By Greg Harman, San Antonio Clean Energy Organizer
Friends of Climate Justice,
We have reasons to celebrate the movement toward the creation of a Climate Action Plan for our city—one of the last large cities in the United States to embark on this journey toward the elimination of fossil fuels. Already we've been lapped by more than 30 U.S. cities who have committed to reaching net-zero greenhouse emissions. A handful of smaller cities have already reached 100 percent renewable energy.
We celebrate first the dozens of San Antonio organizations and hundreds of residents who organized quickly after Trump's June 1, 2017, announcement that he intends to pull out of the historic Paris Agreement on climate change—an agreement that commits the United States to work with the rest of the world to keep global warming from reaching the point it will unleash its most “catastrophic” levels. Because of your organizing we were able to make climate justice a key election priority during a contentious run-off mayoral election.
Thankfully, among our new Mayor Ron Nirenberg's first actions was placing a motion to support the Paris climate accords on the new council's first agenda. The item passed overwhelmingly.
But three months after the San Antonio Resolution in Support of the Paris Agreement was signed, there are many unanswered questions about the scope of the climate action plan—funded with $500,000 from CPS Energy and to be carried out largely by staff at UTSA—that require a full and sustained community engagement to ensure it meets the deepest needs of our neighborhoods and most vulnerable communities.
By resolution, the council committed to “reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adopting and supporting the goals of the Paris Agreement” … [and] “exploring the potential benefits and costs of adopting policies and programs that promote the long-term goal of greenhouse-gases emission reduction while maximizing economic and social co-benefits of such action.”
Last week, members of several social- and environmental-justice communities were briefed by Doug Melnick, director of the City's Office of Sustainability, Hazem Rashed-Ali, UTSA's associate professor of architecture, and Cris Eugster, CPS Energy's chief operating officer: chief players in the creation of this plan.
Melnick admitted that while San Antonio is “late in the game—we're not the last.” If you want to see the long list of U.S. cities who have already committed to reaching 100 renewable energy, check out Sierra Club's Ready for 100 campaign website.
By contrast, while CPS has been an innovator with many renewable energy projects, CPS has still failed to improve upon its 2008 commitment to reach 20 percent renewables in its energy portfolio by 2020.
Next year’s shuttering of “Dirty Deely” is a major step forward. The two-unit coal plant has long blanketed our region with air toxics and ozone-precursors linked to asthma, while pouring a steady stream of pollution into the planet's climate system. Just a few weeks ago, Synapse Energy Economics upped the ante, releasing a compelling justification for the elimination of our two newer coal units, Spruce One and Spruce Two, arguing they should move toward the scrap heap in the coming years for economic reasons.
Spruce 2 (center smoke stack closest to camera)
Photo: Liza Krantz (San Antonio Express-News)
The report received much supportive press, including from the San Antonio Express-News Editorial Board, which opined: “CPS Energy has a coal conundrum with its J.K. Spruce Power Plant. A very expensive and polluting conundrum. The plant is a money loser, with losses estimated at $135 million in 2015 and 2016. It will likely lose money indefinitely.”
In short, it is a promising time in San Antonio to set ambitious and clearly stated clean-energy goals.
While Trump does all he can to revive an 18th century energy source, “King Coal” has already been dethroned by the rapidly falling costs of renewables and natural gas.
So we begin the Climate Action Plan at a propitious moment. Conceptually, the leadership of this burgeoning effort suggested we will be building upon a significant (though far more thorough) SA Tomorrow's Sustainability Plan, which tackled the City's (but not CPS Energy's) greenhouse emissions inventory, attempted to quantify the vulnerabilities of the city from accelerating climate change, and demonstrated dangerous climate trends impacting Texas already.
“Without public support, the plan is not going to go anywhere,” Rashed-Ali warned.
While the process will unavoidably be a rowdy one, with some proposals being more contentious than others, the city's broader social and environmental justice communities will undoubtedly be supporting the effort, expected to be completed in early 2019—at least in its broadest strokes.
For a city already wondering at the pace of gentrification and the shock of the eviction of nearly 300 men, women, and children from Mission Trails Mobile Home Park to make way for high-end town homes, many are also asking how such a major development plan like proposed CAP will respect and honor existing communities. Or how community health and wellbeing will be identified as a fundamental form of climate “resilience” to be prized. Or why we can't step out today and proclaim our commitment to net-zero greenhouse emissions.
San Antonio is a working-class city with incredibly entrenched patterns of systemic violence. These are histories the mayor's amplification of equity-grounded policy processes are intended to address. Equity and community inclusion, we are told, will be key components of the CAP.
But we know the law of unintended consequences, from early coal power development to the Decade of Downtown. The sort of deep transformation a plan that will be restructuring energy generation, mass transportation, “green” development patterns, and water management, among many other major municipal sectors will only succeed with the depth of community-wide creativity and a deep and sustained engagement from the very grassroots of our neighborhoods and communities.
Looking to get involved? Here's a full, regularly updated calendar of upcoming climate justice events in San Antonio.