As 2021 draws to a close, it seems appropriate to take a look back—to update some of the stories and follow up on some public policy issues I’ve covered for the eNews over the past year. Such a review calls, too, for a brief assessment and a look toward the future. The opinions expressed are mine, not those of One Earth Film Festival or its governing board.
For the next month the world will once again be focused on the treacherous global geopolitical terrain of climate change.
The 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will be held in Glasgow, Scotland, beginning on October 31. The talks are scheduled to end on Friday, November 12, but if recent experience is any guide will be extended over the weekend as agreements are forged and contentious issues are resolved—or not, in which case they will be tabled for later consideration. Kicking the can down the road is standard operating procedure for these meetings, as one might expect for a 196-member international body that must operate by consensus.
Between now and the end of this year the City of Chicago will be moving aggressively toward the conclusion of a three-year process of reevaluating the city’s relationship with its utility partner, Commonwealth Edison.
Other municipalities across the country may want to take note and look to Chicago as a model on the transition to clean, renewable energy.
The goal of the reevaluation is to re-engineer and modernize the City’s electricity delivery system to meet the demands of the 21st century. As part of a much broader agenda known as Resilient Chicago, launched in 2019, the City is reevaluating what's known as the Electric Utility Franchise Agreement (henceforth referred to as ‘the FA’), which has been in effect since 1992 and expired at the end of 2020. (It is still in force under a clause that allowed for a period of transition at expiration.)
What’s happening in Chicago, right now, is a very important, very big deal.
The very first finding in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC, or simply, IPCC) August 9 report is this:
“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.”
I strongly suspect that this is the first time the word “unequivocal” has appeared in an IPCC report, given the IPPC’s “calibrated language” and the fact that these reports require both scientific and political consensus. Artist Alisa Singer illustrated one thread of the evidence for human-caused climate change.
In November 2017, I participated in a panel discussion on climate change policy in Indianapolis, headlined by a then-former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assistant administrator named Janet McCabe. She had left EPA at the beginning of the Trump administration and taken a post as director of the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University. When asked what could be done to thwart the administration in its effort to roll back environmental protections, Ms. McCabe offered some ironic assurance.