Cleveland's Climate Action Plan centers on conservation and efficiency.
View full sizeCleveland's Climate Action Plan aims to keep heavy industry but limit carbon dioxide and other emissions over the next 40 years. Common sense conservation, more efficient use of fuels and a gradual shift to renewable energy sources will play a role. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The city of Cleveland's Climate Action Plan may sound a bit grandiose, but much of its comes down to two words -- conservation and efficiency.
Those are old ideas now wrapped into the more comprehensive concept called sustainability.
Trees, for example, are seen as a bulwark if planted in huge numbers against increasingly hot summers that are even hotter in the concrete islands that cities have become.
The city used the occasion of the fifth of its 10 planned annual sustainability summits to roll out the plan this past week.
"This plan makes sense from an economic, environmental, and equity perspective," Mayor Frank Jackson said. "Climate change adds a sense of urgency."
Written with the help of the some of the city's largest corporations, the plan became the focus of most of the two-day summit at Cleveland's Public Auditorium.
The more than 500 people attending the conference tackled the logistics of how to put the 33 major recommendations into play over the rest of this and the coming decades.
In just a few hours, more than 12 committees formed to brainstorm how to advocate for the action plan. If this year's committees behave like those of the previous four years, they will not disappear but continue to meet -- and advocate -- for years.
"What has been incredible has been to see how (summit participants) commit to monthly meetings," said Jenita McGowan, chief of sustainability for the city.
The action plan makes the work a little easier by proposing six major areas the city wants its growing army of sustainability summit graduates to advocate:
• Energy efficiency and green building, including more programs and policies to encourage the insulation of existing homes and buildings while demanding tougher standards for new construction, and pushing utilities to develop "smart grids" that will help rate payers use less electricity.
• Advanced and renewable energy as called for by the 2008 state law now under attack by utilities with the help of some Republican lawmakers.
The plan advocates programs to accelerate solar installations and to get behind the Lake Erie pilot wind turbine project the nonprofit LEEDCo has been developing.
• Sustainable mobility, in other words developing programs to expand car pooling, encourage anti-idling throughout the city and to make biking and walking easier and safer.
• Encourage more recycling to keep trash out of landfills, and come up with ways to recycle the material in buildings being demolished.
• Develop neighborhood and downtown tree planting programs, increase water conservation, decrease storm water run-off by capturing the water on-site, and rewrite city building codes to encourage "sustainable" development.
• Support and promote local companies trying to increase efficiency and reduce their own emissions
By the end of Friday, the ideas of more than a dozen groups working on the floor of Public Hall had come up with the beginnings of strategies.
The goal of the plan is to cut the total carbon dioxide emissions of the city -- its businesses, public buildings, industries, traffic and homes -- over the next 40 years.
The aim is a 16 percent reduction by 2020 compared to what they were in 2010, a 40 percent reduction by 2030, and an 80 percent reduction by 2050.
That's a tough task in a city where heavy industry produces about 30 percent of the total emissions, conceded city officials, who do not want to drive away industry and manufacturing.
The need for the plan is predicated on the conclusion that global climate change is a reality -- caused by industrial society's use of coal, gas and oil fuels.
That conclusion -- especially the idea that something can be done about it -- is still resisted by some.
But it is the working assumption of the city and the more than 50 industry, business, institutional, civic and city neighborhood groups that spent the last year debating and writing the document presented at the summit.
Corporate members of the Climate Action Advisory Committee asked to write the plan included ArcelorMittal, the Cleveland Clinic, Dominion East Ohio, Eaton Corp., FirstEnergy, Parker Hannifin and RPM Building Solutions, a subsidiary of Tremco.
The overarching theme of the action plan is that increasing carbon dioxide and other emissions has thrown a monkey wrench into the climate patterns that society had come to think of as normal.
Hotter summers, droughts, record downpours or snowstorms, lower Great Lake levels, melting Arctic ice caps and slowly rising seas is all seen as the result of the uptick in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
If there were skeptics among the people at Friday's work sessions, they were quiet.
In presentation after presentation, committee members talked of new initiatives -- from lobbying local and state lawmakers to working harder at neighborhood projects -- that they intend to develop.
And that is exactly what the city wants, said McGowan. The summits are a place where people make connections and start the work that often leads to new city programs.
"Our role is to create policies and programs. We devote staff time to helping these working groups be successful," she said.
"The whole point is that we can't do it on our own. Our goal is to create a shared ownership, to create a platform."