Climate Change – Page 3

Prioritizing Climate Equity

Problem:

Climate change impacts are felt all over the country and especially in underserved communities. In Wisconsin, rising heat threatens rich agricultural land and Milwaukee and Madison grapple with pollution-exacerbated injustices. As communities seek out solutions, it is important that leaders engage within the communities and ensure their voices are incorporated into building a greener, more resilient, and equitable future.

Solution:

Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes is leading Wisconsin’s efforts to take big climate action through community engagement. As chair of the state’s new Task Force on Climate Change, Barnes brought together a diverse coalition of business, community, labor, youth, and Indigenous leaders to participate in the task force and the group scheduled listening sessions to gather ideas from constituents on how to best reach the ambitious climate goals to go 100% carbon-free electricity by 2050. As COVID-19 tore across the country, the Task Force quickly pivoted to virtual meetings that convened a broad swath of residents, including Indigenous organizations working on climate adaptations, organizations developing green jobs in predominantly Black neighborhoods, and tribal nations working on food sovereignty. These conversations are creating space for dairy farmers, rural constituents, and low-income communities and communities of color to advocate for their needs as the state continues to build a robust, climate-friendly, worker-focused economy and ensure that no Wisconsin community is left behind in the transition to a clean economy.

2021 Ideas Challenge Finalists

The NewDEAL is pleased to announce the finalists from this year’s Ideas Challenge, our biennial policy competition highlighting innovative policy solutions from NewDEAL Leaders across the nation. Their ideas would reimagine the social safety net, create good jobs, expand education opportunities, build more sustainable communities, and strengthen our democracy. This year’s Challenge came at an especially important time to identify best practices, as Leaders grapple with the work of rebuilding and recovery in the wake of the pandemic, and have a unique opportunity to act with federal funds from the American Rescue Plan. Winners in each of five categories will be announced next week during our 11th Annual Leaders Conference, on Thursday, November 18, and be featured in Governing Magazine. Join us on social media to celebrate these extraordinary ideas, and click here to read details on the finalists in all five categories!

Revolving Loan Fund for Communities Threatened by Climate-Fueled Disasters

Problem

As global temperatures rise, so do sea levels, which threaten to erode cliffs and flood homes along California’s coast. Local governments are facing very difficult political decisions. They are looking for ways to address this crisis, balancing very limited budgets and few good options with the needs of residents.

Solution

Senate Bill 83 establishes a revolving fund within the State Coastal Conservancy to provide state-backed low-interest mortgages to local governments, who would use the money to buy properties at risk of sea-level rise in the next one or two decades. While allowing the owner to sell while a property still has value, the local entity can then rent out the property, repay the loan, and potentially earn additional revenue. Once the property is at risk of flooding from the rising sea, the property can be demolished.

Resilient and Energy Efficient Municipal Infrastructure

Problem

The City of Jersey City has ambitious goals for reducing GHG emissions and the use of renewable energy but has a backlog of older, inefficient municipal buildings that need to be upgraded. We also have solar arrays and EV garbage trucks, but no way of tapping into the solar power or ensuring EV charging during a disruption of the energy grid. As a coastal city facing the threat of more frequent and more severe storm events, in addition to sea-level rise, it is important to ensure that our critical infrastructure is resilient to major storm events.

Solution

The solution is to leverage the NJ Energy Savings Improvement Program (ESIP) in conjunction with other state and utility incentives to reduce operational costs, improve energy resiliency, and leverage energy savings to minimize cost on urgent capital infrastructure projects at over 20 municipal buildings. Additionally, adding battery storage to an existing generator and 1.23-megawatt solar panel array at the municipal services complex to create a microgrid that can function if the conventional grid loses power during a storm event, ensuring that the City’s new electric garbage trucks can be charged.

Protecting Our Natural Resources through Agricultural and Environmental Alliances

Problem

Our world is experiencing the effects of climate change in a way that threatens every corner of the planet, from rising sea levels, drought, and heat to catastrophic weather events. Most farmers recognize and understand the value of our natural resources and have used the best technology available and affordable at the time; yet, many outdated practices resulted in over-fertilization and runoff into our water bodies, timber reduction without repopulation, and animal farming practices that produce waste and byproducts. At the same time, we are experiencing loss of farm and timberland due to the continued expansion of urban and coastal development and natural disasters. A farmer once shared that “the last crop a farmer ever plants is housed.”

Solution

Our legislation seeks to bring environmentalists and agricultural producers together to quantify the ways that farmers and large landholders contribute to long-term sustainability and resiliency goals. State agencies and universities will determine a value for services such as water recharge, stormwater filtration, wildlife habitat, carbon sequestration, and air quality. Putting a value on the BENEFITS of these “services” will encourage and incentivize best practices and modern farming techniques that are integral to the protection of critical natural resources.

New Marker Solar Project

Problem

The 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report states that greenhouse gas concentrations are driving profound change to the Earth System, including global warming, rising sea levels, and an increase in climate and weather extremes. As a result, the City of Cincinnati is actively working to dramatically reduce its carbon emissions and do so in a fiscally responsible way that provides economic benefit to the Greater Cincinnati region.

Solution

To drastically reduce the carbon footprint of cities, we must take action that spurs large-scale development of renewable energy utilizing our consumption and purchasing power to drive these arrays and lead to local community economic development opportunities.
Cincinnati is developing a 100-megawatt solar array, the country’s largest municipal led solar array, that will provide solar power for city government operations and the residents of Cincinnati through the Community Choice Aggregation Program (CCA).
By intentionally directing how the City purchases energy, Cincinnati can lead large-scale solar development, create savings for the taxpayers, and ensure community benefits such as job creation, fair wages, and investments in schools and government within the solar array jurisdiction.

Michigan Green Government Fund and Standards Act

Problem

As Michigan faces the ever-expanding consequences of global climate change, I believe that our government should be modeling good behavior for ourselves similar to that which we’re asking our constituents to do. Michigan’s Department of Technology, Management & Budget manages 6.7 million square feet of facility space via 568 leases and moves 25 million pieces of mail each year. While Michigan does have state guidelines on increasing energy efficiency in state buildings and laws do require that energy efficiency is taken into account, there are neither design mandates to do so in the name of decreasing the state government’s carbon footprint nor are there explicit funds with which to ensure that new green building projects and renovations or EV fleet purchases are properly funded. Government has to model behavior that we expect of our constituents to show that we live the values we’re asking people to follow.

Solution

The Michigan Green Government Fund and Standards Act is a two-part solution, combining a revolving fund with building and purchasing standards for state government agencies. By partnering explicit green building design standards for new state constructions, renovations, and EV fleet purchases with a self-sustaining funding vehicle, we hope to show the government as both a good financial steward and as proactive in reducing Michigan’s carbon footprint. The revolving fund — using initial seed funding — would fund new constructions, improvements, renovations, or EV fleet expansions, and would receive funds equivalent to the calculated savings of each finished project compared to a non-green alternative. This calculus would be supported by mandatory data collection under the initial design requirements under the act — for example, a new building built with these design standards would be required to have systems to track energy usage, so energy savings can be calculated and savings deposited.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for Packaging

Problem

Based on surveys submitted by each County in Maryland, the state is experiencing a waste crisis and local governments are spending an unstainable portion of their budgets to manage this waste.

When China and other countries restricted plastic imports, the market for materials like paper and plastics shrunk overnight. This has resulted in higher costs for local governments: Between 2017 and 2019, the value of recyclables has declined by an average of 41%. A market where local governments and taxpayers bear all of the cost of managing recycling and waste from materials like plastic and paper packaging is unsustainable.

Producers do not consider the cost of their packaging choice on local governments, and seemingly simple shifts in material choice can result in huge costs to local governments and their recycling programs. Local governments are spending too much money trying to clean up a mess they did not make.

Solution

EPR creates economic incentives for producers to consider the impact of their packaging choices on the environment and local governments. Producers are required to form a “product stewardship organization,” pay fees* based on the various characteristics of their packaging, and use funds collected for four purposes. 1) To reimburse local governments for costs associated with the collection, transportation, sorting, and recycling of post-consumer packaging waste. 2) To create grant programs for local governments that want to modernize their recycling systems or develop reuse infrastructure. 3) To fund a needs assessment to evaluate the current capacity related to, need for, and associated costs of recycling, composting, and reuse infrastructure. 4) Staff and operation costs associated with running the Product Stewardship Organization.

*Fees must be structured in a way that rewards/ incentivizes packaging that is readily recyclable or reusable and disincentivizes packaging that is difficult, costly, or impossible to recycle.

Clean Heat Plan for Natural Gas Sector Emission Reductions

Problem

Colorado must reduce greenhouse gas emissions from all sectors in order to meet science-based reduction goals, and the built environment produces a significant amount of pollution from the use of gas to heat homes and businesses and to heat water in those buildings. In addition, gas leaks in the supply chain and commercial and industrial processes contribute to greenhouse gas pollution. There are also many sources of fugitive methane from landfills, coal mines, wastewater treatment plants, etc that need to be mitigated.

Solution

This policy, introduced as SB21-264, implements a quantifiable performance standard that enables Colorado utilities to use energy efficiency, biomethane, hydrogen, recovered methane, beneficial electrification of customer end uses, cost-effective leak reductions, and more to efficiently lower greenhouse gas emissions. It requires gas distribution utilities to submit Clean Heat Plans, requiring commission approval, that meet Clean Heat Targets: as compared to a 2015 baseline, utilities must achieve a 4% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 and a 22% reduction by 2030. A cost cap will be established that limits the cost of each utility’s Clean Heat Plan to a maximum of 2.5% of annual gas bills for all full-service customers as a whole.

Clean Cars 2030

Problem

Climate change is an existential threat not only for future generations but for everyone around the world. Here in Washington state, we’re already feeling the effects of the climate crisis. The last few summers have been the hottest we’ve ever felt, wildfire season is getting longer and longer, and we’ve seen major declines in our iconic orca and salmon populations in the Salish Sea. While the state has made a lot of progress in reducing our emissions, transportation is our largest source of carbon pollution. Transitioning from expensive fossil-based fuels to lower-cost green electricity will reduce our emissions, improve our competitiveness, and save consumers money in the long term.

Solution

Meeting our climate commitments and saving our planet will require bold action to reduce transportation emissions. The private sector is already deploying vehicles to help us do this. Several major automakers have announced plans to phase out gas-powered vehicles in the next 15 years. Every year, more zero-emission models at all price points are being introduced. What we need is the charging infrastructure and political will to accelerate this transition. Setting a goal that 100% of new cars sold will be clean cars by 2030 will align the incentives to build charging networks and reduce emissions faster. It also sends a powerful market signal to automakers and provides an incentive to those that are early adopters.

Prioritizing Climate Equity

Problem:

Solution:

2021 Ideas Challenge Finalists

Revolving Loan Fund for Communities Threatened by Climate-Fueled Disasters

Problem

Solution

Resilient and Energy Efficient Municipal Infrastructure

Problem

Solution

Protecting Our Natural Resources through Agricultural and Environmental Alliances

Problem

Solution

New Marker Solar Project

Problem

Solution

Michigan Green Government Fund and Standards Act

Problem

Solution

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for Packaging

Problem

Solution

Clean Heat Plan for Natural Gas Sector Emission Reductions

Problem

Solution

Clean Cars 2030

Problem

Solution

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