The good news? Climate warriors aren’t waiting for nations to take the lead on change

The COP26 climate summit in Glasgow was discouraging. One British observer called it “COPOUT 26.” Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s executive summary of the proceedings was “Blah blah blah blah.”

The New York Times reports that “Even if countries fulfill all the emissions promises they have made, they still put the world on a dangerous path toward a planet that will be warmer by some 2.4 degrees Celsius by year 2100, compared to preindustrial times.”

Scientists agree that temperature rise needs to be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) to avert catastrophe. And when they say catastrophe, they mean conditions vastly more deadly and widespread than the sea level rise, fires, droughts, floods and storms we’re already experiencing.

Worse yet, almost everyone is skeptical about national governments keeping the promises they made in Glasgow.

But before you go hide under the covers in despair, here’s a source of hope: National governments are being outperformed in climate action by many states, tribes, provinces, and local governments, and the actions of these “subnational actors” add up — possibly to more than national government commitments.

A new research paper “illustrates that the coalitions of subnational actors in the United States are globally significant, representing almost 70% of U.S. GDP, 65% of the U.S. population, and over half of U.S. emissions.”

“These are equivalent to the world’s second largest economy — roughly the size of China’s.” The study “finds that even just the current commitments from these actors alone could reduce emissions by 25% by 2030, and expanded actions could reduce emissions up to 37% by 2030, relative to 2005 levels — even without the federal government.”

Our own Gov. Jay Inslee has been a champion of subnational action both in the U. S. and around the world. He helped lead the creation of a 68-member international alliance of subnational governments from every continent that also met in Glasgow during COP26.

Here at home, Inslee and state legislators have made Washington a subnational action leader. Our state has committed to 100 percent of zero-emission new car sales by 2035, 100 percent zero-emission energy by 2045, and a cap-and-invest system that will reduce more emissions and raise revenue for climate preservation. Forty percent of that revenue will go towards redressing the disparate impacts of climate pollution on “overburdened communities and vulnerable populations.”

In the coming legislative session, Inslee hopes to win passage of measures to decarbonize buildings and construction. This would address Washington’s third major source of greenhouse gases after transportation and energy production.

Our local governments are also subnational actors. The Thurston Climate Mitigation Plan, now also adopted by Lacey, Olympia and Tumwater, has set the table for local climate-saving action. Its aim is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent below 2015 levels by 2030, and by 85 percent by 2050.

Local governments don’t have the larger scale powers that the state does to decarbonize car sales or the energy sector, or to create cap and invest systems. Instead, our local plan includes goals and investments to create more compact, walkable communities, to preserve local natural resources including land, trees, clean air and water, and to support expansion of a local food system.

Another key goal is to “provide opportunities for everyone in the Thurston region to learn about and practice sustainability.”

That goal expresses the idea that each of us is, in our own small way, also a subnational actor — or maybe a sub-subnational actor anyway. We hope this new title makes us all feel more important, as if we’ve been promoted, and have higher expectations to live up to.

We thank Gov. Inslee for his leadership in building national and international coalitions to promote this bottom-up and middle-up strategy for combating climate change.

And one day soon, if the Build Back Better bill passes with climate actions intact, maybe we’ll also thank our national leaders for matching subnational action with significant national action.

This story was originally published November 21, 2021 at 5:00 AM.