BY Courtney DuChene
Nov. 19, 2024
Flora Cardoni, deputy director of PennEnvironment, understands the dread many young people face when it comes to the climate crisis. She’s concerned about increasingly frequent severe weather. She’s wondered whether or not she should have kids.
“A lot of people are really worried about what climate change is going to mean for them in their lives,” Cardoni says. “I can get really worried at times about what our future is going to look like.”
For many, that feeling is more acute now that Donald Trump has been reelected. Trump is likely to slash the Inflation Reduction Act, bring back Arctic drilling, expand fracking and much more. He removed more than 100 environmental regulations in his first term, and canceled the United States’ participation in the international Paris Agreement.
Climatologists, including Penn’s Dr. Michael Mann, creator of the infamous “hockey stick” graph depicting global temperature increases, have expressed dread about another Trump presidency.
But there is a glimmer of hope: States and cities can continue to take action and build bipartisan support for climate initiatives. And individuals can reduce their own carbon footprint and use their votes to spur further climate action.
“It is only game over in a limited sense, i.e. for substantial U.S. policy engagement on climate for the next four years,” says Mann, director of Penn’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media. “If we lose our democracy, however, it becomes a far more serious challenge. So we have to continue to fight to preserve our democracy using whatever legal means are available to us.”
The first thing many environmental activists would like to see is more of an effort to make climate change a bipartisan issue. Right now, the conversation around climate change at the federal level tends to pit Democrats and Republicans against one another. Democrats are for climate action; Republicans are against it. That narrative has some truth — no Republicans voted for the Inflation Reduction Act, one of the largest U.S. actions to fight climate change.
Building bipartisan support is practical as well as ideological. Republicans will control all branches of government at the federal level. Their support is needed if the federal government wants to pass any substantial climate reforms. (Though Mann would like to see Democrats play a bit of defense, too. “Republicans have used the filibuster for decades to block progress on any number of fronts. Now it’s the Democrats’ turn,” he says.)
Historically, Republicans and Democrats have supported climate action. “President Richard Nixon created the EPA. Crazy things happen. In the early 70s, the Pennsylvania legislature passed an amendment to the Pennsylvania constitution that we have a right to a healthy environment, and then the voters ratified it,” says Sean Hoffmann, a legislative attorney with the Clean Air Council. “That sort of thing is unthinkable now, and yet, it was a thing that happened not all that long ago. We’ve got to stick together and keep telling those stories and prioritizing the things that matter most to us, and I think that cuts across the political aisle.”
Eighteen House Republicans are asking speaker of the house Mike Johnson to preserve parts of the Inflation Reduction Act because its green spending is bringing money and jobs into communities they represent. They want to protect the law now, even though no Republicans voted to pass it. “There’s bipartisan support for things like these clean energy tax credits,” Cardoni says.
Ideologically, 69 percent of Americans support the U.S. government taking steps to become carbon neutral by 2050, per a 2022 Pew Research Center survey. That should make politicians on both sides of the aisle feel empowered to step up and support climate policy — even if the executive branch opposes it.
“The majority of Pennsylvanians and the majority of Americans do want to see more clean energy, and do support a clean energy transition,” Cardoni says. “The polling is pretty clear.”
Even before Trump, states and cities have been the primary drivers of climate policy. Local action can still continue to reduce emissions and hasten the transition to renewable energy and reduce emissions.
Pennsylvania, which emitted 258 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2021, is the fourth largest greenhouse gas-emitting state. Action here can really make a difference. Our legislature has the same makeup that it did before the 2024 election, and in July passed legislation that created the Solar for Schools Grant program. We can do more.
Governor Josh Shapiro has a two-pronged climate plan. The first part is the PRESS — PA Reliable Energy Sustainability Standard — bill, which would create clean energy jobs and require the state to get 35 percent of its electricity from the cleanest possible sources by 2035. The second part is the PA Climate Emissions Reduction Act, which would fine power plants for emitting more than a set level of carbon.
“This would be the revamp that would require more of the energy we generate in PA to be from renewable energy sources. It doesn’t require that they exclusively come from renewable sources,” Hofmann says.
This legislation will likely need bipartisan support to pass, but PA lawmakers know how to work across the aisle. Cardoni points to the work of South Philadelphia-based PA representative Elizabeth Fiedler, who took her Republican colleagues to tour solar schools in order to build support for the state grant program as one way we can do it. She hopes that bipartisan climate legislation in the Commonwealth will help drive federal action, since PA is such a coveted swing state.
“If we can pass clean energy and climate policy here in the state, it can help signal support for that nationwide,” Cardoni says.
After Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement during his first term, 350 U.S. mayors (Jim Kenney included) committed to reducing their own emissions. Many cities — again Philly included — are falling short of those promises.
A quick recap: The City promised to reduce emissions in municipal buildings by 50 percent; reduce built environment energy use by 20 percent; and transition those municipal buildings to 100 percent renewable electricity. They want to achieve all this by 2030. Officials have committed to zeroing out our emissions by 2050.
As of 2021, the most recent year for which data is available, we’ve reduced emissions 44 percent and are on track to reduce our energy use. Only 8 percent of our electricity comes from renewables, however. There’s 92 percent to go before 2030. And Philadelphia Gas Works includes $19 million in its budget for new fossil fuel infrastructure. Activists want to see the City do more — including going carbon neutral by 2040 rather than 2050.
Mayor Cherelle Parker says she wants to clean and green Philly (though some of her plans have been vague). Now is when we should be doubling down.
“For Philly to take significant action addressing climate change would be a huge morale boost to all of us,” Hoffmann says.
Locally, “some of the researchers in our group here at Penn are actually studying ways that we can better engage the local community when it comes to climate action,” Mann says. “The role [of local governments] will become even more important.”
How we communicate about climate change will be important too because climate policy “tends to be really wonky,” Hofmann says. People need to understand how climate legislation at the city, state and federal level will affect jobs and the economy — and they need to understand the severity of the climate crisis. Newspapers, magazines and other media need to cover the benefits of climate policy and what will happen if we don’t take action. Explicitly connecting today’s weather events, like Hurricane Helene or our region’s current drought, to the climate crisis helps too.
“The corporate media failed us, to be blunt,” Mann says. “Independent media … are ever more important in this environment. They need to take the rest of the media to task for failing to meet this moment.”
The climate crisis is so severe we can’t solve it with individual action alone. Governments and businesses need to commit to substantially reducing carbon emissions and make investments in renewable energy technologies.
That said, Mann spouts off a long list of things individuals can do — “speaking up, demonstrating, supporting environmental organizations, putting pressure on your local and state representatives,” for starters, he says. Climate protests, largely led by young people, exploded during Trump’s first term. Why not do that again — and keep the focus on the issue next time a Democrat is in office?
Beyond protesting and calling elected officials, people can install solar panels, commit to buying from the circular economy and reducing waste, improve their recycling habits and take action in many, many other ways.
“People are like, oh well, I just recycle, and that’s how I help the environment,” Hoffmann says. “In our day to day habits, we can lower our carbon footprint. We can buy and drive electric cars. We could use public transportation.”
A good place to start is taking advantage of the subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act. Now.
Trump said in September that his administration will “rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.” The bill provides tax credits for electric vehicles, installing rooftop solar panels, installing heat pumps — and lots of other energy efficient upgrades.
Philly has questionable recycling practices. But we have a number of independent recycling services that you can subscribe to to recycle pretty much anything. There’s also a number of sustainable and zero waste businesses you can frequent.
“The social science on all this is pretty clear: People are more motivated to take action on the issue when focusing on climate solutions,” Cardoni says.
“Humans designed our society to run on fossil fuels. We can design it to run on clean renewable energy, and we could do it really fast if we want to. … I know that if we can build that greener and cleaner future for everyone, we can still stop the worst impacts of this crisis.”
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