Discord heard as climate plan passes
The City Council voted Thursday to enact a set of goals aimed at reducing carbon emissions and the worst effects of climate change on residents, but activists warned the plan doesn’t go far enough.
By a 101 vote, council members approved the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan, a document two years in the making.
It lays out several goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions made by the city, residents and businesses by 2050. Most of those emissions come from energy use in buildings and transportation, including personal vehicles.
Among the plan’s dozens of strategies: reducing the city’s reliance on fuel sources that emit carbon, ensuring that new buildings don’t use more energy than they produce onsite and requiring businesses that get tax incentives from the city to enact their own plans to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
The overall goal is to make San Antonio “carbon neutral” by 2050, which means the city will add no new carbon to the atmosphere — even as more than 1 million people are expected to move here in the coming decades.
Residents already are feeling the effects of climate change through rising temperatures. For example, last month was the city’s hottest September on record, following an August that was its second warmest.
Globally, this year is on pace to rank second for heat since record keeping began in 1880, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported this week.
“In no simpler terms here and
around the world, we are in the midst of a climate emergency,” Mayor Ron Nirenberg said.
But the plan, which contains no specific policies or mandates, has frustrated both climate activists and local business leaders.
Environmentalists, who largely supported the plan’s passage Thursday, say it doesn’t address the city’s reliance on electricity generated by coal. The document doesn’t mention cityowned CPS Energy’s two coalfired plants, Spruce One and Spruce Two.
CPS has said it expects to close the older Spruce One in 2030, cutting in half its coalfired electric generation.
Spruce Two, which opened in 2010, will continue operating until at least 2042 while CPS pays off the debt incurred to build it. Spruce Two cost $1 billion and another $27.8 million was spent last year to replace a faulty generator.
District 9 Councilman John Courage called for accelerating that timeline — shutting down Spruce One by 2025 and Spruce Two by 2030.
“I don’t think we’re going to be waiting until 2060 or 2050 or 2040 to shut down our coal power plants,” Courage said.
The cityowned utility’s leadership has been hesitant to retire the plants early.
CPS chief executive Paula Goldwilliams said the utility would work toward the plan’s goal of making the city “carbon neutral” by 2050. But she warned against “isolated and premature plant closures,” arguing that doing so “could leave the community in the position of paying twice for energy capacity.”
“Paying for assets already owned and paying for new solutions simultaneously could make San Antonio one of the most expensive energy markets in Texas, and perhaps, the nation,” GoldWilliams said. “Working together from now through 2050 will give all of us the best opportunity to reach our evolving environmental goals, while not penalizing our customers.”
City officials are confident CPS will not be burning coal in 2060, Nirenberg said. But replacing coal with another energy source shouldn’t be costly to lowincome residents, he said.
“Just because a strategy is not included in this draft, it doesn’t mean that it’s been excluded from our future,” Nirenberg said. “Going forward, everything is on the table.”
But climate activists at Thursday’s council meeting showed growing impatience with CPS’ approach to the two Spruce plants. If council members are serious about closing the facilities, they may have to find a new CEO and gut the board, activists said.
“If that doesn’t happen, then people in San Antonio are going to be looking very closely at an initiative petition for a charter amendment and do it ourselves,” said Greg Harman, an organizer with the Sierra Club who sat on the plan’s steering committee.
Local business leaders have bashed the plan since it was unveiled in January, saying policies growing out of it could add significant costs to San Antonio employers.
City officials revised the plan in August, easing many of the goals to reduce emissions and frustrating environmentalists.
Business reaction
Still, business leaders are unhappy. The San Antonio Chamber of Commerce reiterated its opposition to the plan last week, framing its objections in terms of economic costs, not in denial of climate change.
“There was no true buyin for this plan from the business community,” David Fry of Cox Manufacturing Co. told council members Thursday. “There’s none now. Information abounds as to false ideas of extreme climate change. If the science was so clear, there would be a much greater unanimity. But there is a tremendous amount of debate because it’s more of an ideology than it is science.”
District 10 Councilman Clayton Perry was the lone vote against, citing the lack of cost estimates for implementing strategies laid out in the plan.
“I can’t expect my neighbors and your neighbors to just write a blank check for this,” Perry said. “I’m very concerned about that. It will impact people’s cost of living here in San Antonio.”
Nirenberg said the city will conduct costbenefit analyses on individual ordinances stemming from the plan to be adopted later.
City officials said several strategies laid out in the plan already are being implemented. They’re expected to begin work soon on specific policies, including how to make the city’s vehicle fleet more energy efficient and reliant on cleaner fuel sources and how to finance energyefficient upgrades to homes.
“It’s a strong plan,” Nirenberg said. “But obviously this is just the end of the beginning. The work begins now for implementation.”