Seven years ago, when newly elected President Donald Trump was threatening to pull out of a major international climate change mitigation agreement, San Antonio was among the first in a long list of cities whose progressive leaders sought to take matters into their own hands.
Now the landmark climate action plan they approved is up for its first formal review since it was adopted in 2019, and again faces questions about whether such localized climate efforts can have a meaningful impact.
The city’s Climate Action and Adaptation Plan sought to put San Antonio on track for a carbon-neutral footprint by 2050 — something experts say is no longer considered a reasonable goal anywhere in the country.
“No one has a perfect climate action plan where they can definitively say they’re going to reduce their emissions net zero by by 2050, it’s not a reasonable goal to achieve,” said Meredith Jennings, director of local government and community initiatives at Houston Advanced Research Center, at Monday’s meeting of the SA Climate Action Committee.
While champions of such plans say there’s still plenty that cities can do to mitigate the impacts of climate change, they now face a myriad of political and regulatory challenges that have complicated their efforts.
Those will now have to be taken into account as the city revisits its plan for strategic updates over the coming months.
The climate plan that the council approved in 2019 called for a review within three to five years of implementation, overseen by a SA Climate Action Committee consisting of both council appointees and representatives from CPS Energy, San Antonio Water System, VIA Metropolitan Transit and the San Antonio River Authority.
It’s unclear how much authority the committee has to act independently from the City Council. But on Monday afternoon, it kicked off work in the basement of City Tower with at least one lobbyist who represents the real estate industry in the audience taking notes.
“It’s not necessarily about rewriting the 2019 strategies, but reframing them into what’s actually accomplishable within the next 10 years,” said Laura Patiño, director of the city’s Department of Resilience and Sustainability.
Fewer tools to work with
Per capita, San Antonio’s emissions have been on the decline since the city launched its climate mitigation efforts, said Doug Melnick, assistant director of the Department of Resilience and Sustainability.
But on the whole, emissions are not going down fast enough to meet the goals of a 2019 plan that gave the city three decades to start taking in, or offsetting, more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases than it’s emitting.
Such a feat would have required shifting almost entirely away from fossil fuels in power supply and transportation, experts said, or using expensive technology to keep emissions out of the atmosphere.
Instead, local governments attempting such changes have watched one tool after another removed from their menu of options.
First the COVID-19 pandemic slowed initial implementation the 2019 climate plan, then business interests convinced the council to water down reporting requirements that would have tracked the biggest energy users for measurement and comparison.
As other cities moved ahead with similar climate plans, Texas’ conservative state leaders also responded aggressively with new restrictions on efforts to move buildings away from fossil fuels, and curbing local leaders’ regulatory authority over business, commerce and other entities covered by state code.
Monday’s meeting of the SA Climate Action Committee started out with an unusual preamble calling and acknowledgement that the meeting was taking place on indigenous land — something no other city meeting typically does.
“Stay engaged, speak your truth, practice kindness,” Melnick told the committee. “We’re not going to solve the climate crisis in this meeting.”
Then leaders offered up a lay-of-the-land on the shifting policy landscape to give committee members a sense of what’s possible — and what isn’t.
Since San Antonio owns its electric and water utilities in CPS Energy and the San Antonio Water System, it remains in a better position than most cities to create change within its own organization, Melnick said.
But electric building mandates, or so-called “fuel switching” plans, are out of the question because of the 2021 state law saying municipalities can’t mandate or even incentivize the use of one fuel source over the other.
Meanwhile the 2023 preemption law — known as the “Death Star Bill” — has stopped Texas cities from bringing forward many other ideas being used successfully in other parts of the country because it could open cities up to lawsuits.
“The goal is not to chill the conversation, but to be transparent as we start discussing solutions,” Melnick told the committee. “… We can’t do whatever we want. We really need to acknowledge what is happening at the state level.”
Bending the curve
City leaders are eager to keep going on their climate efforts, but warned version 2.0 of their climate plan may have to change its tactics by looking at incentives instead of mandates and leaning into goals like urban planning and walkability vs. trying to curb the biggest energy users.
“Incentives are good, but considering the [city’s current] budget constraints, that’s a challenge,” Melnick said.
As San Antonio retools its broader climate plans, leaders are now looking at more short-range goals that they can point to as the competition for resources to keep funding such efforts gets tougher.
“The goal is 2035,” Melnick said. “We want to have a good understanding of — based upon reality as well as some stretch goals — what are the handful of things that we can start doing to try to bend the curve, and what’s it going to take?”
The Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) is helping San Antonio with its reboot, including launching a new online tool that cities can use to track greenhouse gas inventory and assign credit to the initiatives helping reduce it.
“There will always be things we can’t predict will happen, so we’re just doing the best we can, and following the lead of what other cities are doing,” Jennings said.
