In the official negotiations and media coverage of them, there is substantial focus on national governments, especially the submission of INDCs. However, sub-national levels, including sub-national states, provinces, cities, regions, are playing an increasingly important role in climate action. Multiple panels this week have focused on their role in taking leadership on mitigation and adaptation. Here, we wish to highlight one of them hosted by the Climate Group and the Network of Regional Governments for Sustainable Development (nrg4SD).
This event focused on a growing network of subnational governments collaborating on climate leadership. The Climate Leadership members collectively account for 331 million people, 11% of global GDP and 2.6 Gigatons CO2 emissions.
Climate Leadership members list
The heads of these subnational governments cited the importance of ensuring constituent support for renewable energy and decarbonization in order to create durable and ambitious climate action policy under sometimes hostile national governments. They also emphasized that one of the ways in which constituency support can be generated is to highlight the important role transition to green energy can play in job creation. Across multiple panels, subnational leaders described as critical to gaining support policies to create a ‘just transition.’ A ‘just transition’ refers to the a transition away from fossil fuels that ensures a) working class people who are part of the fossil fuel economy as well as those most impacted by climate change and the fossil fuel industry receive economic assistance and b) that new renewable energy development takes place in a manner that increases democratic participation and promotes racial, economic, and gender justice.
While climate change will affect every part of the planet, for many, particularly in working class communities, economic concerns are also very important. Often, especially in the United States (as Governors Shumlin and Inslee of Vermont and Washington,respectively, have noted this week), economic prosperity is framed as in opposition to action on climate, which dampens support for climate action. By ensuring that renewable energy development benefits workers and local communities, the just transition framework provides an opportunity for politicians and activists to counter this framing.
First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon talking about the Scotland’s transition to renewable energy
Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, described how direct public benefits were critical to building public support for renewables in a country where many work in the coal industry and there was intense skepticism about renewables from an economic and, to a lesser extent, aesthetic perspective. Today, Scotland generates more electricity from renewable energy than coal and gas combined and aims to produce 100% of their electricity from renewables by 2020 (though this target is looking increasingly unlikely). The Minister emphasized the 10 million pounds per year, Scottish communities receive due to the Community Benefit and Ownership program. She notes: “local energy now helps to fund energy efficiency schemes, fuel poverty alleviation programmes and befriending projects which reduce isolation for elderly people. They meet local priorities because they are run by local communities.” (Despite this program’s benefits, not all companies participate in the program because it is not mandatory.)
Sturgeon and Vermont Governor Shumlin both talked about the importance of community input and governance in increasing support for renewables among the public. In particular, Shumlin noted the local town-based Energy Committees, which allows community members to contribute to decision-making, push for lower energy costs, and pressure reluctant politicians to take action. Similarly, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne expressed her regret that Ontario did not focus enough on public participation and attributed lack of public support (and some active opposition) to lack of community engagement and benefits.\
Moreover, cities, states/provinces, and regions provide an opportunity to connect the localized impacts of climate change to climate action and renewable energy. Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and Durban Mayor James Nxumalo both emphasized the importance of educating the public to connect local severe weather incidents with climate change to increase support for renewables and action on climate.
However, subnational governments do not operate on an island. National action can support, but often threatens this local progress. Wynne and Sturgeon noted how Canadian President Stephen Harper (who just lost office this fall) and UK Premier David Cameron have hurt attempts to shift to renewable energy through actions such as cuts in renewable subsidies. And, as is well-known, the US Congress contains many skeptics on climate change, which prevent substantial subsidies for renewable energy in the first place.
-Anita Desai, Stephen O’Hanlon, Ayse Kaya
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Transition Town Media is holding a Solarize Greater Media event; I wonder what else we could try to do to support subnational movement in our region. It’s hard to imagine PA could ever make it onto the Climate Leadership map…
Hi Betsy,
While Republicans in the State Legislature still have the power to block significant state action, Governor Tom Wolf is in support of Pennsylvania implementing cap-and-trade and joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which would at least be a step in the right direction.
Betsy,
Today, at the public Climate Generations space, I talked to a person from KyotoUSA- a California group that works on developing community owned non-distributed solar projects. She told me about how they managed to procure a very large brownfield (from Chevron, no less) at a dollar per year, with plans to install solar to sell to however many hundreds of thousands of residents in Richmond, CA. They had a public pressure campaign to get the government (probably the Public Utility Commission?) to allow the community to get their energy from the solar by default, with an option to opt-out into the old utility energy system, after its installation. They won that campaign, despite the millions of dollars the utility put into fighting it. Since they were now able to promise hundreds of thousands of customers on day one, they got a loan from the bank at a favorable rate to build the system. They installed the system, managed to provide electricity from solar at ~5$/month for an average household than fossil fuel energy, and then paid off the loan in 8 months.
Sounds like something that’d be bloody difficult to replicate reliably, but I thought it was a really cool example of developing renewable energy on a much larger scale without having to ask some government or company to do it for us.