Tomorrow, on November 27, CPS Energy is hosting a Public Input Session. It will be one-part educational event on how to save money on one’s energy bill and one-part civic engagement event, as members of the public can sign up to speak on CPS Energy’s policies, performance, and most notably, their Flexible Path energy plan. The Flexible Path is an energy resource plan that uses flexibility as a way to avoid taking much needed action to phase out fossil fuels. We don’t know every detail of the future, but we do know that is needed. The simple fact is that we need to transition to renewable energy as fast as possible.

Instead of making a strong commitment to renewable energy, CPS Energy envisions burning coal for the foreseeable future – at least until 2042. This is a future that will continue to pollute us and our families, our water, our land, and our air. For a healthier future for San Antonio we must transition to renewable energy!

A just transition to renewable energy means:

• Less pollution and cleaner air
• Lowered rates of upper-respiratory diseases and cancer caused by fossil fuels
• Doing our part to address the urgent challenge of climate change
• A decrease in hospitalization due to asthma
• Less smoggy skies
• More green jobs
• A decrease in the heat-island effect
• Less polluted water and land

In a world where so much of our built environment and investments are antithetical to our health, this would be a step in the right direction.

By committing to a rapid, just transition to renewable energy, CPS Energy would be committing to the health and wellbeing of Bexar and surrounding counties residents, the continued existence and wellbeing of the natural systems and resources we all depend on, and the increased livability of San Antonio.

The conditions of climate change are creating a world that – if we continue as we are – will be uninhabitable by humans and much other non-human life by the end of the century. That means where action can be taken, it must be taken. The foundation for modern life is in our energy use and it is through our energy use we must look towards to for creating a world that is better for all life.

So, what can you do? You can speak truth to power!

What: Board of Trustees Public Input Session

Where: 401 Villita St, San Antonio, Texas 78205

When: Tuesday, November 27, 5:00 – 8:30 p.m.

Let us know you’ll be there.

Sign up to speak anytime between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. The input session starts at 6 p.m. If you can’t make it until after 6 p.m., please come anyway – we will help try to get you in the queue to speak. We encourage you to take the bus, but if you drive, there is free parking for the event at the Navarro Street Garage (located at 126 Navarro).

Use any of the points above. Tell your energy story. We must speak truth to power in order to see necessary action taken. We must demand a better world.

Last week was difficult. The IPCC report – Global Warming of 1.5 °C – was released on Monday, October 8 and the news articles that ensued after its release were torrential and more often than not, dire. I read one after the another like my life depended on it, inundating myself with predictions of doom, whispers of hope, and passionate calls to action.

By the end of the week, my nervous system was fried. My ecoanxiety was worse than ever.

I work as a climate justice organizer based in San Antonio, Texas with Public Citizen. People often ask me what my job means. In short, organizing is “a practice aimed at helping people create the social movements and political organizations necessary to wage campaigns and win power”. When centered around climate justice, it means that I work towards building power to address climate change and support climate solutions. I spend my days doing research, reading policy and news, hosting meetings, attending meetings, planning events, petitioning, canvassing, sending emails, conversing with all kinds of people, writing, educating, speaking, presenting, and a whole host of other things.

This work is extremely meaningful to me and I can’t see myself doing anything else at this point in my life. I’m immensely grateful that I’m able to make organizing my profession. However, you don’t have to be a professional organizer to organize. Some of the best organizers I know have day jobs. They organize because they are angry at the vast injustices that exist and are passionate about building a better world for everyone. The realization that the injustices of the world are created by unjust systems and structures and understanding that those systems and structures can be dismantled, transformed, and built anew is the root of organizing. Our economic, social, and governing structures were created by people and therefore can be changed by people.

We have the ability to affect change. But we can only affect change collectively.

Organizing is not something that happens – or at the very least succeeds – as an individual effort. At the heart of organizing is community building. However, our society is built around isolation and alienation. This is the great challenge and strength behind organizing: bringing people together, creating meaningful relationships, and engaging in important and significant work.  

The IPCC report states that the next decade is the definitive decade for whether or not we stay within 1.5C of warming for the Earth. More than 1.5C of warming means that every coastal city in the world floods, every island nation disappears under rising sea levels, hundreds of millions of people become climate refugees, drought, food scarcity, and vector-borne diseases would all become increasingly persistent and severe problems, and we’d run the risk of feedback loops leading us into even more warming and even more climate catastrophe. Simply put, the more the planet heats up, the more uninhabitable it becomes for life, including humans.  

I hear people express concern and worry over unaffordable housing and gentrification, food deserts, increasingly severe flooding and weather events, lack of public transit, poor air quality, police and ICE brutality and discrimination, the lack of safe pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure, meaningless jobs that don’t pay a livable wage, a broken healthcare system, longer heatwaves, mental health concerns, barriers to political engagement, and many other issues. Climate justice has a stake in all of these issues and all of these an issues can be (and more likely than not are) organized around. Organizing isn’t easy by any means, but it offers us the tools to make our lives better and in the case of climate change, it means fighting for life as we know it.

Many battles have been won from organizing such as 8-hour workdays to free breakfast in schools to desegregation to women having the right to vote and countless more. The rights that we enjoy today are the results of coordinated efforts by people, not the goodwill of those with power.  

Now is the time for all hands on deck. We are at such a critical and uncertain moment in humanity’s history, we must act. Anyone can become an organizer and everyone who can should. We must organize and win collective power in order to prevent climate catastrophe.

When people ask me what it means to be an organizer, I tell that it means being defiant. It means refusing to settle for the status quo under an unjust and cruel system. It means speaking louder when I am told to be silent.

Organizing means knowing a better world is possible and fighting alongside others to make it a reality. 

If you are interested in organizing opportunities in San Antonio, you can contact Briauna at bbarrera@citizen.org.

By Briauna Barrera
August 27, 2018

This is a story about one city and two neighborhoods that exist within its borders. A tale of two geographies that exist in a microcosm. These two neighborhoods, separated only by ten minutes of time, might as well be across the world from each other, a difference in demographics creating a rift as wide as a sea. The four miles from one to the other creates the thin line between the “haves” and the “have nots”.

One of these neighborhoods, Monte Vista National Historic District, its very name exuding importance and wealth, is situated in central San Antonio, about two miles north from downtown. Monte Vista started development in 1889 in what used to be a goat pasture and is home to about 3,000 people spread over approximately 100 blocks. Originally considered a suburb, it is now praised by real estate websites for its close proximity to downtown and is considered part of the very heart of the city. It is a treat to walk around Monte Vista. The blocks have many old oak trees whose tall, lush canopies spread out and provide shade over lawns, sidewalks, and streets. The sidewalks exist, which is no small feat in San Antonio, with ample room to boot. The architecture is particularly notable in this neighborhood, as a variety of architectural styles exist within its boundaries, from Spanish colonial to European cottage.

The other neighborhood is Dignowity Hill, a similarly historic neighborhood. Founded in 1854, Dignowity Hill was the first residential neighborhood in San Antonio. It is located about a mile and a half from downtown, on the east side of I-37. This neighborhood may not have the architectural diversity of Monte Vista, but its abundance of mansions, Folk Victorian houses, and Craftsman Bungalows radiate coziness and charm. Like Monte Vista, Dignowity Hill started off as a place of affluency, settled by Dr. Anthony Michael Dignowity, a physician and Czech immigrant. After his and his family’s settlement, the neighborhood became known as a place for upper-class residents. However, with the introduction of the railroad in 1877, an increase of urbanization and a concentration of industry came to the area. By the mid-1910s, the neighborhood was surrounded by industry and by the 1920s, the wealthy residents were moving further out to newer housing developments and with the building of smaller houses and creation of working-class, industrial jobs, people of lower socioeconomic status started moving in.

Dignowity Hill became a poorer neighborhood as the decades went on. First the wealthy moved to the edges of the town to escape the ever growing expansion of urbanization and industry, and then after WWII, with the availability of Federal Housing Administration mortgage loans to returning soldiers and the mass development of suburbs, the United States saw a boom in its, primarily white, middle class. This left the urban core deteriorating as government and private funding funneled outside city centers and forced those who could not afford to leave – primarily people of color – to remain living in urban environments with degenerating conditions. Dignowity Hill was one of the core neighborhoods. Monte Vista never experienced this change in demographics because at its advent, it was considered a suburb. It was the place that wealthy people were escaping to and it stayed desirable once people began to move back into the city, as by that point, it was considered to be part of the city core. The history can still be seen today and are illustrated in the maps below.

Figure 1. Race and ethnicity (right) and education attainment for bachelor degrees (left). Monte Vista on top, Dignowity Hill on bottom.

Figure 2. Median income (right) and poverty (left). Monte Vista on top, Dignowity Hill on bottom.

San Antonio is the one of the most economically segregated cities in the country. Economic segregation is based on racial segregation in a country where racist policies such as red-lining was only made illegal in 1968 and others, such a gerrymandering, are still exist today. Those who have historically had access to wealth and power made sure to set up systems of governance and economics that ensured their continuing wealth, while ensuring the continuing poorness of other groups. As a result, black and Latinx people experience higher rates of poverty than white people. Thus, the economic segregation of San Antonio also translates to, in large part, to the racial and ethnic segregation of it as well. Our circular highway system conveniently categorizes the city into a pie chart of the segregation: northside is predominantly white, the southside and westside are predominately Latinx, and the eastside has the highest concentration of Black people. This segregation is perpetuated by systems like property taxes funding public schools so that schools in wealthy areas with high land value do well, while schools in poorer areas are unfunded, and city bonds that distribute money evenly over districts, even though districts are not evenly wealthy. This is why some city districts use their bond money for libraries and parks and others have to use them for infrastructure creation and maintenance. Just like the landscape of the Hill Country, we are not all on even ground.

*****

During the summer of 2016 I did research on food deserts and community gardens in San Antonio. Part of this research involved surveying blocks of houses. Considering it was summer in Texas, it was miserable, but it was noticeably more miserable in neighborhoods in the westside and eastside because of a lack of trees (and often also a lack of sidewalks and the packs of stray dogs). These areas didn’t only feel hotter, they were hotter due to the heat island effect, the warming of urban areas due to greater human presence and activity. Trees help mitigate this effect, but there was also a noticeable difference in the tree density of these areas. When I was in these eastside and westside neighborhoods, there would often be little to no trees shading front lawns and sidewalks, much less shading the actual streets. Walking around, I could feel the sun bearing down on me from above while also reflecting up from the ground. No one wants to walk in environments like this. The times I have spent walking around Monte Vista have been far more pleasant, even during the summer, partly due to the presence of those great, old oaks providing shade and some degree of relief from the summer sun.

The utility of trees goes far beyond providing shade relief for pedestrians through:

Figure 3. Benefits of trees. Source: https://www.state.sc.us/forest/urbben.htm.

If those aren’t enough reasons, there are other resources that compile the research on the benefits of trees such as this one, this one, and this one. Trees come with many benefits and contribute greatly to increasing people’s standard of living, while also contributing to the environmental and economic health of areas too.  

However, San Antonio is segregated and where you live fundamentally shapes your opportunities, your access to education and healthcare, your mental health, your physical well being, how long you live, and even to some degree, your personality. Your social security isn’t the most important number you have, it’s your zip code. That inequality of access extends to tree coverage too (see figure 4).

Figure 4. Map of tree coverage in Dignowity Hill (right) and Monte Vista (left).

It is clear that Monte Vista has more tree coverage than Dignowity Hill. Considering the wealth of benefits trees give us, our environments, and our pocketbooks, we should be doing all we can to expand coverage for all of San Antonio, not just the ones who can afford it.

*****

San Antonio has had a Tree Preservation Ordinance since 1997 and was officially declared a Tree City in 2016. Progress is being made, but it is concentrated in wealthy areas. That is not enough progress. This tree ordinance has a 40% canopy goal for the city. The ordinance also states that it can be strengthened as needed. Considering the tree canopy in San Antonio at 22%, it’s needed.

There are programs that do exist in San Antonio to encourage the spread of tree coverage, such as a rebate program from CPS, but more can and should be done. A report released in 2009 from the nonprofit, American Forests, recommends an increase in education about the benefits of trees, but even that isn’t enough because at the heart of this matter is the inequality of access. A rebate is great, but what if you lack the resources to purchase trees in the first place? A Tree Preservation Ordinance, but what if they area you live isn’t experiencing development like other areas are? Or worse, what if the area where you do live in, like Dignowity Hill, is experiencing development so much so you can no longer live there?

The larger issue of all of this is the displacement that comes from gentrification and lack of access that exists in these neighborhoods before gentrification occurs. They both need to be addressed. If more trees are planted, land values will rise, leading to an increase in property taxes and rent prices, which will eventually price out and dislocate the people that an increase in trees was supposed to benefit in the first place. The people that have lived there for generations leave, forced to live in low-access neighborhoods elsewhere before the process begins anew.

It would be great if planting trees could be a cure-all for the problems in San Antonio, but it’s only one action of many that need to happen. The root, systemic issues of poverty and racism need to be carefully and thoughtfully examined and tackled, not just the symptoms they create. Just as with trees themselves, it is the roots that give hold so much importance and yet, are so often overlooked.

June 26, 2018
By Briauna Barrera

Imagine: You’re walking through your neighborhood one warm summer evening. The sun is sinking into the horizon, and the cicadas are starting their nightly chorus. Bats are swooping in the sky. The scent of a nearby grill lingers in the air. Automated sprinklers and homeowners alike water vibrant green lawns, excess water swirling lazily onto sidewalks and down sewer drains. This is familiar, this is home.

Lawns appeared in England and France in the 1800s as a showcase wealth and nobility. The idea reached the United States through literature and art from England in the late 18th century and was similarly used by landowners to convey their status. In the 1830s and 1840s, as cities in the US become more congested and polluted due to the Industrial Revolution, wealthy families began to move outside the city in order to escape the issues of urbanization. In these new suburban landscapes, the upper class adopted the stylings of the elite in England and France. Then at the beginning of the 20th century, the United States Department of Agriculture, the United States Golf Association, and Garden Club Of America encouraged the proliferation of lawns due to its potential as a profitable industry. During this same time, the United States shifted from a producer society to consumer society and much of the individually owned land, especially in cities and suburbs, was no longer needed to produce food for domestic animals or vegetables for the family. Advertising encouraged people to have lawns and buy lawn-care products and by the 1930s, lawns were viewed as a normal and expected feature of middle-class suburban landscapes.

With the economic boom following World War II and the passage of the GI Bill, which allowed returning soldiers to afford college educations and ownership of detached single-family homes, there was a dramatic increase in suburban development. Automobile-centric policy and corporate practices, in large part through lobbying from car manufacturers, also supported the rapid increase in suburban development, as the increase in mass production of cars made them more affordable for private ownership and the drastic expansion of the U.S. highways systems under the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, gave residents an avenue out of deteriorating urban areas into the surrounding suburbs. While white residents fled in droves from cities, known as White Flight, people of color were often prohibited from moving into the suburbs through racists practices such as red-lining. Thus, the sharp rise of suburbia resulted in an increasingly stark urban landscape defined by race and allowed white families to join the middle class and start building generational wealth that that was harder for families of color to obtain. The American lawn became a staple for the well-to-do middle class and continued its legacy of showcasing wealth, status, and consumption.

The Green Revolution, a period of rapid technological advances in agricultural technology and federally-supported agriculture research increased people’s ability to maintain grass lawns in any climate. Now that grass lawns were within reach for families across the nation, the United States Golf Association (USGA) and the National Gardening Association (NGA) sought to expand their power and influence through the new patch of empty land surrounding each middle class American home. The NGA did so by hosting garden workshops that educated people on the proper way to grow and maintain lawns, hosting gardening contests, and volunteering within local communities. While gardening groups and clubs shifted their focus to growing ‘victory gardens’ consisting of vegetables to support the wartime effort during World War I, after the war, focus shifted back to growing flowers instead of vegetables and beautification efforts rather than using gardens, lawns, and community spaces for practical measures. Advertisements also ramped up, with ads and articles about gardens starting to appear in magazines like Better Homes and Gardens. Beautification gardening and golf, leisurely and status-laden activities, became available to the middle class who were increasing in numbers in the suburbs and creating a lifestyle in which grass became paramount.


Wizard Power Mower & Lawn Conditioner advertisement, 1953

The commitment of American consumption and advertising resulted in the creation of a financial and laborious expenditure for home-owning Americans who were expected to spend vast amounts of time and money in the upkeep of something that produced nothing. Currently, the average homeowner spends about 70 hours a year maintaining their lawn and Americans households spent around $29.5 billion on lawn care and gardening services in 2015. However, people are not instinctively compelled to care for lawns, at least not when lawns were first introduced, but many people learned “to keep their front yards in presentable condition as dictated by community cleanup campaigns and school programs, as well by advertising. Advertising, as a result of a country driven more and more by consumption and production, manufactured a false need for lawns that came at the consumer’s and the environment’s expense.

Lawns have a distinct impact on the appearance of the American landscape through the introduction of non-native and invasive plants across the United States. Many of the common grasses used for lawns, such as Kentucky bluegrass or Bermuda grass, are not native to the North American continent and were brought over to familiarize the landscapes for colonists, to graze animals that were accustomed to European flora, and by accident, as when grass seeds were present in the hay of livestock on ships. Eventually these non-native grasses became the grasses people used for their lawns. As lawns spread across the United States, so too did invasive and non-native grass species spread. These grass species drove out other, native species of grass, decreasing biodiversity and disrupting the local food webs as a result.

Lawns are an intensive use of resources, especially water. According to the EPA, nationwide use of landscape irrigation makes up approximately one-third of all residential water use, totaling more than seven billion gallons per day, and up to 50 percent of water used for irrigation is wasted due to evaporation, wind, or runoff caused by overwatering. Lawns not only waste resources, but they are also an inefficient use of land. As lawns became more commonplace, it became increasingly taboo for lawns to serve a purpose other than aesthetics. When lawns were first introduced, they served various functions, such as grazing for livestock, but by the 20th century, functionalist lawn us had all but died out. However, lawns take up an estimated 40 million acres of land in the continental United States or almost two percent of surface in the contiguous U.S. If grass were counted as a crop, it would take up three times as much space as irrigated corn.

Lawns maintenance uses an inordinate amount of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and insecticides. Lawns use about 30,000 tons of pesticides yearly in the United States. However, the effects of  these toxic chemicals do not stop at the land; excess phosphorus and nitrogen runoff from lawn fertilizer enters waterways, and the increased amounts of dissolved nutrients cause algae blooms that siphon oxygen out the affected waterways, asphyxiating fish and causing the larger ecological systems to fail and ultimately eutrophying these waterways. Not only does this destroy the habitat for flora and fauna, disrupt the ecosystems, and lower biodiversity, it also causes “dead-zones” that prevent fishing from taking place and negatively affects water quality, which in turn causes human health issues.

Furthermore the toxicity of these fertilizers can affect other animals indirectly, for example, birds that eat fish or insects that have come into contact with fertilizers are at the risk of contracting pesticide poisoning and dying as a result. Additionally, studies have shown a link between the use of pesticides and colony collapse disorder (CCD), a phenomenon in which bee colonies are abandoned for seemingly no reason. This is problematic because one-third of the food we eat depends on insect pollination, mostly by honeybees at that, and over the last six years, American beekeepers, on average, have lost 30 percent of their hives each winter. With the spread of lawns and the use of pesticides, the health of ecosystems, animals, and humans are all at risk.


A suburb in Bay City, Texas. 

By enforcing a particular landscape aesthetic, it becomes evident that the American lawn forced a cultural homogeneity across different climate zones and different demographics. This particular home landscape aesthetic enforces a hegemonic idea of what American homes can and should look like by catering to the Northeast ideal and climate of landscaping, all the while pushing people who cannot afford  that ideal or do not wish to conform to it to the periphery. This becomes yet another barrier to becoming homeowners, an integral feature to accruing generational wealth.

As the commonality of lawns increased and more and more homes in the suburbs were bought, an increase in private property occurred as undeveloped land was acquired, bought, divided, and sold to families and individuals. Thus, the propagation of lawns also contributed to an increase of privatization. This increase of privatization is problematic because privatization sterilizes culture by taking public space, whether it be physical commons like public parks or digital commons such as TV and radio, and sells them to the highest bidder. As privatization increases, through processes like the acquisition of undeveloped (and unowned) land or of public land and the subsequent development of that land for private purposes, such as creating suburban developments, culture loses to commercial values. The institution of the grassy lawn, driven by those same commercial values, forced out cultural and geographically-specific landscaping methods because it suited the land developers who had vested interest in the lawn maintenance industry.

Lawns are ecologically unsustainable and contribute to the pervasive isolation of people who live in an economic system based on consumption and individualism. Lawns may cause many problems and issues, but they are not the root cause of them. They are microcosms of systematic problems. We need to rethink the way we construct and live in cities, including housing, transportation, and density.

Imagine: You’re walking through your neighborhood one warm summer evening. Native trees cast shade over the wide sidewalks with ample bus-stops on one side and protected bike lanes on the other. You pass one of the many neighborhood parks and see children playing, couples walking hand-in-hand, and families enjoying dinner together. Where lawns were once sprawled out, now stands additional multi-family housing, along with more shade trees, fruit trees, and landscaping full of native plants and flowers. Gardens built with permaculture methods bloom everywhere, full of vegetables and herbs. Butterflies, bees, birds, and bats provide a peaceful, steady hum of life. You pluck a ripe plum, it tastes sweet. This is familiar, this is home.

CPS Energy’s Flexible Path plans to use fossil fuels until 2040 and beyond. The Wednesday, June 13th Public Hearing Session allows us an opportunity to speak up against fossil fuels and speak up for the well-being of our families, our communities, and our environment.

Common wisdom says that if something isn’t broken, don’t fix it. But in regards to the CPS coal-fired Spruce units, there is a broken and outdated system in dire need of fixing.  There are a variety of reasons to switch to renewable energy; positive environmental, public health and economic outcomes chief among them. All of these are reasons to retire CPS Energy’s Spruce power plant.

Confronted with the changing tide of technology and the public’s favorable view of renewable energy, Synapse Energy Economics conducted an analysis comparing the costs of installing selective catalytic reduction (SCR) technology in the coal-fired Spruce 1 power plant. SCR technology reduces nitrogen oxide (NOx), a toxic gas compound that can be found in smog, cigarette smoke, and vehicle exhaust. But adding SCR to a coal plant is less effective than switching to clean energy technology (see Figure 11).

Rather than ridding Bexar County of coal plants and the costs they impose upon the environment and public health or investing in renewable energy and in our community, CPS plans to continue using an energy source known to increase rates of cardiovascular diseases such as asthma and heart disease, impair brain development in fetuses and lower life expectancy. Developed internally, without community input, the plan is called the Flexible Path.

The Climate Action SA coalition spoke out against this plan and called on CPS Energy leadership to involve the public in this important decision. A public hearing has now been scheduled for Wednesday evening:

WHAT: CPS Energy Public Hearing

WHEN: Wednesday, June 13th from 5:00 – 8:30 PM

WHERE: Villita Assembly Building (401 Villita St)

RSVP: http://bit.ly/CPSPublicHearingRSVP

The CPS Energy Board of Trustee meetings don’t normally include citizens to be heard. This makes the upcoming public input session all the more important to attend and speak at. CPS could benefit from another bit of common wisdom: an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.

In addition to being a major source of pollution, the Spruce power plant isn’t economically viable. Last August, Synapse Energy Economics released a report evaluating the economics of the J.K. Spruce power plant and found it would economically benefit CPS – and by extension the taxpayer – to switch over to renewable energy.

They found that Spruce 1 lost more than $20 million during 2015 and 2016 and Spruce 2 lost more than $80 million in the past two years. Part of this loss in profits comes from the decrease in natural gas prices, but even if natural gas prices were to increase again and thus increase the economic viability of the Spruce units, it is likely Spruce 1 would never recover the costs of the SCR installation. The future for the Spruce units is likely one of ongoing economic costs, and those costs will be paid by San Antonio taxpayers.

Currently, almost 20 percent of our energy use comes from coal (see following table). In 2040, that percentage is estimated to drop by more than half, but the important thing to note is that in 22 years there is still estimates for coal energy use. CPS also plants to keep burning natural gas, another major contributor to climate change. And “flexible generation” is undefined, so that could also be fossil fuel-based.

Source: CPS Energy

Just being better than a theoretical “Traditional Path” isn’t good enough. By CPS projections, we will still use coal and other fossil fuels in 2040. We don’t have time to use coal for two more decades. Presently, there is a global increase in the occurrence and intensity of flooding, wildfires, hurricanes, heat waves, droughts and other extreme weather events. San Antonio, already one of the most flash-flood prone areas in the country, will experience more extreme droughts, heat waves, and flooding. Our city is becoming hotter and hotter, and as global temperatures rise and the heat island effect worsens, San Antonio will continue to become a sweltering desert of cement and asphalt.

We have the power to mitigate these consequences and contribute to the global effort of reducing and reversing the acceleration of climate change. We have the power to decide for ourselves to be the change we need to see. We have the power to demand more of CPS and of our local government. We have the power to become a 100 percent renewable energy city and challenge other cities to do the same.

We join our Climate Action SA partners in calling for the retirement of the Spruce coal plant by 2025 and a transition to 100% fossil fuel-free energy by 2030.

Renewable energy is increasingly favored by the public; wind and solar are now the cheapest energy sources in Texas; and renewable energy is unequivocally better for the wellbeing of people and the environment than coal and other fossil fuel sources.

It’s time we speak louder and we have a chance to do so this Wednesday, June 13th at the public hearing.

Come out. Speak up. Demand better. Our well-being, our communities, and our future depend on it.