Learning from Cities for the Green New Deal
Sara Hughes
Cities in the U.S. have been developing policies and programs that mirror the goals of the Green New Deal. From developing community solar projects, to retrofitting buildings to promote energy efficiency, cities now have experience navigating the political, economic, and institutional challenges of realizing an equitable low-carbon transition. Cities are early climate change policy adopters, providing several key lessons for a national scale Green New Deal and positioning themselves as valuable partners in implementation.
Climate change policy leadership from cities was initially a reaction to the U.S. failing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol in 2005. Since then, the number of U.S. cities committed to reducing their own GHG emissions has grown rapidly. Today, eleven of the largest cities in the U.S. are members of the global C40 Cities for Climate Leadership network, and 125 cities and counties have committed to the Compact of Mayors. When President Trump committed to withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, more than 160 U.S. mayors pledged to remain committed to the Agreement’s goals. As relatively early and engaged climate change policy actors, U.S. cities provide a learning opportunity for federal policy makers.
Local Experiences with Climate Change Policy
Many of the goals of the Green New Deal require local engagement and implementation due to their overlap with the formal jurisdiction of city governments and the hyper-local nature of their outcomes. Federal initiatives that aim to build strong, low carbon communities should leverage and learn from the experience cities have already gained in the design and implementation of a national scale Green New Deal. A few examples help to illustrate the kinds of local capacities and programs already underway that can inform federal policies and programming.
The first is building energy use benchmarking, a tool cities have developed to support energy efficiency programs. New York City first developed an energy use benchmarking program as a way of filling the city’s knowledge gaps about how and where energy was used, and of helping building owners better understand and respond to their energy use. In 2009, the city passed Local Law 84 as part of its Greener, Greater Buildings Program, requiring that large building owners report their energy use to the city on a regular basis. This information has been used to provide both the City and the building owners with baseline energy use data, allowing for efficiency programs that are targeted and verifiable. In 2018 the City passed additional legislation that assigns building owners grades based on their energy efficiency performance, a move that would made possible by the benchmarking ordinance.
New York City’s program is being replicated across North America, in part through the efforts of the City Energy Project of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Today more than 20 large U.S. cities have adopted energy benchmarking policies, and a number of resources are available that evaluate and synthesize their efforts and progress. These experiences can inform the formation of federal programs designed to support or encourage energy efficiency programs at the local level. Benchmarking and reporting are important tools for generating information for policy design and decision making by building owners. The federal government could expand their support and help to scale up these early efforts.
City governments have experience navigating the challenges and tradeoffs of a transition that is both green and equitable. Efforts in Los Angeles to increase solar power capacity illustrate these tensions. For a city that experiences more than 300 days of sunshine a year, solar power is an obvious clean energy supply, and Los Angeles has been working seriously toward expanding solar power since 2008. To reach its goals, the City divided its investments between large-scale and local solar projects. By some measures, local solar projects are less cost-effective than centralized large-scale installations, but decision makers saw potential for local job creation and community building. Investing in renewable energy (and renewed investment in energy efficiency) quickly led to the need for higher energy rates, an issue that for Los Angeles, like many cities, is a political lightning rod. There were high levels of distrust and tensions between the public, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), and city council that made raising rates nearly impossible. As a solution, the City instituted a Ratepayer Advocate to act as a conduit between residents and utility decision making. In 2016 the LADWP established the Equity Metrics Data Initiative, which claims to be the first effort by a U.S. utility to “track, measure and report service and infrastructure disparities” in the city. The metrics, which include things like customer complaints and access to rebate programs, continue to be developed and refined through stakeholder consultation. This program helped support the expansion of local solar projects to renters in the city. These enhanced transparency, accountability, and equity mechanisms will be increasingly important for the types of projects and policies implicated by the Green New Deal.
Contributions to Public Administration Theory and Practice
Cities have traditionally been understood by public policy and administration scholars to have the capacity to serve as policy testbeds, or laboratories. Cities can experiment in ways that other levels of government may find difficult, and their successes and failures can inform policy and program design. Distinct from the New Deal of the 1930s, the just transition outlined in the Green New Deal requires intergovernmental coordination and cooperation. Cities will be and must be partners in the development and implementation of the Green New Deal. Their experience with both the policies and politics of a just, green transition also provides an opportunity for policy learning between cities and levels of government. The process will raise new questions about power and institutions of federalism, intergovernmental relationships, and governance. Developing, passing, and implementing the Green New Deal must integrate the experiences of cities and include mechanisms for learning from and supporting their ongoing efforts.
Sara Hughes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at University of Toronto.