The Climate Planner

Overcoming Pushback Against Local Mitigation and Adaptation Plans

Jason King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000422627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The Climate Planner is about overcoming the objections to climate change mitigation and adaption that urban planners face at a local level. It shows how to draft climate plans that encounter less resistance because they involve the public, stakeholders, and decisionmakers in a way that builds trust, creates consensus, and leads to implementation. Although focused on the local level, this book discusses climate basics such as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Paris Agreement of 2015, worldwide energy generation forecasts, and other items of global concern in order to familiarize urban planners and citizen planners with key concepts that they will need to know in order to be able to host climate conversations at the local level. The many case studies from around the United States of America show how communities have encountered pushback and bridged the implementation gap, the gap between plan and reality, thanks to a commitment to substantive public engagement. The book is written for urban planners, local activists, journalists, elected or appointed representatives, and the average citizen worried about climate breakdown and interested in working to reshape the built environment.

1Why Are We Doing This?

Local Planning and the Call

Introduction to Part 1

Why Are We Doing This? Local Planning and the Call

Climate plans come in many forms and those are discussed in Chapter 2, but every climate plan involves two parts: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation initiatives aim to reduce or prevent greenhouse gas emissions and involve actions like installing solar panels on government buildings or instituting a bicycle-sharing system to reduce the carbon pollution of automobile use. Climate adaptation initiatives prepare a community for the unavoidable impacts of climate change, such as sea level rise or extreme weather events. Initiatives might include raising sea walls, updating building codes, or water recycling efforts.

Significant, meaningful action means collective action, and collective action begins at the community level. As important as individual action may be, the carbon pollution problem can only be mitigated when we reinvent our systems at the level of the city, region, nation, and planet, and this will take a lot of people. Likewise, no one individual can afford to adapt even a small town to shrinking water supplies or surging seas – the cost would be too great. It takes the entire town, every time. The enormity of the problem has a silver lining: communities that work together to create new climate plans or add big new commitments to their existing plans often find themselves participating in a transformative process that transcends the old battle lines drawn by longstanding, unsolvable issues or tensions.

The call to action in movies takes the form of the hero’s quest in which a character has an idea, leaves his village, has an adventure, returns to his home, mobilizes the community, and leads them to defend their home using the wisdom the hero has gained. The call we discuss in this book is just like that, except we needn’t go anywhere physically; the journey is an inner one. The heroic quest is one you take to find out what you believe. It is also a quest for identity in which people don’t know quite who they are at the beginning but, by the end, they know.

At the level of the individual or household, some people vote for candidates who make climate a major agenda item and change their lifestyles to lower their carbon footprint using energy and water more wisely. Some switch to renewable energy providers for their home or add solar panels to their roof. Many people purchase hybrid or electric vehicles. Others participate in local climate conferences or marches and post alarming articles on Facebook. They donate to climate action groups and may even enroll the offices where they work in carbon offset programs. We all know people who go even farther and eat vegan (for purely environmental reasons), use public transportation or their bike for their daily commute (even when a car would be more convenient), and are never without their Nalgene water bottles and bamboo utensils in order to lower the amount of waste they produce. The people I know who do all of these things typically reach a point in their journey in which they feel they are not doing enough. The logical next step for them is to work at the community level.

At the same time, many people feel they don’t have the extra time to reorder their life or extra income to donate to a cause. They don’t have the money needed to turn their homes into renewable powerplants or upgrade their car. They do what they can but are still left feeling powerless. The best cure for that sense of personal powerlessness is participation in a municipal effort because by participating in any way, even virtually on the internet, these people are introduced to their community’s professional planners and staff members, people paid to work on the issues that residents can’t find the time to work on, and there is comfort in that. A city plan puts more than just two hands to work; a plan can mobilize a thousand people. Over a long enough a period, a good plan can task a hundred thousand. Mayors, commissioners, and presidents are temporary, but plans last.

A citizen’s work isn’t over after plan adoption, however. Once the plan is adopted, it can be a full-time commitment to stay involved, stay aware of upcoming issues, hold elected and appointed officials to plan goals, and keep others attending meetings and voicing their concerns. The call to action isn’t a single moment, like in a movie; it is many moments, and a continual discipline. It is a lifestyle. A municipality of 25,000, or even 250,000, may only have a handful of gadflies and fewer than a hundred fully engaged citizens who make local affairs their personal mission, but, from what I have seen, a single individual, community activist, senior staff member, or elected official, can keep a community on track.

This kind of work can be frustrating. This kind of work has its ups and downs. The people I know who are engaged at the community level must take breaks for months, years, or even whole administrations. If you swim against the stream, you know the current’s strength. And, let’s face it, public meetings are an ordeal every time. However, there’s just about nothing better than the feeling of having made a difference. I, myself, have felt the deep satisfaction at having made a difference, and I have seen other people feel it too.

It’s no secret that most people who participate in local government are older. Older people have more time and, often, fewer resources, and participating in local government is free. Older people also find personal fulfillment in participation. Everyone wants to be needed by someone. Everyone needs to feel important. Older people who have fewer hopes for themselves can hope for their community. They can sometimes even re-find the fervor of youth. In my experience, the older people in a community are as likely to be an agent for positive change as the younger. Enlist their help.

It’s a lot easier to mobilize a community and keep them engaged, than one would think. Once people feel they’ve made a bit of a difference they usually go back for more and continue to participate locally. Working toward a goal helps people escape, for a little while, preoccupations with the problems in their lives. Life never feels empty at a City Council meeting just before the adoption of a plan that involved a community effort. People who act locally know what’s in it for them. Frankly, the actual issue they are working on can feel secondary. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard suggested that the passionate state is the highest state for people. People want to be tasked. They want to feel important. It just takes a plan.

That’s Not How Things Work in My Town

In other places, there are no indications at all of a latent desire to save the planet which simply needs an outlet. There is no observable call. For many citizen-planners there is zero discussion of climate locally and it is hard to imagine that there ever will be one. Let me suggest that because these are the places where the most progress is to be made the greatest sense of achievement is possible. In my opinion, these can be enviable places to work because there’s no expectations to disappoint. I’ll talk a lot about places like this in the “Notes From the Field” sections. These are the kinds of places I usually work.

How much can a person further the climate conversation in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts where their first climate plan was adopted in 2002, they have implemented highly technical building efficiency requirements and greenhouse gas emission targets, they have an 18-person Climate Protection Action Committee which includes MIT and Harvard professors, and the committee meets every month to discuss such minutia as the climate change theming of the local Mermaid Parade?¹ Cambridge has achieved an enviable (and arguably sufficient) amount of local awareness. Citywide, it has plenty of climate-related umph. What’s even left to do?

There’s a lot to do in Lubbock, Texas. There’s a lot to do in Mobile, Alabama. It will be a while before the people working on climate in those cities have to worry that they are redundant.

Whether your town is one that wants to participate in the climate struggle or couldn’t care less, your job is the same: Educate and build public support for new climate initiatives. There are opportunities to do this in every community. Let’s give one example of a relatively easy step that can be taken everywhere. Across the country I have seen small towns update the portion of their building codes related to mitigation and resilience (even if those terms are not used) after a natural disaster. In every case, the new local code exceeded the life-safety provisions in the standard building codes. Standardized building codes were often designed as a one-size-fit-all at the federal or state level. For this reason, new regulations could only be invented at the local level because only local people understand their local climate challenges (even if their regulations never mention climate and stick to the term natural disasters). The citizen-planners who improve health and safety codes save lives. It’s okay to begin your climate planning after a disaster and begin it without ever discussing climate. Start with the codes.

Leading a Discussion on Climate

At City Council, for better or worse, you are dealing with real people. When it comes to speed bumps, bike lanes, potholes, fence permits, parking lot lighting, and even trickier issues like taxes, up-zonings, and traffic, you are dealing with real, physical, observable, and understandable issues that the average person can weigh in on. It isn’t rocket science; city planning is ultimately about streets, public spaces, and buildings and everyone has enough experience with those things to participate. However, for these same reasons it can be incredibly difficult to bring the findings and recommendations of the global science community to the local forum.

Around the country, I have observed members of the public take their three allotted minutes at the microphone to talk to elected leaders about climate change on all variety of topics. Slowly, these people are introducing terms and educating. I have observed that planning staff reports increasingly discuss the root cause of new flooding problems, unexpected storm damages, and even increasingly hot days. These reports are changing public sentiment.

Abraham Lincoln stated that with public sentiment anything can be done and without it, nothing. Specifically, in a speech on the spread of slavery in Ottawa, Illinois, in 1858, Lincoln said,

In this, and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.

Local government provides us with the ability to shape public sentiment. What follows are common objections, potential replies to those objections, and stories which describe how planning teams I’ve worked with have dealt with objections to climate planning. It isn’t easy. You may have loud negativity hurled angrily at you while you are in front of a room filled with people who aren’t sure what to think and are watching your reaction very closely. Listen to the objections and, I recommend, be as respectful as possible. Most importantly, listen. Understanding the objections will improve your efficacy. Let me describe the objections I hear all the time.

Note

1. City of Cambridge Climate Protection Action Committee Agenda (2019). Wednesday, March 14. Retrieved from: www.cambridgema.gov/-/media/Files/CDD/Climate/climatecommittee/2019/CPACagenda031419_processed.pdf

Chapter 1

Climate Planning Objection 1

“Climate change is a lie. It can’t be proven. The climate change myth is a political maneuver.”

We need to put aside what we believe the climate conversation to be because in most of America it is not the same conversation that we read in The New York Times, The Guardian, or urban planning publications. There’s still a lot of skepticism in the world and it’s helpful to put ourselves in the skeptic’s place for a moment.

As an attendee at a public meeting involving climate change how can one tell that the presenter isn’t simply seeking attention? How do we know they aren’t alarmists? There’s a long tradition of fortune-tellers, false prophets, Chicken-Littles, and fear-festers. Reckless fearmongering for the purposes of attention-getting comes naturally to people. Often, they don’t even know they’re doing it. At the very least, there is no one who does not exaggerate. For these reasons, the crowd is slow to trust.

Remember the Y2K scare? The world feared computers would stop working at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999 because instead of allowing four digits for the year, many computer programs only allowed two digits. We were told computing would stop and havoc would ensue. Nothing happened. At that same time millennialism, the end-of-the-world fear, took other forms. As a young man, I met Sheik Nazim Al-Haqqani in Northern Cyprus, the Sufi Muslim sheikh who got the world’s attention when he predicted the Last Judgment would occur in the year 2000. A lot of people, like Jerry Falwell, the American pastor, and Edgar Cayce, the psychic, seemed pretty sure that 2000 would be the big year. Nothing happened. People remember this. You might think that climate change and millennialism have nothing in common. One is based in science and the other in some kind of misplaced religiosity, but many of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Why Are We Doing This?: Local Planning and the Call
• Part 2 Creating Climate Plans
• Part 3 Two American Cities in 2050
• Conclusion: The Way Forward
• Index