Chicago 2022 Climate Action Plan
Chicago has a 2022 climate action plan that targets 62% reduction of GHG emissions from 2017 levels by 2040. The designers of the plan mean well, but they have little leverage and pull in city politics and they are mainly hoping for the political climate to change at the State and Federal levels, and for lots of gratuitous community involvement to do the heavy lifting.
They had a budget of just over $100 million for the plan. However, they ignored my suggestion to use some of this money for education and public forums. I presented my suggestion at the 2021 Chicago budget engagement forum, and mayor Lori Lightfoot said it was a good idea, but they ended up using $0 of their over $100 million for this effort.
A lot of their community involvement strategy involves data extraction from the community to shape policy, and then some how after that they expect that the community will start building clean energy infrastructure on its own. There is really nothing in the plan that I can see that genuinely strengthens communities. Instead of focusing on data extraction from the community, they should focus, in my opinion, on true public inclusion measures such as real two-way public forums, education, and cooperative techniques to truly engage the community and get them to feel a part of the effort.
I see firsthand how it seems that most people simply feel left out of the whole endeavor of sustainability and don't even seem like they realize that they are a part of the sustainability effort. Large segments of the community feel left out and this means that when it comes time for the community to step up and start creating the necessary changes in infrastructure, I wonder how this will happen when whole sections of the community seem to be being left out of the process.
Sustainability is a complex issue that is going to take a wide variety of people in the community to solve, and we cannot just leave it to a handful of people to solve. Everyone is called upon to help out in their community, everyone is a part of this, and those who have a connection with Mother Earth know this best, but those who don't feel that connection as well need to be helped by those who do.
When it comes time to address the heavy-hitting measures needed to become truly sustainable, we will probably encounter significant resistance from those portions of our community who were left out during the planning process. We've seen this for the last 50 years and I think we may keep running into this brick wall, encountering resistance from the landscapers, the oil and gas industry, the unions, the construction workers, until there is a more more cooperative, collaborative, and inclusive effort.
I've noticed that many environmentalists don't understand how badly misinformed and mis-educated most of the rest of their community is on these issues. They assume that the fault is that the other people in the community are simply bad or lazy people but I maintain that this is not the case. For too long large swaths of the community have been left out of environmental conversation and not properly taught all of the considerations, such as how urgent it is to get off of fossil fuels mostly in the next 8 years. For a large part the people who are well-versed in sustainability and environmentalism are not as well versed in the realm of compassion and human understanding.
In Chicago we should try to help the city achieve better sustainability, renewable energy, better waste management, and more efficient buildings and better transportation, but we cannot simply rely on the Chicago Climate Action Plan to bring us there. It is at best a guideline presented by well-meaning people, but it is by no means a fully developed strategy to attain our goal. If people continue to mainly do nothing and rely on the City to engineer this transformation, the plan will almost certainly not be realized and this will just be another empty promise such as others the city has already made by hopeful people who want the best but have not fully discovered the extent of the complexity of the problem yet.
This page last updated on 8/15/2022