the city sat on its hands for eight years under Mayor Buckhorn with nothing but the occasional feel-good platitude regarding any real commitment to address climate change. Mayor Jane Castor campaigned on making climate change a priority in her administration and recently signed onto the Climate Mayor’s Steering Committee, which aims to coordinate local efforts to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. Last month, her Chief of Staff John Bennett traveled to the Netherlands to study climate resiliency strategies and the city has hired a firm to conduct a nationwide search for a sustainability officer for the city, a position Castor promised to create when she took office May 1st.
“I do believe the mayor is sincere about making climate change a priority,” said Compton who intends to begin working with the Tampa City Council in January on putting the pieces in place for the city to sign the Ready for 100 pledge. “We have a lot of work to do. We’re the smoggiest city in the state.”
Compton notes that tailpipes are the number one source of carbon emissions. HART has invested in alternative energy vehicles but the compressed natural gas buses they purchased reduce some particulates but have a negligible impact on carbon emissions. They produce 200 times more methane than a diesel bus.
“We can do better,” he said. We have to. As 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg said after she led a march of thousands through the streets of Madrid during the UN climate summit, “the eyes of the future generations are upon us, if we fail them, they won’t forgive us.”
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This article appears in Dec 19-26, 2019.