By David DeWeaver
President Trump was elected, he said, “to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”
It was a line he used to justify pulling America out of the Paris Climate Agreement, a non-binding, overwhelmingly popular global accord which asked signatory nations to curb their greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible.
But Pittsburgh, along with many cities and municipalities across the country, was determined to fight climate change with or without the president’s blessing.
That fight is chronicled in the film “Paris to Pittsburgh,” a climate change documentary shown at Stamp’s Hoff Theatre Tuesday evening. The film explores how communities across America are addressing climate change in spite of government inaction.
Many localities are acting to face the effects of climate change partly as an act of survival. In Miami, for example, exceptionally high “king tides” have forced urban planners to raise roadways, build levees and install pumps to keep stormwater out of the storm drain system.
In other places, the development of green technology has not just been a necessity, but an economic boon.
Iowa, for example, has long been America’s agricultural heartland but is now enjoying new prosperity as a wind energy mecca. Utility companies, enticed by the low cost of wind energy production, are making major investments in wind farms. Sustainability-minded technology companies including Google and Facebook are building new data centers in the state. And young Iowans are benefitting from the newfound abundance of jobs in the wind energy sector.
The supposed choice between prosperity and sustainability is a false dichotomy. States, cities and businesses, the film argues, can move the environmental needle even without the federal government’s leadership.
Scott Lupin, director of UMD’s Office of Sustainability and chief architect of the university’s environmental management efforts, said that the university didn’t have a clear sustainability plan when he arrived in 1997. Despite this, he said the university has made massive headway in the past few years towards becoming an environmentally conscious institution.
Lupin pointed to the university’s much-maligned Anytime Dining plan, for example, as an environmental achievement.
“Some of you might remember when dining services switched to Anytime Dining and took away carry out options. In doing that they eliminated about six million single-use plastic items from the waste stream,” Lupin said. He also indicated that further efforts to reduce plastic bag and other single-use plastic wastes were underway.
Nate Hultman, director of the university’s Global Sustainability Initiative, said that such institutional efforts were a key component in addressing the larger global warming problem.
“How we’re gonna solve some of the problems we have at hand right now,” Hultman said, “is to think how we in our own organizations can make a difference.”
Students in attendance said that while the reality of climate change is depressing, the documentary gave them hope that they could still make a difference.
“I thought the movie was great and had a lot of points for hope. It gave me a lot of ideas for things to get involved with to make changes on a community level,” said Sonja Neve, a junior environmental science major and environmental activist with MaryPIRG.
Zhengming Miao, a doctoral student from Beijing studying international relations, knew firsthand just how important it was to preserve the natural environment.
“I like running. I just ran the Boston Marathon half a month ago,” he said. But in Beijing, where the smog is heavy, he barely steps foot outside at all.
“Climate change is not just one country’s problem. All the countries should communicate,” Miao said.