El Paso climate chief: Driving less, curtailing urban sprawl key to addressing climate change in Borderland
The EPA is expected to notify the city of El Paso whether it's awarded hundreds of millions of dollars for climate-related work later this fall. El Paso's climate chief, Nicole Alderete-Ferrini, has been tasked with developing a Climate Action Plan to combat climate change. The city's plan aims to reduce emissions from transportation and electricity generation, ensure buildings are energy efficient, expand open green space, and reduce urban sprawl. In January, the city hired consulting firm AECOM for $1.2 million to assist with technical work, but the contract was not awarded without controversy. In March, Alderee-Fermini's team submitted a 73-page preliminary plan to be eligible for a federal grant up to $500 million. This is part of a multi-billion dollar pot of federal funds available through the Inflation Reduction Act to help U.S. metro areas fight climate change, and to be more competitive, El Paso is working with Hudspeth County and 10 nearby municipalities across nearly 5,600 square miles.
ที่ตีพิมพ์ : เมื่อ เดือนที่แล้ว โดย Diego Mendoza-Moyers ใน Environment
Nearly a year and a half after El Paso voters granted the city $5 million to craft a plan to counter climate change, city leaders said they are poised to seek $500 million from the federal government to make the plan a reality.
Most of the major cities in Texas – Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Houston – have adopted long-term climate plans that lay out broad strategies to do things like reduce greenhouse gas pollution, address urban heat and conserve water.
Nicole Alderete-Ferrini is the city of El Paso’s climate chief and heads the Office of Climate and Sustainability. She’s tasked with putting together El Paso’s Climate Action Plan, which will seek to lower emissions from transportation and electricity generation, ensure buildings are energy efficient and expand open green space, among other things.
Her office in January hired consulting firm AECOM for $1.2 million to help with the technical work, including measuring air pollution, although the contract wasn’t awarded without some controversy.
In early March, Ferrini’s team submitted a 73-page preliminary plan – a requirement by the Environmental Protection Agency to be eligible for a federal grant up to $500 million. That sum is part of a multi-billion dollar pot of federal money available through the Inflation Reduction Act to help U.S. metro areas fight climate change.
To be more competitive, El Paso is crafting a region-wide plan and working with Hudspeth County and 10 nearby municipalities, including Anthony, San Elizario and Socorro, across nearly 5,600 square miles – although Hudspeth accounts for about 4,500 square miles of that.
Now that the city submitted the preliminary plan, word on whether the EPA will award El Paso hundreds of millions of dollars for climate-related work should come later this fall.
Alderete-Ferrini recently spoke with El Paso Matters about the city’s preliminary plan and what El Pasoans can expect from the final Comprehensive Climate Action Plan, which will likely be completed by fall 2025. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
El Paso Matters: What can you tell us about the status of the city’s preliminary climate action plan and overall climate-related work up to now?
Alderete-Ferrini: The work is about, at its core, taking the issues and the impacts of the global climate crisis – all of the weather changes, whether it’s too hot, too cold; there’s too little water, too much – those sort of global issues that are happening and drill them down to a scale that is tangible and impactful in our community.
When we brought on the consultants on Jan. 3, that really gave us the horsepower that we needed. Our little climate team is five people, and we’re addressing 5,500-plus square miles of territory on an issue that has never before been tackled in this way – in a real way – in the region.
El Paso Matters: The PCAP was due to the EPA on March 1, and you’ve spoken previously about an April 1 deadline. What did you submit by that date?
Alderete-Ferrini: Our task was to take all of that information that was in the PCAP and roll it into a physical project (to submit to the EPA). It’s pretty clear where we need to intervene in order to reduce emissions.
The goal of the grant is to reduce GHG emissions and air pollutants as much as possible. And the more you can reduce it, the more points you get. Our challenge though was that the community was loud and clear that some ethereal project that was going to shift the numbers but not impact the daily lives of our residents was not acceptable. And we took that very seriously. And so looking at what can we do to shift El Pasoans out of their cars to change the way we look at transportation? Also, what are the tools we have to reduce emissions?
The project is about the (metropolitan statistical area). The project is about human beings and their quality of life and their health. And their prosperity as it relates to climate. From the Texas-New Mexico border to the eastern edge of Hudspeth County, that’s what our project is about. And, by the way, it has to be sort of shovel ready because we had to put the application together in 30 days.
So what’s the project? The project is the Paso Del Norte Trail.
That trail goes back to the early 2000s. … In 2019, they were able to get all of the affected municipalities to adopt the plan, but it still didn’t have any funding. The (complete) Paso Del Norte trail was 50 years out. So fast forward again, the EPA says ‘What project can do all of these things that are in your PCAP?’
What if we could build the trail all at once? And what if it becomes more than we ever imagined it could be? The project we submitted is not just a sidewalk. It’s so much more than that. It addresses transportation. We create destinations so that people aren’t just using the trail for recreation. In some sections, it’s hike; it’s bike. We are looking at, as the trail moves through, planting 65,000 trees.
In areas where the trail already exists, we’re going to come in and propose to enhance them.
In addition to the trail itself, we’ve identified specific locations across the entire stretch, where I call them nodes. They are locations along the trail where it’s a center of activity. I’ll give you an example. We’re working with the Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo. We’ve identified a location where they have their health clinic. They have their cultural center. And across the street, there’s a Walmart and there’s a Mimco shopping center. It’s a center of activity in that area.
So we take that whole area, we connect the trail to it, and then we amenitize that whole footprint for the tribe. When you do that you create a reason to use the trail other than just, ‘Hey, I want to walk my dog.’ There’s a destination to it. That’s how you start to reduce the amount of hours and miles that El Pasoans are traveling in their cars.
Another big node … is (the county’s) Ascarate Park. That is the largest open space asset that is locally owned in the region. Why would we not invest in it?
El Paso Matters: A key part of the city’s preliminary climate action plan was an initial greenhouse gas inventory, which is essentially a study identifying and examining the biggest local sources of greenhouse gases – such as methane and carbon dioxide – that contribute to climate change. Did the preliminary GHG inventory yield any new information about the major pollution sources in the Borderland?
Alderete-Ferrini: I think it proves what we already knew. And I want to be clear, because this is a preliminary inventory and so it was based on calculations and data. In the CCAP that will be published next year, that will dive deeper into more specific emitters and where they’re coming from. But the largest portion of emissions comes from transportation and from, basically, stationary energy usage.
When the city is working on this issue, we have a set of tools in front of us and there are things that we control, and there are things that we don’t. We have to address these challenges utilizing the things that we can control. So when I see that a large portion of emissions are coming from stationary energy usage, the best intervention that the city can affect is how to reduce peak energy demand and reduce the amount of energy that we’re pulling as a community off the grid, ultimately reducing the emissions generated by the infrastructure that supplies that energy.
Something that’s included in the grant is $50 million to invest in commercial and public building energy efficiency and renewable energy generation. If you invest $50 million in reducing energy demand, you are going to have a significant impact on emissions.
El Paso Matters: When it comes to local pollution and climate issues, an argument commonly arises that it is not worthwhile for the city of El Paso to invest in addressing climate change unless Ciudad Juárez acted in conjunction, because, the argument goes, more pollution is produced in Juárez than in El Paso. Is that a fair argument, and are you able to coordinate with policymakers in Juárez as you work on this regional climate collaborative?
Alderete-Ferrini: In every meeting that I introduce myself as the climate officer, I can almost verbatim tell you that the comment is, ‘How are you going to do anything about climate in El Paso because you don’t have any authority in Juárez, and it’s really all Juárez?’ And that’s not true. It’s not all Juárez. And the work that we’re going to do between now and next fall is really going to lean into that.
Talking with some academics that work in this space, the way air works … is it sort of ebbs and flows in terms of valleys and peaks and where it moves and where it settles. A large portion of Ciudad Juárez, particularly the impoverished portion that we can see south of the freeway, that’s in a valley. So a lot of the emissions and the air quality issues that we have on our side of the border actually settle on them, not the other way around.
That means I need to investigate that as part of our work. But that isn’t to say that burning material, the footprint of the maquilas on the Juárez side, the idling of trucks that are sitting on the bridges and, frankly, on our highway once they get over, yes, that is absolutely a big, big issue in our community.
What I need to know is, more specifically, how can we address it? And that is going to take really a huge collaborative effort around incentivizing maquilas to behave differently. It is going to be about how the bridges are staffed and how fluidly they move.
When (the Bridge of the Americas) was built, this stuff we’re talking about was not an issue, it was not on anybody’s radar yet.
El Paso Matters: The Marathon-owned crude oil refinery, for example, which emits carbon dioxide and carcinogens like benzene, is in El Paso and not Juárez. On the other hand, dust kicked up from unpaved dirt roads in Juárez can contribute to haze and particulate matter in our region’s air?
Alderete-Ferrini: One of the biggest challenges we have with particulates is raw desert that is scraped and graded and not built out on the edges of our city. The desert understands how to manage herself. The plant material that exists in the desert holds that dirt down. When we go in and we scrape the desert, and then leave it, there is nothing to hold down that dirt.
El Paso Matters: During a presentation to El Paso County Commissioners in mid-March, you referred to the “abandonment” of El Paso’s climate-related impacts. Can you expand on that?
Alderete-Ferrini: Vehicle miles traveled by El Pasoans is a driving force behind our emissions. So what we want to try to do is reduce the amount of time that El Pasoans are in their cars. So if you build more in the core, or you build in a way that folks from the East Side aren’t driving to a job on the far West Side or in Downtown, if you’re living in the core and you’re working in the core, you drive less. The second thing though goes back to energy and natural resource usage.
My job is to make sure that the council has all of the information and the data and the feedback from the community so that, ultimately, they make policy decisions.
El Paso Matters: You’ve said reducing urban sprawl is a climate-related goal for the city. But we see the development patterns in El Paso today are concentrated in the far East Side, the far Northeast and in the Northwest side. How do you think about the challenge of countering or reducing urban sprawl within the context of addressing climate change?
Alderete-Ferrini: It doesn’t have to be about simply developing in the core, but what it means is developing centers of activity. Folks have chosen to live in those areas and that’s great. What we need to do is make sure that we’re not just developing housing, but rather we’re developing job centers and retail and sort of full communities.
In our housing policies, you have seen the city lean in through the council on urban core development. We’re not saying you can’t build wherever you want to build. We’e not saying you can’t use the business model you’ve used in previous years. We’re saying if you want support from the city, if you want incentives from the city, if you want to utilize public dollars or public resources to make your development work, then ultimately that development has to serve the needs of El Pasoans.
El Paso Matters: Last October, the city applied for a separate EPA grant of up to a $100 million that would allow it to provide solar panels for thousands of low-income households and renters in El Paso. Can you share an update on the status of that grant application?
Alderete-Ferrini: We should know sometime in June. But what I will close with is that right now, as of today, we have $600 million in asks for federal money. And one of my primary tasks from the City Council, back to 2021, was to go pursue federal and state funding to affect climate action in our community. I hope that by August, I can … say we brought in over a half a billion dollars, not invested just in climate, but invested in this community.
หัวข้อ: Climate Change, ESG