An eco-friendly goal for energy capital
City climate plan enlists oil firms, residents in aim for carbon neutrality by 2050
Houston’s first Climate Action Plan calls on the city’s 4,600 energy companies to lead the transition to renewable sources, while residents are asked to swap car rides for mass transit and work to cut down on the estimated seven pounds of waste each person discards every day.
The plan also calls for the city to adopt a new building code and develop a long-range plan for its waste collection system as part of a broadbased effort to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.
The 97-page plan, in the works for more than a year and published online Wednesday, is a strategy, not an ordinance, so it does not enforce any new rules. Instead, it identifies four areas to target emission reductions: transportation, energy transition, building optimization and materials management. It also identifies goals, strategies and targets for residents, businesses and the city to follow in each of those areas.
For example, the section on transportation, which accounts for nearly half of emissions here, includes a goal to shift the regional fleet to electric and low-emission vehicles. It lays out targets to get there, such as converting all non-emergency municipal vehicles by 2030, and increasing incentives and infrastructure for the private sector to do the same.
The section on energy tran
sition includes the production of 5 million megawatt hours of solar power by 2050. It calls for the city to power municipal operations entirely with renewable sources by 2025, and it proposes training private businesses and property owners on how to adopt solar power on their rooftops.
Nearly all of the 34 million metric tons of carbon that Houston emitted in 2014, the baseline year for such calculations, came from transportation and energy that powers homes, businesses and institutions, the plan says.
Those strategies are tailored to Houston, said Lara Cottingham, the city’s chief sustainability officer and lead author of the plan. The city, she said, does not have the same tools as the state or federal governments or even other cities, such as San Antonio and Austin, to combat climate change. It has very little authority to regulate the oil and gas industry, and it does not have a cityowned electric utility.
That means the plan requires buy-in from businesses and residents to take initiative themselves, Cottingham said.
“The Climate Action Plan is a good combination of ambitious goals and common-sense solutions,” she said. “We don’t have all the answers, and that’s OK. We do know that science is behind us and technology is on our side. What is important is that every single one of us does our part.”
A wide range of stakeholders, from energy companies like BP and Shell to environmentalists at Air Alliance Houston and the student-led Sunrise Movement, supported the plan, a diversion from other cities where plans often grew contentious amid competing forces.
“It’s a good first step, but it’s only a first step,” said Harrison Humphreys, a policy analyst for Air Alliance who co-led the plan’s working group on transportation. “Now comes the difficult part of implementation. If we hope to even come close to reaching the stated goals… we need to be pursuing the initiatives pretty aggressively.”
Stephanie Thomas, a Houstonbased researcher for Public Citizen, echoed that sentiment. She called in a step in the right direction while challenging “the city to go further.”
BP, which recently said it plans to become a net-zero emitter itself, applauded the deal.
“We stand ready to roll up our sleeves and help Houston move toward a lower-carbon future,” chairman and president Susan Dio said in a statement.
In ordinary times, the climate plan would have marked a major platform item that generated much attention at City Hall. Cottingham said it is a feat that Houston, the oil and gas capital of the world, has a climate plan to begin with.
Because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, however, Mayor Sylvester Turner does not even plan to hold a ceremony to announce it.
Turner said his office released the plan Wednesday to mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. He mulled waiting to unveil the plan, but said “the operations of the city must go on.”
“No other city is better suited to tackle climate change than Houston,” Turner wrote in the plan’s introduction. “And Houstonians already understand the consequences to our lives and our economy if we do nothing — larger, slower hurricanes, stronger rain events, longer, hotter summers and the safety, health and property impacts that come with them.”
The framework goes hand-inhand with the city’s resiliency plan, published in February. That document shows how Houston can prepare for the increasingly harmful effects of climate change, Cottingham said.
“The Climate Action Plan says what can we do to ensure that our climate conditions don’t get worse,” she said.
The plans do overlap. Both call for the planting of 4.6 million trees, for example, and both include the essentially unattainable goal of reaching zero trafficrelated fatalities and serious injuries on Houston streets.
The climate plan includes items with immediate impact as well, Cottingham said. As more cars rely on electric power, the plan would see the city install charging stations at public-facing facilities, including libraries and multi-service centers. Such an effort already was in the works before the plan was published Wednesday, Cottingham said.
The plan calls for the city to formulate and pass a new solid waste plan by the end of the year, as the three landfills the city uses are expected to reach capacity within 37 years. It also advocates for the adoption of the model building code by 2025, which would ensure buildings in Houston are able to be plugged into renewable sources of energy in the future, Cottingham said.
The plan also asks businesses — and the city — to create incentives for walking or biking to work for employees by providing bike parking and access to showers.
Cottingham said the framework was designed to be a living document, meant not just for city officials but everyone in Houston.
“The Houston Climate Action Plan is not going to solve all of climate change,” Cottingham said, adding that will take a global effort. “While you work on those things, there are activities that people and businesses can do in the meantime to start reducing emissions.”