Climate Emergency Resolution Advances

An aldermanic committee unanimously recommended approval of a climate emergency resolution — with the caveat that the financial implications of such a resolution be worked out before a final version is voted on by the full board.

The alders on the City Services and Environmental Policy Committee (CSEP) recommended that the full board approve that resolution during a packed hearing Thursday night in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall.

The proposed resolution, backed by the local environmental activist group the New Haven Climate Movement and introduced by Westville Alder Darryl Brackeen, Jr., calls on the city to end all community-wide greenhouse gas emissions by December 31, 2030, and to designate 0.1 percent of the city’s annual budget towards reducing the city’s carbon footprint. It also calls for the city to create a Climate Emergency Task Force and to prioritize the creation of clean energy jobs. See below for the full text of the proposed resolution.

Committee alders said Thursday night that they plan to hold another public meeting to work through a substitute amendment concerning the resolution’s financial details. They invited the resolution’s supporters to return for that meeting in the Spring when as the alders work through next fiscal year’s budget.

The resolution now advances to the full Board of Alders for a vote and for the introduction of any new financial amendments.

The resolution was penned by the New Haven Climate Movement , whose members organized weekly events to raise awareness and build up morale to support the resolution.
Throughout the summer, they met with residents and city officials to encourage New Haven to join hundreds of other cities including, New York and London, in declaring a climate emergency.

The almost entirely student-led movement put together numerous community discussions as well as two rallies on the New Haven Green and in Fair Haven. The group submitted over 1,500 signatures in support of the resolution that members had collected at various events leading up to Thursday night’s hearing.

Last, But Not Least, On The Night’s Agenda

Resolution supporters poured into the Aldermanic Chambers on Thursday at 6 p.m., toting signs and written testimonies. An assortment of 24 different climate change experts and impassioned students, some as young as 13 years old, testified in support of the resolution.

New Haven Climate Movement Chris Schweitzer and City Engineer Giovanni Zinn introduced the resolution before the committee as the final item on the night’s agenda. The presentation and testimonies for the climate resolution took over two hours, but the supporters’ composure and charisma persisted through the night.

Over ten experts in public health, environmental law and science, and engineering fields highlighted the health and economic impacts that have already and will continue to burden New Haven due to climate change.

“Climate change is something that colors everything we do everyday,” Zinn said. ​“All the infrastructure decisions that my office does, we have to be extremely concerned about climate change.”

Zinn said for every project, climate change is already adding costs. Even with projects such as the Grand Avenue bridge reconstruction, Zinn said ​“climate change is a daily part of our thinking process.”

“When you look at the Grand Avenue bridge reconstruction, you wouldn’t immediately think we see that in a climate change way. But, we looked very carefully at the height of all the machinery, knowing that we might have up to 20 more inches of water by 2050.”

“We’re Killing Ourselves”

According to the state Department of Public Health, New Haven has the highest asthma rates in the state, and was ranked seventh worst nationwide among cities with the highest asthma rates.

That’s why Yale New Haven Health Registered Nurse Joseph Foran rushed over to City Hall after work to testify in support of the resolution. ​“I work in the ICU [Intensive Care Unit] and we fight like heck to allow people to survive asthma exacerbations and restrictive lung disease. The climate emergency is going to continue to make these problems worse, and cause a crisis in our healthcare system.”

Foran moved to the Hill just when Hurricane Sandy struck New Haven in 2012. He said his neighborhood was without power the longest of any other neighborhood, and failed to see much city action to help those in need.

“It was a little glimpse of the type of crises we are going to be facing in the future.”

Yale public health student Brian Thompson spoke about the threats of extreme heat, sea level rise, and adverse health effects due to decreased air quality. Thompson said climate change disproportionately affects lower income communities across the nation and in New Haven. ​“Often people who are the most vulnerable have contributed the least to climate change, yet stand to lose the most.”

“Winning Slowly Is Just Another Way Of Losing”

Co-Op student Kiana Flores said she’s tired of being ignored.

“I’m 15 years old and I’m terrified for my future.” Flores said it is important to continue infrastructural adaption to lessen the blows of climate change, but the city also needs to focus on prevention. ​“When your bathtub is overflowing, you don’t grab a mop, you turn off the faucet.”

Flores also spoke about the impacts of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Maria on low income communities. ​“Many people came to New Haven to seek refuge from those storms, but with rising sea levels we put ourselves and those who have come to New Haven for safety at risk.”

At the beginning of the school year two years ago, Hopkins student Julia Kosinski started having trouble breathing. ​“All the sudden, I had asthma and it turns out I had this experience in common with thousands of others across New Haven.” Kosinski and those thousands of others developed asthma due to low air quality exacerbated by greenhouse gas emissions. ​“It’s a justice issue, it’s a health issue, and it’s a human rights issue, and it’s an emergency right here and now.”

Many of the younger supporters spoke about their fears for the future and the need for immediate action. Hopkins student Ella Zuse said ​“What scares me the most about climate change is that there is still so much we don’t know about the dangers it poses. While we have so much to learn about the damages we’ve done, we do know what we can do to fix it.”

In closing, Westville Alder Adam Marchand spoke up in favor of passing most of the resolution.

“We’re headed for a lot of trouble in our country, our community, and our world because of the lack of political will to do something,” he said, ​“but we can’t pass a resolution tonight that commits us to something about dollars and budget.”

Marchand said he supported passing the resolution on to the full Board of Alders with some future amendments because he wanted the resolution to be ​“meaningful, with commitments that are binding.”

New Haven Climate Movement organizer Molly Babbin said she was ​“excited” after the CSEP Committee recommended approval of the resolution. ​“We understand that New Haven doesn’t have extra money lying around to invest in such a project, however, we also understand that we have a short window of time where we can actually make a difference.”

“New Haven Isn’t Full Of Climate Deniers”

Before the hearing, roughly 40 members of the New Haven Climate Movement gathered on the steps of City Hall for a protest in support of the proposed resolution.

A half-dozen teenagers spread out across the top of the steps, holding a black-and-orange banner reading, ​“Climate Emergency / Restore A Safe Climate,” while others in the crowd below waved signs that said, ​“Resist Build Rise Vote” and ​“Our Future Is Not For Sale.”

Nineteen-year-old organizers Babbin, from Guilford, and Alexandra Ashworth, from Orange, walked the crowd through the basics of the proposed resolution.

“The first step is for the City of New Haven to declare a climate emergency,” Babbin said. New Haven wouldn’t be alone in declaring as such: 888 other local and state and national governments from throughout the world have already done so, including New York City, Los Angeles, Oakland, and even New Britain.

“We don’t want them just to say we’re in an emergency,” she said. ​“We want them to follow up with actual action against climate change.” That means eliminating all greenhouse gas emissions in the next decades. Hiring staff specifically dedicated to fighting climate change. And dedicating 0.1 percent of each year’s city budget towards reducing the city’s carbon footprint.

Kiana Flores, a Fair Haven native and rising junior at Co-Op, read out a petition that the movement’s youth committee recently submitted to all of the city’s mayoral candidates, asking each to prioritize reducing New Haven greenhouse gas emissions if elected in November.

Flores said she came to the New Haven Climate Movement simply because, when she started learning about climate change and searching on the internet for local groups concerned with the issue, the New Haven Climate Movement was at the top of the search results list.

Over the past few months, she said, she and her fellow student activists have met once a week, lobbied alders, educated themselves and their peers about the dangers of climate change and the immediate, mass mobilization needed to counter it.

“We need to actually do something,” she said.

Below is the proposed climate emergency resolution, printed in full.

RESOLUTION OF THE NEW HAVEN BOARD OF ALDERS ENDORSING THE DECLARATION OF A CLIMATE EMERGENCY TO RESTORE A SAFE CLIMATE.

WHEREAS: human activities have warmed the Earth enough to end the 12,000-year period of climate stability that allowed agriculture and human civilization to develop; and

WHEREAS: global warming has already set in motion disastrous changes to the Earth system, including accelerating ice mass loss from the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets and the thawing of the borders of the vast Arctic permafrost, which holds twice as much stored carbon as the entire atmosphere; and

WHEREAS: the world is on course for 2C of warming at which point many scientists believe that this temperature will initiate a chain of self-reinforcing changes (feedback loops) that dramatically accelerate warming (ex: hotter temperatures cause more forest fires, releasing more CO2, causing more warming, causing more fires, etc.); and

WHEREAS: 73% of Connecticut residents think global warming will harm future generations; and over 80% of Americans think that CO2 should be regulated as a pollutant; and

WHEREAS: NASA scientists have concluded that the complete collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet alone could raise sea levels 23 feet, creating several billion climate refugees and a ​“global-scale catastrophe”; and

WHEREAS: Connecticut’s biggest climate change risks are intimately linked to its 217 miles of Long Island Sound shoreline, where 40 percent of the population lives in 36 coastal communities that now faces the potentially dangerous combination of rising water levels and more frequent and intense

storms; and
WHEREAS: over 19,000 scientists have signed a Second Warning to Humanity proclaiming that ​“a great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided”, and

WHEREAS: the economy’s overshoot of a number of ecological limits and, increasingly, climate change, are driving the sixth mass extinction (1000 to 10,000 times above the normal rate) of species, which could devastate much of life on earth for the next 10 million years; and

WHEREAS: England’s chief scientific advisor warned that humanity faces a ​“perfect storm of global events” by 2030 as climate change, population growth, and growing demand for food, energy, and fresh water incite violent conflict over diminishing resources that are essential to human life and
dignity; and

WHEREAS: climate-fueled droughts, famines, and diseases have already killed millions of people in the Global South, and displaced millions more; and

WHEREAS: indigenous and low-income communities and communities of color in the United States and abroad have suffered the gravest consequences of the extractive economy since its inception; and

WHEREAS: the destruction caused last year by Hurricanes Harvey and Maria, as well as the record wildfires that devastated Northern California, confirm that the earth is already too hot for safety or justice; and

WHEREAS: it is an act of unspeakable injustice and cruelty to knowingly subject our fellow humans now and into the future to societal disintegration, food and clean water shortages, economic collapse, and early death on an increasingly uninhabitable planet; and

WHEREAS: Pope Francis has declared that humanity is on the verge of a ​“global suicide,” and that we will destroy ourselves if we destroy God’s creation; and

WHEREAS: common sense and morality dictate that humanity can no longer safely emit greenhouse gases and must seek to restore a safe level of greenhouse gas concentrations and global average temperatures well below today’s levels; and

WHEREAS: restoring a safe and stable climate requires an emergency mobilization to a near-zero greenhouse gas emissions economy across all sectors at wartime speed, a global effort to rapidly and safely remove all the excess carbon from the atmosphere, and safe measures to protect all people and species from the consequences of abrupt warming in the near-term; and

WHEREAS: reversing ecological overshoot and halting the sixth mass extinction requires an effort to preserve and restore half the Earth’s biodiversity in interconnected wildlife corridors and to humanely stabilize population as well as a shift toward a society that prioritizes conservation, community and mutual aid over consumerism and narcissism; and

WHEREAS: justice requires that those countries, classes and sectors that have contributed the most to this global climate and ecological cataclysm foot a commensurate financial burden in reversing it and protecting those most impacted from the lethal impacts underway already; and

WHEREAS: New Haven cannot wait for more Superstorm Sandy’s, extreme rain and snow events, and accelerating sea level rise to begin an emergency climate mobilization; and

WHEREAS: in present day, New Haven can rise to the challenge of the greatest crisis in history by organizing politically to catalyze a national and global climate emergency effort, employing local workers in a mobilization effort building and installing renewable energy infrastructure, growing local healthy food, restoring ecosystems, and retrofitting and redesigning our built environment, electric grid and transportation systems.

NOW BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED, that New Haven declares that we face an existential climate emergency that threatens our city, region, state, nation, civilization, the natural world, and humanity.

1. BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that New Haven officially commits to leading an emergency mobilization effort that, with appropriate financial and regulatory assistance from state and federal authorities, ends community-wide greenhouse gas emissions by or before December 31, 2030, and immediately initiates an effort to safely draw down carbon from the atmosphere.

2. BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that New Haven Board of Alders works with the Mayor to report back within 90 days on the establishment of a Climate Emergency Task Force with necessary powers and resources to plan and coordinate all of the New Haven’s climate responses, including emergency climate mitigation, resilience and adaptation programs.

3. BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Mayor directs all City Departments and proprietaries to report back in 6 months on maximum emergency reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from their operations feasible by the end of 2021, with the highest priority placed on an equitable and just transition in all sectors.

4. BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that New Haven commits to educating our residents about the climate emergency and the broader ecological crisis and working tirelessly to catalyze a climate emergency mobilization at the local, state, national, and global levels to protect our citizens as well as all the people and species of the world.

5. BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED , that New Haven commits to work with local organizations and communities to include job creation, environmental justice, and public health in project development in a way that prioritizes equitable outcomes, particularly for poor and marginalized communities.

6. BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that New Haven commits to designate 0.1% of its annual budget to accelerate greenhouse gas emissions reduction in the New Havaen community and hire staff for the Climate Task Force, and to coordinate Climate Framework implementation, clean energy/energy efficiency jobs creation, and alternative transportation expansion, or other appropriate projects.

Thomas Breen contributed to this report.

Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the pre-hearing protest on the steps of City Hall.