Laura whirls away Climate Week
Houston Climate Week, a fiveday virtual event to highlight the city’s Climate Action Plan and mark the third anniversary of Hurricane Harvey, is being postponed Wednesday as the region braces for the threat of another storm, Hurricane Laura.
Lara Cottingham, the city’s chief sustainability officer, said the events scheduled for Wednesday through Friday will be postponed and rescheduled later.
“Given the increasing severity of Hurricane Laura, we are postponing #HoustonClimateWeek starting TOMORROW, August 26,” the city’s Office of Sustainability said on Facebook. “We are monitoring the situation and working with our speakers to reschedule the events. Thank you to everyone who has joined us so far and we hope you will join us once the storm has passed.”
Nearly 3,000 people had registered for the event, which will feature virtual panels on various climate-related topics in Houston.
Hurricane Harvey, the worst rainstorm in continental U.S. history, devastated the Houston region beginning Aug. 25, 2017.
Hurricane Laura, currently in the Gulf of Mexico, is expected to make landfall as a Category 3 storm somewhere in Louisiana or Southeast Texas Wednesday night or early Thursday morning. Its forecast ticked west Tuesday, increasing the chance that Houston could be impacted.
Among the now-postponed
events: panels on energy transition, reducing reliance on cars, and green infrastructure; discussions about a project to turn a long-dormant landfill in Sunnyside into a solar farm; and a closing conversation that would have included Mayor Sylvester Turner and David Lawler, the chairman and president of BP America.
The energy company partnered with the city on its climate plan, donating $2 million and other manpower to the effort. That drew some consternation from environmental activists uneasy about BP’s legacy.
The city released its climate plan in April to little fanfare, as city officials concentrated on responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. They had hoped for a larger unveiling in the summer, Cottingham said, but that was ruled out by the continuing pandemic.
Climate Week was envisioned as a way to revisit and highlight the plan virtually.
The Climate Action plan, which is nonbinding, lays out strategies the city can employ to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.