I missed you, too.
Checking back in one year into the Biden administration, I’m happy to say the climate news may not be as bad as you’ve heard. Meaningful climate provisions were tucked into last fall’s infrastructure bill and the stimulus Congress passed last spring. If you got mad when Joe Manchin killed Build Back Better, you may have to hate the chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee a modicum less if he allows passage of a scaled-back set of climate investments, as it appears he may.
So today’s issue will be split into a climate check-up and an encouragement to get educated about and involved in local efforts at decarbonization. And we’ll foreshadow the latter as we look at the news in two communities at the forefront of the transition.
Storms in the Pacific
First, O’ahu, whose million residents make it the largest American locality to pursue such a fast trajectory toward net zero. Given their intense premium on land, islands make for fascinating case studies in grid decarbonization, as do places like Hawai’i that are committed to addressing the legacy of colonization. Both O’ahu and Hawai’i, despite their size, have some of the nation’s most ambitious drawdown plans that also explicitly insist that “Kanaka Maoli and island cultures and values” must be “thriving and perpetuated.”
But as O’ahu transitions from cheap coal-fired electricity generation to solar farms and cutting-edge Tesla batteries, it is facing a looming energy supply crunch (documented by Canary Media’s Julian Spector) exacerbated by the permitting process and delayed pipeline of new developments on its limited land.
In many respects, O’ahu is having issues most states’ climate activists would envy: Their coal plant is legally forbidden from operating past September 2022, at which point their grid might get all those kilowatts from the sun and wind, with much of the former captured on residents’ roofs. This is very exciting. The entire city of Honolulu could be powered primarily by renewables… eight months from now.
But they might not make it. And this is the cautionary tale from the frontlines: There’s no fell swoop. When the state legislature effectively banned the burning of coal for energy, it did not ensure that an adequate supply of renewable energy was on the way. And Hawaiian Electric, the local utility, has not exactly moved with alacrity to construct new solar generation capacity. Combined with a slow approval process, the prospects for adequate energy by year’s end aren’t excellent.
Hawai’i already has by far the nation’s highest electricity prices, laying fertile ground for a backlash against the transition if O’ahu faces intermittent blackouts or price spikes when the AES Hawaii Power Plant goes offline in September. Fortunately, coal doesn’t make up a very large share of Hawai’i’s power generation, but what does? Oil. So while leaving coal behind is a step forward, it could spur two steps back, one toward oil and one away from the intermittency of renewables.
So Hawai’i is really giving it the old college try, but its predicament is a reminder of a fundamental truth of every aspect of the climate transition: You can’t just take things away from people; you have to give them viable alternatives — maybe even better ones, too, since they have to be enticed away from what they know. If O’ahu loses coal without having enough wind and solar to take its place, it won’t really have transitioned at all.
Ithaca’s Odyssey
Second, Ithaca, a chilly college town with a metropolitan population a tenth of O’ahu’s but no less ambition. After its vote to decarbonize all of the city’s 6,000-odd buildings received national attention last fall, Ithaca has been on a breakneck trajectory toward net zero, with goals to have a fully renewable grid in three years and be carbon-neutral in just seven. Now those are the kind of drawdown timelines I’m talking about.
And with three years to make it happen and not eight months, Ithaca has given itself marginally more breathing room, but only just. Decarbonizing the building stock is a taller order than getting carbon out of the grid. For one thing, it can be phenomenally expensive — Ithaca’s director of sustainability Luis Aguirre-Torres estimates the cost at $2 billion. For 6,000 buildings. For a city with a budget of $80 million.
In a city like my hometown of Eugene, whose budget is a comparatively whopping $860 million, the figure for decarbonizing the building stock would similarly be about an order of magnitude greater. Eugene is the third largest city in the twenty-seventh largest state in the US. Even if Ithaca’s per-building cost to decarbonize is the upper end of what cities might experience nationally (unlikely), we are talking about a process that would take tens of trillions of up-front dollars to accomplish nationwide. We would proceed to reap savings to the tune of several hundred billion dollars a year, but the hurdle is clear: Cities like Ithaca and even Eugene can’t fund their own decarbonization.
So who can? Aguirre-Torres notes bond issuance would make for unserviceable city debts, so he and Ithaca are turning to private equity, whose funds would go to firms that could develop these decarbonization solutions and to the city for financing tools. Through a system of “low- and no-interest loans,” the city will make it possible for homeowners to fund the retrofits that will begin saving them money overnight. Without the astronomical costs of asking a single firm to adjust a one-size-fits-all retrofit plan for every home, Ithaca is relying on a diffuse action plan: Individual homeowners will be on the frontlines of the solution, just as residential solar will be in O’ahu’s grid.
Uncle Sam (Joe?) Wants You
So here’s where you come in. You live somewhere. And your city’s building stock needs to get decarbonized. The building you live in needs to get decarbonized. And maybe you’re not unfortunate enough to have a gas stove, or a gas water heater, or other fossil infrastructure making your daily environment more hazardous to your health. But many of the usual retrofits, from heat pumps to convection ovens to triple-glazed windows (for those in colder climes), may still be excellent investments, whether it’s you making them or your landlord.
But beyond just decarbonizing our own homes, we can insist our communities take action as O’ahu and Ithaca have, transitioning our grid and our buildings away from fossil fuels one city at a time. For every new gas station or fossil gas main or other costly nonrenewable infrastructure your city permits, they have slowed their transition and sunk further costs into assets that will need to be scrapped well before the end of their useful lives if we are to come anywhere near our drawdown goals.
It’s time to enlist in your local effort to eliminate fossil fuels. And perhaps the most visible step is transportation. Starting this year, electric vehicles will come in unprecedented variety, with EV options from Ford trucks to GMC Hummers (not kidding) and even laggards like Subaru. (The prices of all these — and of their competitors in 2023 and beyond — are sure to drop as automakers offer more mass-market EVs, but budget options, like Leafs and Bolts, are already widely available.)
So for those who need cars, you’ll need to ensure your home electrical panel gets upgraded to support a home charger alongside all your other electric appliances. But e-bikes and other options, while much cheaper, also require chargers and warrant a panel upgrade for many homes on their own. In electrifying our transportation, we’ll need to rethink not just what car we buy, but our homes and neighborhoods as well. Think how much less often you’d hear about range anxiety from the EV owner(s) in your life if every Shell and Chevron were replaced with a charging station. We need to advocate for that change now, telling city planners and permitters to offer subsidies and other accommodations to such non-fossil infrastructure.
But, you say, I don’t know any city planners. Who even allots city permits? Why me? Because you, dear friend, had the time and inclination to read this newsletter. And if early adopters and the climate-informed can’t even be counted on to show up to an occasional city council meeting to offer public comment or do a five-minute Google search to find local climate organizations (who I pinky swear already know all this stuff back to front and are just dying for you to get on board), who will?