By San Antonio based organizer Greg Harman
Any 2020 reflection can't help but start with COVID-19 and the corresponding scramble to hold community together in unprecedented times. While some cities swung to Green-New-Deal-inspired principles of just transition to guide recovery efforts (not to mention the tremendous investments by the European Union, new promises from China, etc.), San Antonio's aspiring climate mayor, Ron Nirenberg, reflexively clenched after historic Big Money alliances. The hard-won equity values and sustainability goals enshrined in 2019's Climate Action and Adaptation Plan lost out to the usual cast of influential business interests and top-shelf nonprofits at the expense of more creative, community-led solutions, including those advanced by the Sierra Club.
Yet, energy-justice advocates weren't dissuaded. Faced with a year of dismissals, they launched a recall petition intended to force the closure of our last remaining coal plant and move the locus of utility management from a largely unaccountable board of trustees to the City Council. That decision sparked vigorous opposition from the chambers of commerce, CPS Energy's CEO Paula Gold-Williams, and our mayor. However, after months of misinformation amplified by local media, we've begun to see an inching toward accommodation. For the first time ever, Gold-Williams expressed an openness to community conversation around a possible early coal retirement.
As I've watched this new round of climate-justice work lift off, buoyed by new partners, even as our relationships with both City-owned utility CPS Energy and Mayor Ron Nirenberg have all-but fractured, I've been thinking about the power of our story. Why is it that the experience of those who have tried in good faith to find a path off of coal for so many years is so poorly told? We know, and come to assume, that news coverage is typically limited to artificially abbreviated timeframes: a pending vote privileging institutional voices, for instance, a critical quote for an appearance of balance. This sort of reporting rarely asks questions about the data (or lack of data) being used to justify the utility's choices. Or a grounding in historical dialogue. As those toiling in the radical—roots—of systemic racism and violence, each of us know what it's like to be the inheritors of a long history of neglected and disrespected voices.
In San Antonio, stories around this difficult relationship between the community and CPS either aren't told, aren't told well, or just get too little coverage. The great disparity in health and longevity, why residents of some Southside neighborhoods live decades less on average than some in more affluent Northside ZIP Codes in this heavily segregated city aren't investigated as they should be—unless we do the digging ourselves. To correct that, 2020, as a year of forced contemplation, perhaps, has been the year I've begun trying to recover the fuller community story to share in digital spaces while challenging the misinformation still being propagated by CPS. Check out a 22-minute summary of our long struggle around coal or the full 1.5-hour Deceleration broadcast for that sweep of EJ history.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for Sierra Club members, the reality is that community forces, within and without our organization, have been right in every major energy debate before the CPS Energy Board of Trustees. We sued to stop the construction of Spruce 2, one of the last coal plants build in the United States. The unit brought a $1 billion debt which utility leaders now blame for a supposed inability to retire the plant in an appropriate response to the worsening climate crisis. We fought against an effort to construct what would have been one of the first new US nuclear plants in decades, before that deal collapsed beneath tripling cost estimates leaving ratepayers to sweep up the hundreds of millions lost in the quixotic process. We closed the oldest, dirtiest plant in San Antonio and were instrumental in launching an aggressive energy conservation program at CPS that has prevented the need for any additional centralized power plant.
It has been the steady pressure of community members that accomplished these things. And it is that pressure, captured in the Recall CPS petition and our sustained lobbying of Council and the Trustees that continues to move clean-energy investments—including 900 new megawatts of solar expected in 2021—while we press for an early Spruce retirement.
Those contributing to recovering and telling this remarkable history include my partner Marisol Cortez, as well as Russell Seal, Meredith McGuire, and Chrissy Mann from the Sierra Club; DeeDee Belmares of Public Citizen; Alex Birnel of MOVE Texas; Anacua Garcia of the Southwest Workers Union; and former City Council member and community conscience María Antonietta Berriozábal. Together, in this crisis inflection point, is is obvious that we inhabit a remarkable and indomitable web, itself enmeshed in of a much larger, infathomable tapestry, full of resilience and persistence. This fabric of community, which itself is celebration, our acts of love and interdependent devotion, our collective memory and clarity, sustains. It holds our families and this land; it holds all of our relations through a dark and uncertain passage. Pandemic doesn't telegraph its conclusion, and our colliding crises promise none. But that's cool. We don't rely on disease of disequilibrium for our vision of wholeness, anyway. I've come to suspect what light may be found on the other side of this great struggle is that light we bring forward with us. 2020 has been, in spite or because of everything it has brought to us, has been a tremendous time for collecting the light that is our story.
As 2021 will be.