Disaster plans:
Cities persist with pointless climate ‘action’
“We’ve lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement.”
— Jody Freeman, Director, Environmental and Energy Law Program, Harvard Law School
“We’re not doing that climate change, you know, crud, anymore.”
—U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins
Fear not, carbon warriors. The federal government has surrendered, but America’s cities fight on.
Municipal entities small (South Lake Tahoe, Calif., Bozeman, Mont., Las Cruces, N.M.), medium (Sacramento, Anchorage, Salt Lake City) and large (San Diego, Phoenix, Denver) are increasingly adopting “climate action plans.” The documents, per the C40 Knowledge Hub (“a resource for cities wanting to act on climate change”), lay out “a framework for measuring, tracking and reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” as well as what “adaptation measures” will be adopted.
Predictably, climate action plans are heavy on catastrophism. San Francisco’s claims that residents “now experience heat waves, drought and wildfires that blanket the city in smoke,” with “impacts … compounded for people by racial, social and economic inequalities.” Portland’s thunders that to “prevent irreversible damage to the planet, we must keep average global temperatures from increasing 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels.” Boise’s lectures: “Our days are getting hotter, our water resources are threatened, forests are burning and air quality is worsening. As individuals, as a city, as a country and as a global community—we must take bold action to address climate change.”
As usual, such worst-case-scenarios garner plenty of media attention. But it’s egregiously inaccurate. Cities’ climate crusaders, it appears, have learned nothing from the voluminous eco-end-times predictions of the past. Shoreline urban-dwellers should be particularly doubtful. In 1995, The New York Times wrote that at “the most likely rate of [sea-level] rise, some experts say, most of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States would be gone in 25 years.”
But up-to-date research confirms that there’s little cause for alarm. The American Enterprise Institute’s Roger Pielke Jr. notes that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself has, “for decades,” failed to “conclusively detect changes in [the] frequency or intensity” of many extreme-weather events. Matthew Wielicki’s research has uncovered no linkage between atmospheric carbon dioxide and heatwaves. A recent paper published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology attributed “up to 65% of observed warming in urban and suburban areas … directly” to the urban heat island effect. And according to meteorologist Anthony Watts, the “available data shows no trend of increasing hurricane frequency or intensity due to human-induced climate change.”
The “science” is weak, but climate action plans can’t be justified by a groundswell of public support, either. A recent poll revealed that few Americans are worried about becoming greenhouse-gas “refugees.” In July, CNN’s Harry Enten cited a Gallup survey that revealed “just 27% of Democrats … say that climate change will make it harder to stay in our area,” with “all adults” at “just 17%.”
Even if rapid, radical reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions were necessary and popular, cities would be an odd prioritization for the project. One analysis estimated that “rural America covers 86% of our nation’s land mass and is home to about 18% of the US population,” but accounts for “[a]t least 36% of US emissions.” And when compared to the world, the numbers get absurd. The U.S. Census Bureau defines “urban areas” as “densely developed residential, commercial and other nonresidential areas.”
The regions “now account for 80% of the U.S. population,” or 272 million people. That’s a fraction of 8.1-billion Earthlings. Yes, per capita, rich nations consume more fossil fuels than the developing world. But despite a growing population, America’s total CO2 emissions are in decline—falling by 17.5% between 2007 and 2022. Focusing solely on the energy sector, the Institute for Energy Research reports that “U.S. carbon dioxide emissions declined by 0.8% and represented 13.0% of the world’s emissions in 2024,” as China’s “carbon dioxide emissions increased in 2024 by 1.2% and India’s increased by 4.1%, representing 31.5% and 8.3% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, respectively.”
American cities’ carbon-cutting capacity grows paltrier, once consideration is given to what little control municipalities have over energy, commerce, transportation and lifestyle choices within their borders. North Carolina’s capital, for example, admits that in 2022, most of its “community-wide GHG emissions come from community activities while less than 2% come from city of Raleigh municipal operations.” An assessment conducted for Irvine, Calif., concluded that “municipal operations generated approximately 18,579 [metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent] in 2019, which makes up less than 1% of the city’s communitywide total emissions.”
Little wonder, then, that pressure is mounting for cities to “do more.” Exhibit A: Banning natural gas. In March, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed a lawsuit against the Big Apple’s prohibition of “combustion of any substance that emits 25 kilograms or more of carbon dioxide per million British thermal units of energy” in newly permitted buildings.
As the American Public Gas Association explained, plaintiffs used a “line of argument … similar to that underpinning the successful challenge of the [Berkeley, Calif.,] gas ban ordinance, which ultimately played out in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit”—but this time, “the district court found that the city’s law does not ‘relate to’ and therefore does not ‘concern’ ‘energy use’ within the meaning of [Energy Policy and Conservation Act].” The climate-alarmism website Grist approvingly observed that the “decision provides strong legal footing for all types of local policies to phase out gas in buildings—and could encourage cities to once again take ambitious action.”
Climate catastrophism is no “niche leftist movement” in America’s cities. It’s policy. And with a “denier” in the White House for at least another three and a half years, it’s likelier to get more aggressive.
