Last June, when federal “leadership” decided to abandon the international effort to address global carbon emissions, the Sierra Club helped mobilize what would become a lobby of roughly 40 allied community organizations under the coalition Climate Action SA to demand that San Antonio's leadership stand up for the principles of the international Paris climate agreement.
As a city, we showed that we won't turn our backs on the world and we won't turn our backs on each other as extreme weather ramps up due to our own industrial greenhouse pollution.
Last weekend, the city utility (CPS Energy), Office of Sustainability, and UT-San Antonio—working in concert to develop a climate action and adaptation plan (CAAP) for Council adoption early next year—hosted their second official SA Climate Ready gathering.
Rick Luna, CPS Energy's Senior Manager of Product Development, meets with community members at the Feb. 24 SA Climate Ready Town Hall
At the Feb. 24 town hall meeting, CPS Energy Chief Operating Officer Cris Eugster reflected on the December rollout of the CAAP, the 18-month effort's first public event:
“When we met here back in December it was snowing outside, the first time it's snowed in...”
“Climate weirding!” injected local Sierra Club Member Barbara McMillin.
“Exactly,” Eugster replied.
While introductory remarks from Doug Melnick, the city's Chief Sustainability Officer, emphasized rising temperatures, Melnick sought to strike an upbeat tone with references to the City’s annual Fiesta celebration and a slide stating that it is “not the end of the world.”
“Climate change is global, but the impacts, as well as the ability to manage it, are on the local level,” Melnick said.
Then, more than 100 residents spent roughly two hours discussing ways in which city residents could reduce their greenhouse pollution and better prepare themselves for the accelerating disasters being ushered in by climate change.
Unfortunately, some of the most obvious targets - such as CPS Energy’s outdated polluting coal plants - didn’t come up much at Climate Ready.
Shutting down San Antonio's coal plants, the most massive greenhouse gas point-source polluters in the area (8.3 million metric tons greenhouse gas pollution per year), didn’t rise to the forefront of conversation so much as climate response concepts like strong public marketing of sustainability concepts like recycling, ridesharing, and better transportation options.
The path forward for all of us will be a difficult one. Already, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere means we are in for a couple hundred years of rising temperatures and all of the extreme weather that that shift means. If the world fails to act in an aggressive, concerted way to reduce the still-galloping streams of carbon pollution from crushed coal and burnt gas and more, San Antonio summers will twist into months-long, life-threatening experiences beyond the ability of our bodies to regulate.
The Rivard Report spotlighted the work of the Sierra Club and dozens of community organizations working in concert to make sure the equity values embedded in the CAAP's early documents survive the political process through to adoption:
"Outside of the official process, a group of environmental, social justice, and labor groups calling themselves Climate Action SA are meeting on a weekly basis to work on this problem from a different angle, focusing particularly on those disproportionately affected by climate change - the poor, working class, and people of color.
Greg Harman, coalition member and Organizer for the Sierra Club’s Lone Star Chapter, said the city has “an interest in inclusion and bringing historically marginalized and economically oppressed people into the conversation,” but the language used to discuss climate change can be overly technical and alienating to people who aren’t used to it.
'The community partners need to be equal partners in the process, and we’re not there yet,” Harman said. “It’s a trust-building exercise.'" - Brendan Gibbons, Rivard Report
While it will take an “all of the above” approach to protect and empower San Antonio residents at home, along with families around the world, some frank discussion about the monster in the room—coal—is a prerequisite.
Those interested in helping build strong grassroots power to ensure that the justice language of SA Climate Ready survives the typical buzzsaw of developer-driven San Anto politics, visit ClimateActionSA.com and sign up for updates.
For full transparency on who’s being “invited to the table” to help guide the City’s towards a path of climate justice, here’s a list of steering committee members and five working groups - with familiar long-time environmental and social justice leaders - that the Rivard Report published just last week.
SAN ANTONIO NEEDS CLIMATE ACTION BECAUSE...
If you weren’t able to make it out to the Feb. 24 SA Climate Ready meeting, don’t worry - we streamed segments live on FB: