Fighting Climate Change in Portlandia

It’s easy for anyone who studies climate change to be discouraged. We humans appear to be like the lemmings of our myths, joyfully jumping off cliffs to our destruction. We have endured 30 years of failures to reach an international climate accord at U.N.-sponsored annual climate conferences. And climate activists in the United States watched in dismay as Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema hamstrung national climate policy during the two years when Democrats briefly controlled the White House and both branches of Congress from 2020–2022.

But not only is failure not an option, those fighting to avert cataclysmic climate change have achieved important successes worthy of celebrating. First California, and now Oregon, Washington State, and Minnesota have all enacted impressive policies which are on their way to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in these states by 80% or more by 2050. Scores of cities across the United States have launched local climate action plans which are on track to reduce carbon emissions by 32% by 2025. Wind and solar power generation has taken off in some red states as well as blue ones. And the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative—a cap-and-trade program among several Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic U.S. states designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector—has already reduced carbon emissions from power plants in a dozen states by 50% since 2009.

Below I describe some impressive climate initiatives which have been launched in cities like Portland, Ore., where I live and work. In future posts I will describe pathbreaking state climate policies already at work, impressive national climate legislation which Democrats have ready to go as soon as the opportunity arrives, and why there is reason to hope that a breakthrough in international climate negotiations may yet materialize.

Fighting Climate Change in Portland, Ore.

In 2001 the Portland City government passed a Global Warming Action Plan. Then, in 2018 Portland voters put their money where their mouths were and passed the Portland Clean Energy Initiative ballot measure by a margin of over 65%, requiring retailers with a total annual revenue of over $1 billion, and a Portland annual revenue of over $500,000, to pay a 1% “clean energy surcharge” on gross revenues from city retail sales into the Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund. Supporters described it as “taking 1% from the 1%,” and while the measure was only projected to raise $69 million annually, it is now generating over $90 million a year for the Portland Clean Energy Fund to distribute. We Portlanders:

• Were one of the first cities in the United States to acknowledge that cataclysmic climate change is a real threat.
• Embraced the urgent necessity of taking dramatic action by pledging to reduce net emissions by 50% by 2030, and by 100% by 2050.
• And most importantly, have already reduced emissions significantly.

But what we Portlanders have committed to do so far will not even get us halfway to where we have said we need to be. Hopefully Portland’s historic election of November 2024 will close the gap between Portlandia’s climate ambitions and performance. For the first time city counselors were not elected at large, but instead by districts using ranked-choice voting—a structural shift that reshaped the council’s political makeup. Four of the city counselors elected are members of the Democratic Socialists of America, and all 12 have pledged to increase the pace of carbon emission reductions.

Other Cities on the Move

In chapter 12 in my just-published book, Climate Change Policy: The Eleventh Hour, I describe climate initiatives in Boston, Columbus, Denver, Honolulu, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, San Diego, and St. Paul, and I discuss whether the city climate action plan “glass” is more full or empty. A study of climate action programs in 25 U.S. cities funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Natural Resources Defense Council concluded that those cities were on track to reduce their emissions by 32% by 2025.

In sum, evidence strongly suggests that many environmental economists—including me! —were far too pessimistic about the power of local initiatives when we interpreted the infamous “free rider problem” as a kind of “iron law” dooming climate initiatives at lower levels. Economists call reducing greenhouse gas emissions a global public good because communities which bear the cost of reducing their own emissions enjoy only a tiny fraction of the benefit from having done so. But not only is it far easier for a small group of activists to launch successful initiatives in a city than it is for activists to win approval for programs at higher levels—which requires far more political organizing and collaboration—there is good reason to believe that cities which launch local programs to reduce carbon emissions will prosper while those which fail to do so will not for two reasons:

1. Many important local pollutants are also reduced when carbon emissions are reduced, with considerable health care and aesthetic benefits for local residents.
2. What we might call the economic development benefits of leading, rather than lagging behind, other cities in the transformation from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources are considerable. Since the only future worth contemplating is one where we all have moved on from “fossil-fuel-istan economies” to “renew-conserve-istan economies;” initiating this transition will materially benefit residents of cities who do so first, while residents of cities which lag behind will suffer job losses in declining industries. 

However, I do not want to leave readers with the impression that we are doing nearly enough to prevent cataclysmic climate change before it is too late. Eleven is not 12, but we have reached the 11^th hour. And unless more cities do more than they are doing now, unless more states do what only some states have begun to do, unless Democrats can win future elections and launch a robust Green New Deal at the national level, and unless we soon achieve a breakthrough in international negotiations; climate scientists have made clear that the future for our children and grandchildren will be bleak indeed.

Robin Hahnel is a professor emeritus at American University in Washington, D.C. He has also taught at the University of Maryland at College Park, Lewis and Clark College, Willamette University, and Portland State University.