I know I’m surprised. Are you surprised? It’s easy to make a pledge, right? We make them all the time for New Year’s Day. I’m good at continuing to work out (excepting during lockdown, though I did do at least a 2 mile walk daily), but, playing more golf and losing weight? Not so much. But, then, that only affects me, and doesn’t really harm anyone else. Lots of these climate cult cities make lots of pledges. How are they doing?
Cities are pledging to confront climate change, but are their actions working?
Scientists and activists put the problem of global warming on the national agenda in the late 1980s. Since then, five different presidents have occupied the White House, leading to five disparate federal strategies for managing the emissions that cause climate change.
Whipsawed by Washington, activists and policymakers have instead turned inside the country, notably to cities. Since 1991, over 600 local governments in the United States have developed climate action plans that include greenhouse gas inventories and reduction targets, reflecting growing public concern about the consequences of a warmer planet. Recently, this local action has been accelerating. But despite numerous studies, we still don’t know if all this effort is working.
(Hint: it’s not)
Now, a team of scholars organized by the Brookings Institution has built and analyzed one of the most comprehensive statistical evaluations of just what’s happening in a cross section of diverse cities on emissions reductions. Unlike earlier studies—which tend to focus only on the places that have made climate pledges—we looked at all of the nation’s 100 largest cities to get a dose of realism about how much of the country is really engaged in confronting climate change.
From that perspective, what cities are doing is—at best—a start. As of 2017, only 45 of the 100 largest cities had any serious climate pledge at all, and many of those pledges are more aspirational than realistic. About two-thirds of cities with climate pledges are currently lagging in their targeted emissions cuts, while 13 others don’t appear to have available emissions tracking in place.
Hey, this is not some climate skeptic group looking at this: the Brookings Institute is definitely far left. They go on to attempt to paint some sort of rosy picture, and yammer about having to have nation and international dictates forcing citizens to comply, but, let’s face it, most of what these leftist climate cult cities with a majority leftist climate cultists as citizens are doing is just climavirtue signaling. It’s easy to make that pledge, right? Not so easy when instituting it levels their economies, and the government’s themselves, and especially the elected politicians, rarely take actions in their own lives. Go too far and you end up with the Yellow Vest protests in Paris.
Read: Bummer: Leftist Cities With Climate Pledges Aren’t Really Accomplishing Much »
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