Written by Greg Harman & Courtney Naquin
The climate crisis is an existential threat to all life on Earth. To slow the overheating of the biosphere--driven primarily by fossil fuels--millions of people around the world marched last month to demand rapid and aggressive action from their governments in crafting effective responses. Turning out by the hundreds over several days, the residents of San Antonio were no different.
In the near-term, rising temps associated with our destabilized climate system are already contributing to worsening air quality in a county designated as an ozone nonattainment area in 2018. Stronger storms hitting our state poses a rising threat in the greater San Antonio known as “flash flood alley.” Already, historical inequities mean low-income residents, mostly people of color, bear the brunt of these impacts thanks to development patterns, urban deforestation, and the urban heat island effect. Worse: We know that global warming is set to transform our city into a land of perpetual (blistering) summer--with life-threatening temps over 100 degrees predicted to run unabated for months on end. If, that is, the world fails to act.
In view of these realities, climate-focused rallies in San Antonio have picked up since Donald Trump announced on June 1, 2017, that he was beginning the process to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement, a voluntary international framework intended to help the world’s nations reduce emissions and avoid catastrophic and potentially irreversible destabilization of Earth’s climate system. This also inspired San Antonio to join the global youth-led climate strikes just a few weeks ago.
Real action seemed underway this past January, when the first version of San Antonio’s Climate Action and Adaptation Plan (CAAP) was drafted. The CAAP is intended to eliminate San Antonio’s contribution to global climate pollution while preparing the city to better weather the changes already coming down the climate pipe.
That first draft showed clearly that the Sierra Club and our many partners within the Climate Action SA coalition were not able to get the plan San Antonio most needed. City-owned CPS Energy’s role in our pollution crisis was downplayed and nowhere was the need for rapid retirement of our coal units highlighted.
The plan got weaker after a string of revisions undertaken, in part, due to unfavorable feedback from those who would rather have no plan at all; namely, Valero Energy, San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, and SA Manufacturer’s Association. What is still worth supporting is the inclusion of an interim goal of 41 percent emission reductions by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050. Virtually everything having to do with implementation has been left up to the community to figure out after the expected plan adoption on October 17.
From Version One to Version Two
San Antonio’s original CAAP seemed to have two types of critics: those who thought it was too ambitious, and those who thought it wasn’t ambitious enough. The CAAP was challenged regularly by those demanding aggressive interim carbon reduction targets on the way to “net-zero” emissions community-wide by 2050. Sadly, many of those demands—unlike those from Valero Energy and CPS Energy—went largely unheeded.
The first CAAP was also pilloried by spokespeople for manufacturers association and chamber. By removing a complicated web of deadlines and dollar signs in the first draft, a loosely structured outline for eventual implementation, the Office of Sustainability and plan advocates hope Version Two will prove more “palatable” to the business interests who resisted Version One.
In the words of Brendan Gibbons at the Rivard Report, the CAAP has been “stripped of its most controversial strategies to cut greenhouse gas emissions, while still asserting that San Antonio can be carbon-neutral by 2050.”
There was considerable push back from dozens of those volunteer CAAP committee members who no longer saw their work reflected in Version 2. Many of the complaints have been echoed in the local media. The San Antonio Express-News said that the new version of CAAP is “woefully short on specifics,” and calls CPS Energy’s Spruce 2 coal plant the “elephant in the room when it comes to our local discussion about climate change, emissions and electricity rates.”
CPS Energy, the largest municipal utility in Texas, has worked hard behind the scenes to keep coal in San Antonio’s climate action plan, in part because they believe they will still profit off this polluting technology. This is despite Synapse Energy’s recently published report detailing how CPS Energy’s Spruce 1 and 2 coal plants are not only bad for public health and the environment - it’s entirely uneconomical.
CPS Energy lost more than $390 million on its failed bid to expand the South Texas Project nuclear complex. And the coal plant, we now know with near certainty, thanks to the Synapse report, will be losing tens of millions per year going forward compared against the cost of building new renewable energy projects and battery power ready to take its place.
“Fossil fuels,” “coal sources,” “energy capacity,” “shifting technologies.” This is the domain of CPS Energy, our city-owned electric and natural gas utility. Worse than failing to address Spruce head-on, the new CAAP now formally recognizes CPS’s poorly conceived “Flex Path” as setting the strategies and pace for zeroing out its share of the climate pollution that is deteriorating this planet’s life-support system.
The devil’s in the details
The differences between the two CAAPs are in the subtle changes of language, but leave many targets and goals open to interpretation. The softening starts from the topline narrative.
VERSION 1 (PDF): “DECARBONIZE THE GRID. Work with CPS Energy to continue to reduce the emissions factor of supplied electricity to reach an emissions factor of 0.0 kg CO2e / kWh by 2050.”
became...
VERSION 2 (PDF): “REDUCE THE CARBON INTENSITY OF SAN ANTONIO’S ENERGY SUPPLY. Work with CPS Energy on the implementation of their ‘Flexible Path’ to drive towards carbon neutrality by 2050.”
As significant as it is to move from net-zero to “towards carbon neutrality,” CPS CEO Paula Gold-Williams appears most concerned about guarding CPS Energy’s turf from perceived meddling by the public and city electeds and bureaucracy. Language that would have established an energy generation committee made up of CPS staff, City of San Antonio employees, and community members was scrapped.
CPS rejected public input during past fights over coal plants and nuclear power. Likewise, critiques of the Flex Path schedule have been swept aside. Gold-Williams has insisted the City-owned utility will not be held to account by a municipal climate plan implementing a more cooperative generation planning process. It has “other investors” to appease first. Public health, the climate, and residents of San Antonio are a sub-priority to CPS Energy executives.
Rallying for accountability
Enshrining CPS as the unchallenged authority on energy generation decisions within the CAAP will make gaining new controls going forward ever more difficult. If we have to wait 3-5 years for the next CAAP update, as is likely should Version Two be approved as is, the odds of scrubbing Spruce’s 7.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution from the air as early as is required grow frighteningly difficult.
While CPS Energy wants to present itself to the public like climate heroes, many residents of San Antonio know better, and are still demanding accountability.
Just a few weeks ago, San Antonio residents and activists joined the global youth-led Cimate Strike. About 100 people filled a corner of San Antonio’s Main Plaza on Friday, September 20, passing the mic around encouraging each other to describe their fears, desires, frustrations, and hopes for the future, with the youngest and most reticent receiving cheers.
Roughly 150 residents who either missed Friday’s events or hadn’t had their fill returned to take over Main Plaza on Saturday morning. Mayor Nirenberg, who has been generally sympathetic and supportive of San Antonio’s environmental movements, was also in attendance - though climate protesters did not necessarily give him a warm welcome.
As Nicholas Frank and Brendan Gibbons wrote at the Rivard Report, “Before Nirenberg addressed the crowd, some people had taped signs up to the side of the Municipal Plaza Building. “Nirenberg, we know who owns you,” one of the signs read. Nirenberg referenced it in his speech.
“You own me,” Nirenberg said. “The people of this community own me.”
A handful of people in the audience heckled the mayor, with some shouting of “shame,” “shut down the coal plants,” and “hold CPS [Energy] accountable.” Many more in the crowd cheered when Nirenberg urged them to support the passing of the CAAP on Oct. 17.
With the vote approaching in less than two weeks, the Global Climate Strike had strong local resonance. “I hope they can see how important it is to us,” rally participant Vanessa Ramon later told Spectrum News. “We’re going to do all that we can to save our earth.”
Judging by the nature of the edits made on CPS’s behalf, the City utility’s leadership expects they will be able to buy their way out of their pollution with carbon credits. Possibly, they are banking on the ultimate arrival of that oxymoron “clean” coal. Whatever technical arguments motivates them to continue to insist they may be burning coal into the 2060s, the political reality is that our mayor and council are letting them run the table on the plan.
Given the crisis we are facing together, the ultimate success of the CAAP can’t be left to CPS Energy. Our mayor, our council, and our communities must rein in our utility. We can start by re-inserting language deleted from Version 1 at CPS Energy’s request: Energy generations decisions can’t be trusted to CPS alone. It is time to put the “public” back in City Public Service.