This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In 2017, when the Trump administration withdrew from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement — an international treaty that attempted to avert climate catastrophe by cutting global emissions — John Cranley, the Democratic mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio, joined other mayors across the country to announce his intention to remain faithful to the agreement’s primary goal of keeping the rise of global temperatures below 1.5 degrees C in this century. Cranley and leaders from from dozens of cities like San Francisco and Chicago even went a step further, promising to work toward a 100 percent transition to clean energy sources, with ambitious deadlines.
So, in 2018, Cincinnati announced its own 2035 mandate for carbon neutrality — the 100th U.S. city to do so — by turning to solar energy. “I was inspired to [pursue this project] out of anger over Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accords,” Cranley says, describing the frustration he suspects he shared with many other city leaders who made the carbon-neutral pledge.
Cincinnati planned to create the largest munic... Read more
