(highlight:: Philly’s Climate Change Report Card
It’s been five years since Mayor Kenney announced ambitious plans for combating climate change locally. Here, a look at how that's going.
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Philly’s Climate Change Report Card
It’s been five years since Mayor Kenney announced ambitious plans for combating climate change locally. Here, a look at how that's going.
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BY Courtney DuCheneIllustrations by Jane Puttaniah
Jun. 21, 2022
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Say what you will about former President Donald Trump’s approach to climate policy. If nothing else, his 2017 withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement spurred Mayor Kenney (and 61, and, eventually 350, other U.S. mayors) to act locally.
Three months after Trump’s announcement, the City of Philadelphia announced its Municipal Energy Master Plan for the Built Environment. The plan set three goals for 2030, along with a commitment to reduce or maintain energy costs for the city’s built environment. Those goals were:
Reduce emissions from City-owned buildings by 50 percent.
Reduce built environment energy use by 20 percent.
Transition the City to 100 percent renewable electricity.
Then, in 2021, the City doubled down on its commitment to fighting climate change. Kenney promised to zero out carbon emissions — to go “net zero” — by 2050. His Climate Action Playbook outlines the plans the City has in place for Philly to reduce emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change. (Of course, City of Philadelphia regulations are, in some cases, subordinate to state and federal regulations.)
That is more important now than ever. And scientists have stated there needs to be a 25 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 and peak greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 to secure a livable future. By the end of his term Trump had ambushed over 100 environmental rules, and President Biden’s climate goals have been declared almost dead. That makes what happens at the local level paramount to protecting the earth.
For real, lasting progress, we’ll need radical change at every level of society — the foods we eat, the ways we travel, the houses we live in.
Related from The Citizen
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“There is no silver bullet,” says LeAnne Harvey, program and policy director for Green Building United, a nonprofit that works to advance green construction regionally. “We can prioritize initiatives based on expected carbon savings, but in order to reach our local, regional and global targets, we have to do everything, all at once. That includes rapidly transforming our transportation sector, better managing our lands for carbon sequestration, building out a circular economy, and more.”
Nearly five years after the Municipal Energy Plan was released and almost one year since debuting the Climate Action Playbook: How are we doing?
The short answer: We’ve made some progress. But we must do better.
Here’s where we are on Mayor Kenney’s climate goals
Goal: Reducing carbon emissions from buildings and industry by 50 percent
At the core of the 2017 municipal energy plan are the 600 buildings the City owns and operates. And for good reason: That year, energy use by all Philly buildings and industry accounted for 75 percent of our carbon pollution, per the Climate Action Playbook.
The City’s municipal energy use dashboard shows we’re on track to meet many of the goals outlined in the 2017 plan. That comes with a couple caveats: Much of the success is the result of shifting away from coal to natural gas, so though we’ve seen a drop, that won’t continue long-term unless we shift toward cleaner forms of energy like renewables. And the success so far has only been of municipal buildings; what is still needed — and only just now getting underway — is a City-led push for private buildings to reduce their carbon emissions as well. (More on that below.)
One success story: A deep energy retrofit in 2020 for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, one of the city’s top five municipal energy users. The City partnered with the PMA on the $11.3 million project, which included installation of LED lights, updated heating and cooling systems, and a new chilled water system. The project reduced the museum’s overall energy use by 23 percent, brought down its yearly carbon emissions by 2,400 metric tons, and is expected to save the museum $750,000 per year.
In 2021, the City also completed a project to update HVAC and lighting systems in the Fire Administration Building, which brought the building’s total energy use down 34 percent from April 2021 to March 2022. (These changes have yet to be reflected in the city’s latest emissions data.)
All told, by 2020, the City had exceeded its interim goal of reducing carbon emissions from the 2006 baseline by at least 10 percent. The latest citywide greenhouse gas emissions inventory, released in April, showed that between 2006 and 2019, overall emissions had dropped 20 percent.
We’re also on track to meet the next goal — a 25 percent reduction by 2025. Emissions from City-owned buildings alone went from 219,306 to 133,527 metric tons of carbon.
Emily Schapira is president and CEO of the Philadelphia Energy Authority (PEA), the municipal authority that contracts with the City for large energy projects. She says the PMA upgrade “really set the tone for cultural institutions all across the country” and that the City’s overall progress has “created a model that is a national model. People are looking to Philly to see how this gets done.”
Harvey of Green Building United agrees — somewhat. “Progress is slow going, but they are inching along,” she says.
Related from The Citizen
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By Mike Krancer
Reducing emissions solely from City-owned and operated buildings won’t meet the City’s ambitious goals, however. Commercial and residential buildings will also need to make changes to be more energy efficient. “The City has done what it could, given the resources that it has, but these plans need to be far stronger if we want to truly move the needle on climate change and energy security,” Dr. Simi Hoque, professor and program director for the department of civil, architectural and environmental engineering at Drexel University, says in an email.
Hoque and 15 other Drexel professors authored “Climate Change and the Future of the North American City,” a sprawling report that examines how clim)
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The latest citywide greenhouse gas emissions inventory, released in April, showed that between 2006 and 2019, overall emissions had dropped 20 percent.
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Commercial and residential buildings will also need to make changes to be more energy efficient. “The City has done what it could, given the resources that it has, but these plans need to be far stronger if we want to truly move the needle on climate change and energy security,” Dr. Simi Hoque, professor and program director for the department of civil, architectural and environmental engineering at Drexel University, says in an email.
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The PEA’s Commercial Property-Assessed Clean Energy (C-SPACE) program aims to incentivize property owners to make their buildings more energy-efficient by offering loans to help finance upgrades, water conservation and clean power projects
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The City also created a Building Energy Performance Program in 2019, which mandates that non-residential buildings with at least 50,000 square feet of indoor floor space conduct building tune-ups aimed at increasing energy efficiency and water conservation. (Tune-up reports are due over the next couple of years, depending on size of the buildings.)
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“We should focus first on anchor institutions and large commercial properties, rather than small businesses,” says Hoque. “The goals we set should be aggressive and accountable. There should be fines for not meeting these goals, similar to the fines that an industry has to pay for polluting the air or water.”
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The city’s LED streetlight conversion is one area that has struggled with a lack of staff. Schapira says that the PEA stepped in to help support the plan to convert 100,000 streetlights to energy-efficient LED bulbs, reducing our carbon footprint by nine percent.
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Then, there’s Philadelphia Gas Works. PGW, the largest municipality-owned utility in the country, contributes almost one fifth of Philly’s carbon emissions.
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Renewable energy sources still trail far behind nuclear and natural gas in the region’s electric grid. In 2016, the year currently used as a baseline for the municipal energy use dashboard, renewables accounted for just six percent of the City’s power use sources. By 2019, that number had only increased to eight percent. The goal, again, is to generate or purchase 100 percent of the electricity for the City’s built environment by 2030.
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The City plans to address these emissions with the Municipal Clean Fleet plan to transition more than 6,000 City-owned vehicles to clean and electric alternatives. They plan to procure 100 percent electric sedans, SUVs, vans and light duty pickups by 2030.
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Waste was the third-highest source of emissions in Philly, accounting for three percent of carbon emissions, per the Climate Action Playbook.
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The Department of Sustainability is currently piloting several circular economy programs with SmartCityPHL.
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The Zero Waste and Litter Action Plan city government released in 2017 outlined 31 recommendations to get Philly to a zero-waste, litter-free city by 2035. But we’ve faced a number of roadblocks on the path to reaching those goals.
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Illegal dumping and littering are two of the main forms of improper waste disposal that plague Philly’s streets. In 2019, we had two good, potential solutions to these problems: an algorithm Penn developed to catch illegal dumpers and Glitter, an app created by MilkCrate CEO Morgan Berman that allows residents to report litter sightings.
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The City’s Community Composting program, announced in 2019, was delayed for a year due to the pandemic. Last year, 12 community composting sites were opened for groups who applied to be part of the pilot program and in September compost pickup was introduced at 30 rec centers, per WHYY’s report.
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Private companies like Bennett Compost and Circle Compost are trying to create opportunities for residential composting where the City has fallen short, but there’s still more to be done.
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In 2011, the Parks and Rec Department launched TreePhilly, which strives to make 30 percent of every Philly neighborhood is tree canopy by 2025. So far, it’s given city residents 22,000 trees. But in recent years, Philly has lost tree coverage. Our tree canopy declined six percent between 2008 and 2018, a City of Philadelphia and University of Vermont Spatial Analysis Lab study found. (Some residents have hesitations about tree plantings, including misconceptions that trees damage sewer lines, costs and other barriers.)
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In October 2020, the City launched its first-ever urban forest strategic planning process, the Philly Tree Plan, to outline ways Philly can increase canopy and protect mature trees. The final plan is due out this summer.
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These effects are disproportionately affecting people of color and those living in poverty, largely due to past racist housing policies. Redlined Philadelphia neighborhoods have average daily temperatures almost 10 degrees higher than non-redlined neighborhoods, according to a January 2020 study published in the journal Climate. Philly’s Heat Vulnerability Index found that some neighborhoods can be up to 22 degrees hotter than others.
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PEA’s Solarize Philly has helped around 900 businesses and residents transition to solar-powered energy, and its Built to Last program helps the 75 percent of energy-burdened low-income households make needed upgrades that help save on energy costs.
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Two programs run by PEA, Bright Solar Futures at Frankford High school and the Green Retrofit Immersive Training program for adults, seek to address this issue.
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