The capstone paper that almost wasn’t

During Spring 2019 I took the final required course for my Master’s in Public Administration at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs – PUBAFR 7900, the capstone research paper. In this course, students write a structured capstone paper on a project of their choice. Although the projects vary a lot, the papers all follow the same format:

    • Title Page
    • Executive Summary
    • Table of Contents
    • Introduction
    • Background, including Stakeholders
    • Literature Review
    • Methods
    • Data
    • Results
    • Conclusions
    • Appendices
    • Works Cited

As chair of the Sierra Club’s Ready for 100 Columbus campaign, I wrote my paper on how three cities that have committed to 100% renewable energy are getting there. At the time of my writing, 120 cities had made this commitment, including Cleveland and Cincinnati in Ohio, as well as several other major cities. I wanted to figure out a possible road map for Columbus.

Although I wrote about a topic I am extremely involved with — how cities can get to 100% renewable energy — the amount of rewriting and frankly unreasonable demands from the professor almost led me to withdraw from the course. No matter what I produced, it wasn’t right. If something was in a bulleted list, she wanted it in a table, but if it was in a table, she wanted a bulleted list. Even when I made the revisions asked for, it seemed she didn’t read them and said I hadn’t done the work. Halfway through the semester, she wanted me to change my topic!

Exemplary Community Service Award

I got the Exemplary Community Service Award from the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at its pre-graduation ceremony in May.

But after encouragement from my Glenn College advisor, I stayed in, earning barely enough points to pass with a B, but I did get the B. And it’s a good thing because I not only learned a lot despite the difficulties, I also was able to graduate. Even better, during the Glenn College pre-graduation ceremony, I was given the Exemplary Community Service Award.

In writing the paper, the first thing I had to do was identify which cities I was going to look at. I got a list of all cities that had made the commitment, then identified which ones are in the top 100 cities in the United States by population. Those included San Diego, San Francisco, Denver, Washington D.C., Portland, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Cleveland, St. Louis, Saint Paul, Cincinnati, Orlando, and Madison, Wis. Of these, most had made the commitment within the past year, and only about half had published energy plans for how they would get there.

Of the cities with published energy plans, I picked three: San Francisco, the first city to make a commitment to 100% renewable energy in 2010; Atlanta, the only city to include a full consideration of policy alternatives in its climate plan; and Cincinnati, which has the most comprehensive plan of all large cities that have committed to this transition.

I also consulted the academic and think tank literature. On the academic side, I found that most people who study this question believe cities, states, and countries can transition to 100% renewable energy, but there’s a debate between those who think it can be done using only sun, wind, hydro, and geothermal, and those who believe it must include nuclear energy. The 100% renewable energy side is led by Mark Jacobson of Stanford University, founder of the Solutions Project who mapped out how states, cities, and countries can get to 100% renewable energy.  The critics include 21 scientists who published an evaluation of Jacobson’s work in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The dispute was covered by David Roberts in Vox here and here.

I also found a lot of think tank and advocacy group literature on how cities can transition to 100% renewable energy. The two best sources were the Carbon-Free City Handbook, published by Rocky Mountain Institute, which looked programs cities could implement by sector such as buildings, transportation, and energy supply, and Pathways to 100, a primer for how cities can use legislative, financial, and structural practices to transform their energy supplies.

I found that by instituting best energy practices on the city level, rather than depending on state or federal action, cities could take control of their energy supplies and significantly lower their carbon emissions. San Francisco, which has been working on programs to get to 100% renewable energy since 2011, has significantly lowered its emissions.

I was also able to put together a high-level blueprint for how cities can get to 100% renewable energy:

STEP 1: ENERGY EFFICIENCY
Buildings are the top source of carbon emissions in most cities. Making energy efficiency upgrades helps by reducing the amount of energy being used, which both lowers emissions and saves money. Also called retrofitting and weatherization, energy efficiency includes activities such as installing LED lights and EnergyStar appliances, adding insulation, sealing windows, and using low-flow plumbing. This needs to be done on both the residential level, particularly in low-income areas where housing is often very inefficient, and in large commercial buildings, financed through the Property Assessed Clean Energy program. Cities can also require or incentive new builds to be LEED-certified or net zero, and they need to address the split incentive in which which tenants pay for energy, so landlords don’t want to pay for upgrades. This can be done by requiring landlords to list energy costs with rent or by providing incentives for landlords to make needed upgrades.

STEP 2: RENEWABLE ENERGY
To run on 100% renewable energy, we need more renewable energy! This includes building out solar generation on city property, and helping residents and businesses to install more solar. Cincinnati is building 25 MW of solar to run its water treatment plans, and Cleveland has a solar farm on a capped landfill. San Francisco has incentives for purchasing solar equipment as well as a solar equipment leasing program, which has lowered costs and spread solar panels on homes and businesses across the city. In Ohio, Solar United Neighbors runs bulk purchasing programs.

STEP 3: TRANSPORTATION
Transportation is the second large source of carbon emissions in cities. Cities have a lot of options for tackling transportation emissions, such as converting their own fleet to electric vehicles, encouraging residents to drive EVs, rolling out charging infrastructure, supporting biking, walking, and scooters, offering bike share and car share programs, and building bus rapid transit and light rail. City form is also important. Channeling development into the city center rather than urban sprawl lowers emissions from cars and makes getting around by public transportation, biking, or walking easier.

STEP 4: ENERGY SUPPLY
The most effective way to lower carbon emissions from energy use is to ensure that the energy supply is generated from renewables. This can be done in two ways: building more utility-scale solar and wind generation, and using renewable energy certificates to offset fossil fuel use. In Ohio, we have a third option: Aggregation. This is when a city pools together its customers and uses them to bargain with utilities for more renewable energy at a lower price. Cincinnati is aggregated for 100% renewable. Aggregation is legal in only eight states, and we are lucky Ohio is one.

STEP 5: FINANCING
Whenever renewable energy comes up, the first question is usually “But how will you pay for it?” Fortunately cities have lots of financing mechanisms to choose from, including programs like Property Assessed Clean Energy, bulk purchasing, power purchase agreements, green banking, and more. For example, Los Angeles allows low-income residents to “rent” their rooftops to the city electric utility, which installs solar panels that put clean energy on the grid. Atlanta offers a “round it up” program for people to pay a little extra on their utility bills; the money funds energy efficiency upgrades in low-income areas. New York has a Green Bank that works with private-sector banks to fund clean energy developments.

Here’s a link to my Glenn College capstone paper: Getting to 100: How Cities are Transitioning to 100% Renewable Energy (pdf)

Here’s a link to my capstone presentation: Getting to 100: How Cities are Transitioning to 100% Renewable Energy (ppt)

 

Summer internship with Ready for 100 Columbus

ENR 7191 is the required internship course for the Master’s in Environment and Natural Resources. Students can fulfill this requirement through their jobs in an environmental field, through a formal full-time internship, or through part-time volunteer opportunities.  I chose the third way to do this by working on the Sierra Club’s Ready for 100 campaign in Columbus.

Although I have been working on the Ready for 100 Columbus campaign for the past 1.5 years, I had not made it the center of my activities due to work and other courses. This summer I had the chance to spend my coursework time on the campaign. It was a great experience, and I learned that I love doing this kind of work.

Tom Foley, sustainability manager for Cuyahoga County, speaks at the Clean Energy for All Ohio Training on June 2, 2018.

Mike Foley, director of sustainability for Cuyahoga County, speaks at the Clean Energy for All Ohio Training on June 2, 2018.

The objectives I had for the summer were:

  • Hold a successful 100% Clean Energy for All Ohio training on June 2. We achieved that goal, training about 50 people who heard from energy leaders in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Oberlin, as well as Tom Foley, sustainability manager for Cuyahoga County. As a result, five new Ready for 100 campaigns got started around the state.
  • Restart the grasstops part of the campaign by doing power mapping of the mayor and members of city council, and community mapping in neighborhoods of Columbus. We got this done with the help of two other interns for the campaign.
  • Identify and start a new communications chair. We promoted Brittany Converse, a longtime volunteer who works for the city.
  • Speak about Ready for 100 at community and neighborhood events. I spoke at the Clean Energy for All Ohio training, a projection art event at Flowers and Bread in Clintonville, and led the panel discussion following a showing of Reinventing Power. I was also invited to be part of the city’s application for the Bloomberg Climate Challenge Grant, pulling together information about tax abatements for sustainability.
  • Hold tours of several renewable energy facilities in Columbus and Ohio. I was not able to do this. But I did make it to the Growing Local Solar workshop on August 1 at Denison University, where I learned about aggregation in Ohio, the carbon tax in Athens, how to overcome barriers to solar, and toured the Denison solar array.
We held a showing of Reinventing Power with a panel discussion on August 9, 2019. About 45 people attended.

About 45 people attended our showing of Reinventing Power with a panel discussion on August 9, 2018.

One of the best things about the summer was getting to work with two other interns for the campaign, one from the Glenn College and one from School of Environment and Natural Resources. Suddenly work that we had been wanting to do for months, like power mapping and community mapping, got done. We couldn’t pay these interns – we could only offer course credit – but it was amazing to have them on board. I wanted to get more interns in the fall, but national Sierra Club changed its policy and now requires paying interns $15 an hour. We don’t have money for that.

It is not an exaggeration to say this summer was pivotal to the direction of the Ready for 100 Columbus campaign. When we started, we were trying to get sign-on letters from local businesses in Clintonville and the Short North. It was a disaster. Employees couldn’t sign, managers were never there or too busy, and most were hesitant about signing. Quickly we realized that approach was not working and switched to gathering signatures on our AddUp petition to the city. We got 300 signatures at Comfest alone, about 1600 during the summer.

We also did some serious campaign planning work, identifying our theory of change, targets, tactics, partnerships, and budget. This laid the groundwork for our campaign moving forward.

Inside Climate Reality training with Al Gore

Almost 1000 people participated in Climate Reality training, March 1-4 in Denver. Click on photo to enlarge it.

Ten years ago when An Inconvenient Truth came out, I like so many other people became aware of the climate crisis. The movie ended with 10 things each of us could do to help stop global warming, and I did all of them: changed my light bulbs, took shorter showers, started recycling.

Yet now the climate crisis is worse than ever. Each of the last three years has been the hottest on record. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at its highest point since the age of the dinosaurs. Oceans are 30 percent more acidic than before the Industrial Revolution, the fastest chemistry change in 50 million years. Glaciers worldwide are melting, the jet stream is wobbling, and ocean currents are slowing down.

I was lucky to get this pic with Al Gore at the Cedar Rapids airport in May 2015. No he doesn’t fly around on private jets. Photo by Brian Ettling

Clearly individual action is not enough. So two years ago, I attended my first Climate Reality training with Al Gore in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to find out what else I could do. There I met hundreds of climate leaders from around the world and started learning about climate in depth.

Here are some mind-blowing facts:

  • The energy trapped by man-made global warming pollution is now equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day, 365 days a year.
  • Extreme hot days are now 150 times more common than 30 years ago.
  • 2016 was the 40th consecutive year with a global temperature above the 20th century average.
  • 93 percent of the extra heat trapped by manmade global warming pollution goes into the oceans.
  • Seven 1,000-year floods have occurred in the United States in the last seven years.
  • A 1ºC mean temperature rise decreases wheat yields by 21 percent.
  • Water scarcity now affects 40 percent of the world’s population.
  • Air pollution kills 6.5 million people worldwide every year.
  • Land-based plant and animal species are moving poleward at a rate of 15 feet per day.
  • We have lost more than half of the world’s wildlife in the last 40 years.

Climate action

My Ohio mentees at Climate Reality training in Denver.

I came out of the Iowa training determined to tackle the problem of climate change in a much more systematic way, through action on the local, state and national level. The first thing I did was join the Sierra Club, which helped me get to the People’s Climate March, testify about the Clean Power Plan, and lobby my state legislators on returning Ohio’s clean energy standards.

In December 2015 I went to Paris for two weeks as part of the Sierra Club delegation during the COP 21 climate conference. At the time, no climate agreement had included developing countries, and no one knew if almost 200 nations would come together to make it happen. But they did, and I came back full of hope that the climate crisis would finally be addressed.

My California mentees at Climate Reality training in Denver.

A year later, after the 2016 election, I knew I had to get back to climate activism. In January, Climate Reality announced a new training in Denver, so I applied to go – this time not as a participant but a mentor. I was thrilled to be accepted and get 20 mentees from Ohio and California.

At mentor training the day before the conference, I learned that 2,700 people had applied for 900 slots. My list of mentees was full of accomplished people – among them, a city councilwoman from Cuyahoga Falls, a county commissioner from San Jose, a staffer for Ohio EPA, a former staffer for Florida Department of Transportation who left for a job at Google after the governor told employees they couldn’t discuss climate change, a doctor at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, and a high-school student from Marin School of Environmental Leadership.

Day 1

Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and Isa Caress performed their new song “Break Free” at Climate Reality conference in Denver. Photo by Jill MacIntyre Witt

On the first day we saw Al Gore give his entire slideshow, “The Climate Crisis and Its Solutions,” based on his presentation from An Inconvenient Truth. Gore updates this slideshow constantly, with many slides containing graphics and videos from recent events. This was followed by a panel discussion on responding to the impacts of climate change, featuring first responders, emergency managers, and community leaders on the front lines in Colorado.

Only the first half of Gore’s presentation is about the problem of climate change. If it stopped there, we would have been left hopeless, but it didn’t. The second half covered the incredible takeoff of renewable technologies. Here are a few facts:

  • In 2016, $58.6 billion was invested in clean energy in the United States.
  • Wind energy capacity has grown 16 times faster than 2000 projections.
  • The United States now has 75 gigawatts of wind power installed, enough to power 20 million homes.
  • Globally there is enough wind energy to supply electricity consumption 40 times over.
  • Solar energy capacity has grown 77 times faster than 2000 projections.
  • The cost of solar cells has fallen from $79.40 per watt in 1976 to 41 cents per watt now.
  • Solar installation has gone from 4 megawatts in 2000 to 35,800 megawatts now.
  • Enough solar energy hits the earth every hour to fill the world’s energy needs for a year.
  • Renewables accounted for 90 percent of new electricity generation worldwide in 2015.
  • The subsidy-free cost of solar and wind is now less than gas, coal or nuclear.

We also heard from Leah Greenberg, co-author of Indivisible, a guide by former Congressional staffers of best practices for making your elected representatives listen. The day ended with a performance by Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and his sister Isa Caress, indigenous hip hop artists. Xiuhtezcatl is also a plaintiff in the Our Children’s Trust lawsuit of 21 children against the federal government for not fulfilling its public trust to protect the climate for future generations.

Day 2

Al Gore’s photo with youth trainees at the Climate Reality conference in Denver.

Day 2 featured an incredible panel of scientists including Kevin Trenberth, climate scientist with NOAA; Henry Pollack, geophysicist at University of Michigan; and Don Henry, director of Climate Reality in Australia.

They talked about the impacts of various types of greenhouse gases, the most prevalent denier claims and how to respond (check out Skeptical Science), political forces aligned against climate action (see Merchants of Doubt), the Montreal Protocol that phased out ozone-destroying CFCs as a model for climate action, how to get coal country on board (clean energy jobs), and the outlook for carbon capture and sequestration (too expensive for coal plants to implement), nuclear (too slow and expensive for our needs), and fracking (methane leakage and risks to water make it untenable, and we should just leapfrog to renewables).

We also heard about best practices for communicating climate change from Ngiste Abebe of Aulenor Consulting, and Jon Shenk and Diane Weyermann of Participant Media, who talked with Al Gore about making An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power, which premieres July 28.

Day 3

The 2017 Denver mentors get their photo with Climate Reality Chairman Al Gore and CEO Ken Berlin.

Day 3 began with a survey of the political landscape after the election of Trump by Ken Berlin, president of the Climate Reality Project. One point Berlin made is that Trump can’t just roll back climate rules or even agency budgets without new rules and action from Congress, and that environmental activists and groups will be fighting his anti-climate agenda every step of the way.

We heard from Director of Engagement Olena Alec about what we as climate leaders could do, with slides of actions by current climate leaders, including two people I had trained with in Iowa, Doug Grandt presenting to a room of fifth-graders and Ina Warren conducting a monarch workshop.

Al Gore recognizes leaders of cities and universities that have committed to going 100% renewable. Photo by Bill Trueit.

Gore then presented awards to representatives of several cities that have recently committed to transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy. Climate Reality’s 100% Committed campaign is working with Sierra Club’s Ready for 100 campaign to bring on dozens of new cities by 2018. Stay tuned – this could be coming soon to a city near you.

Next was a presentation by Jules Kortenhorst, CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute, that explained both the technology and economics behind the unstoppable rise of renewable energy over expensive, outdated and polluting fossil fuels, followed by a livestreamed panel of Climate Reality leaders talking with Al Gore about their experiences.

Mentees at the very first training in Al Gore’s barn in 2006 for what was then called the Climate Project. Photo by Keith Bergman.

Over lunch the mentors got to meet Al Gore in person. I had gotten my photo with Gore at the Iowa training in 2015 – purely by luck meeting him at the airport – so this time I took photos for other people. Some of the other first-time mentors were thrilled, while the longtime mentors caught Gore up on their latest news. Two mentors in Denver, Keith Bergman and Bill Bradbury, had been among 50 people at the very first training in 2006 at Gore’s barn in Carthage, Tenn.

The afternoon was filled with breakout sessions on topics like public lands, the water/energy nexus, putting on sustainable events, but after an intensive four days of training, I took a couple of hours for myself before commencement at which I gave certificates and Green Rings to my mentees. I’ll be following up with them throughout the year, hoping to arrange a meetup for the Ohio mentees this summer. We now have at least a dozen Climate Reality leaders in the state.

Moral challenge

The last day of Climate Reality training in Denver. My tables were in the back of the room that day.

Al Gore’s closing remarks to the conference summed up why I’m in the climate movement. Climate change, he said, is a moral challenge in the tradition of other moral issues of our time such as abolitionism, women’s suffrage, civil rights, apartheid, and most recently gay marriage. These movements encounter roadblock after roadblock, until finally they succeed.

“When any great moral challenge is resolved into a binary choice between what is right and what is wrong, the outcome is foreordained because of who we are as human beings,” Gore said. “That is where we are now, and that is why we are going to win this. We have everything we need. Some still doubt we have the will to act, but I say the will to act is itself a renewable resource.”

The Climate Reality Project has now held 35 trainings for over 11,000 climate leaders from around the world, and they are still going strong. This is a unique opportunity to learn about the most pressing crisis facing the planet, and how to make change even in a hostile political environment. It’s also a chance to meet some amazing people you will be in contact with for years. If you are concerned about climate change, this is a program you won’t want to miss.

This article appeared in the April 2017 newsletter for Sierra Club Central Ohio Group.