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Climate activists rally in front of San Antonio’s council chambers in 2019.
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And cleaning up the power supply at CPS Energy remains a work in progress. So far, the only major plank to advance has been a rebooting of a moderately aggressive energy efficiency program previously known as the Save for Tomorrow Energy Plan, or STEP. Chief Sustainability Office Doug Melnick acknowledges the problem of pace. “All the components are there,” Melnick said. “The challenge is we don’t have a lot of time and we’re experiencing [extreme weather] now.”
Critical report
Sanford Nowlin
Broken Promises
A recently unearthed report on CPS Energy shows just how fractured San Antonio’s climate response has become BY GREG HARMAN
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fter decades of international efforts intended to slow and reverse global climate emissions, industry and governments around the world released more heat-trapping gases during 2021 than at any point in history. And with Congress deadlocked on critical issues like a Green New Deal, the religious cult known as the U.S. Supreme Court recently voted to confound federal efforts to regulate climate-warming pollutants in power production. “This decision is going to seriously slow U.S. progress in reducing emissions of greenhouse gasses and avoiding a dangerous climate change,” Princeton’s Michael Oppenheimer told PBS last week. While we will remain harried — until voters decide otherwise — by Christofascists in Austin who view fossil fuels
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CURRENT | July 13 – 26, 2022 | sacurrent.com
and fully loaded automatic weapons as the pinnacle products of religious freedom, cities like San Antonio should now consider themselves the de facto leaders in responding to the global climate crisis. “That’s why the Supreme Court decision is so disheartening, because this is a national issue,” said Doug Melnick, San Antonio’s chief sustainability officer. “When you start talking about what really needs to happen locally around energy infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, I mean these are major investments that are going to need federal support.” Minus that support, what chance do we have? None of the key elements of San Antonio’s Climate Action and Adaptation Plan have advanced due to the confounding influence of business elites and political leaders who are less than
fully invested in rapid action. The plan is intended to guide the city in reducing its share of the climate emissions responsible for global warming while better preparing residents for a world of ever-rising temperatures and increasing violent weather events. It was developed over two years by more than 90 volunteers. For the sake ot transparency, it’s worth noting that I served on the plan’s steering committee. “I don’t think I want to say the mayor hasn’t done shit, other than passing the [Climate Action and Adaptation Plan],” said Russell Seal, a longtime engaged member of the local Sierra Club. “But the CAAP has been meaningless. We’ve had, as far as I can tell, zero implementation.” Efforts to improve energy use in buildings through a mandatory “benchmarking” initiative have been rejected by business leaders and San Antonio City Council’s conservative wing. Attempts to change building codes to smooth the way for electric vehicle and rooftop solar adoption have been delayed for three years by members of the building community — members who were just put in charge of a code super committee. Funding challenges and a lack of political will have limited any major transformations of public transportation options.
In the buildup to the climate vote, Melnick often warned of forecasts showing that San Antonio would see 90 more days annually over 100 degrees by 2100. Last month saw 17 such days, for a total of 28 this year, and set a string of heat records. Since the deadly grid collapse during 2021’s Winter Storm Uri, a growing gap of the population can’t keep up with their escalating bills, driven largely by spiking natural gas costs. Yet during our climate maelstrom, Mayor Ron Nirenberg apparently sat on a critical report for five months — even shielding it from his colleagues on the CPS Energy Board of Trustees — that all but begged for an immediate and public correction of important energy information that the analysts claim had been mischaracterized by the utility. Dated December 10, 2021, a 21-page technical review of the utility’s January 2021 Resource Plan by nonprofit sustainability research group Rocky Mountain Institute states that CPS misled San Antonio residents about the cost of an energy transition to cleaner power sources. The report also accuses CPS of downplaying the benefits of energy efficiency programs contained in STEP. What’s more, it argues that the utility limited coal-retirement scenarios to “suboptimal” choices that would create some of the worst cases for transitioning off of coal. The analysis called on Nirenberg and CPS Energy to immediately and publicly correct the record. That didn’t happen. Early investigation into the document’s origin and chain of custody suggests that no one outside of
