Yesterday, the City of San Antonio announced an extreme climate plan that set lofty goals that are considered to be “difficult” to implement. The city’s radical environmentalist efforts have been recognized by the liberal former mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg, but the already-extreme plan is considered not extreme enough for the Texas Sierra Club and other environmental groups.
Speaking at a Sierra Club press conference in San Antonio yesterday Briauna Barrera of Public Citizen Texas bashed the already-extreme plan, stating:
“We need rapid, steep greenhouse gas reduction goals, both long-term and short-term, not a vague 30-year linear goal with no concrete way to get there. By 2050, the people currently in power will be gone and it will be the young people of today that will be forced to suffer and bare the effects of climate crisis because the needed and necessary actions weren’t taken today. Our oceans are warming rapidly. Our forests are being cut down faster than they can grow back. The heat waves are getting longer and hotter. The storms and floods more extreme. Our futures hang in uncertainty and this climate plan does almost nothing to address that uncertainty. Don’t let the city and private interests trick you into thinking that it does.”
The already-extreme plan was also not extreme enough for Yaneth Flores of the Esperanza Peace & Justice Center, who indicated that the more radical goals pushed by environmentalists were “not negotiable” and that anyone who accepted the proposed plan was “naïve and incredibly privileged”:
“We cannot pretend that carbon-neutral by 2050 is an acceptable goal. It is not. San Antonio, we are more than that. It is naïve and incredibly privileged to find that sufficient. We must commit to shutting down all coal plants by 2025, to be entirely carbon-free by 2030, and to transform San Antonio into a net-zero emissions city by 2040. The livelihood of our communities entirely depends on this, and I am so tired – absolutely, of seeing this as some sort of game or joke for the city of San Antonio where they have meetings seeking public input but disregard almost all of our comments. These are not negotiable goals, but genuine commitment to a climate action plan.”
These statements indicate that no matter what efforts elected officials make to appease the Environmentalist Left, they will not be satisfied until their “Keep It In The Ground” slogan is fulfilled and all oil and gas activity is ended. While environmentalists claim that “the livelihood of our communities depends on this,” the livelihood of Texas communities rely more on oil and gas, with one-third of Texas jobs, $5 billion in state taxes, and other countless economic and geopolitical benefits that oil and gas bring to the Lone Star State.
