How communities can reduce climate emissions

From NPR's Climate Solutions correspondent Julia Simon

How communities can reduce climate emissions

by Julia Simon, NPR’s Climate Solutions correspondent

Last month, I traveled to Santa Marta, Colombia, for the first international conference for a transition away from fossil fuels.

In a hotel nestled between the turquoise Caribbean Sea and green mountains, more than 50 countries showed up to figure out how to speed up the transition away from oil, gas, and coal.

Burning fossil fuels is the primary driver of climate change. The countries at this conference want to move their economies away from these polluting energy sources. They included the United Kingdom, France, and major fossil fuel producers like Nigeria, Australia and Mexico.

One country that was not present was the United States.

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

The Trump administration has spent the last 16 months putting up roadblocks for climate action. When asked why the U.S. would not attend the conference, a spokesperson for the state department told NPR in an email that “the president has been clear that the United States will not participate in the bogus climate agenda.”

But a representative from the state of California was in Colombia. In fact, several representatives from cities from other countries came to the climate conference — even when their federal governments didn’t send anyone.

So often the focus of climate solutions stories is on federal actors. They are important. Scientists say that coordinated actions from countries are necessary to quickly reduce planet heating emissions.

But policies around things like energy policy, transportation, and building codes are often implemented at the state and municipal level. These things have a huge impact on emissions.

I spoke to Nate Hultman, director of the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland, about his research on local climate solutions. He and his team have found that climate actions from states and cities in the U.S. do in fact drive down emissions when you add them up.

“We have this kind of national story that seems very monolithic with the president doing a lot of things around climate and energy,” Hultman told me. Still, he said, “there’s all this kind of driving force for action that’s happening at the sub-national level and it’s not small in terms of scale.”