Film review: "Paris to Pittsburgh"

Last year's National Geographic documentary, Paris to Pittsburgh, highlights local and grass-roots efforts to combat climate change, against the backdrop of the growing threat and the utter failure of the American national government (and most state governments) to take it seriously. The film's tone is positive--encouraging as well as optimistic--which is both a strength and a weakness.

The warning signs keep coming. Tuesday the World Resources Institute published a report showing declining groundwater supplies causing "extremely high water stress" in 33 large cities with a combined population of 255 million; climate change exacerbates the problem, due to droughts as well as faster evaporation on hotter days (Sengupta and Cai 2019). Today the United Nations reports that climate change is exacerbating stress on land and water resources caused by overpopulation and poor management (Flavelle 2019). Scientists have found evidence for the impact of climate change on a broad variety of fronts. (See these posts for a sampling of such research from 2014.) And there's the escalating pile of natural disasters that happen around America and compete for attention and federal governmental relief.

Attention, as the saying goes, must be paid. And yet year after year, American politics remains stuck on whether this phenomenon exists at all. The film takes its title from President Trump's 2017 statement announcing American withdrawal from the international agreement known as the Paris Accord: "I was elected to represent the people of Pittsburgh, not Paris." The statement was apparently crafted for its alliterative charm rather than actual engagement with anyone in actual Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as one theme repeated throughout the film was the efforts of the mayor, city council, and citizens to do what they could in the absence of national action. Meanwhile, the administration props up coal mining corporations, staffs itself with climate change deniers, and tries to block states like California from mandating higher fuel efficiency standards.

This approach has been politically successful, which surely terrifies anyone who finds the climate change models even somewhat persuasive. President Trump was elected once, and may well be elected again, and anyhow Republicans at the state level have taken a similar approach: Florida (Florida, readers!) governor Rick Scott has banned the phrase "climate change" from state agency communications, and North Carolina in the administration of Pat McCrory barred any research at all into mitigation. The Atlantic Ocean is, I assume, duly impressed.

Getting ready to watch the film at St. Paul's United Methodist Church

I suppose no one can possibly take a position like "our activities are destroying life on the planet, but I refuse to do anything about it." So the only available way to justify refusal to act is to deny that there's anything to act against. Some may be motivated by economic interests: the film calls out Exxon, Koch Industries, and Shell. But that's a tiny number of people. Why are their denials falling on such fertile soil? I think there are three reasons:

1. political/ideological resistance. Climate change evidence has been produced by scientists, who are elites; policies to address it have been pushed by environmentalists; and effective action will require government at the national and international levels. There are a lot of people who find some or all of those to be anathema.
2. complexity. Climate is complicated. A number of factors influence it, including but not restricted to human activities; it's easily confused with weather, which by the way is just gorgeous in Cedar Rapids today; scientific projections have a wide range of outcomes; and the impact so far includes a wide variety of sometimes-opposite phenomena (floods, droughts, heat waves, cold waves). Climate change is at the same time both too erratic and too subtle.
3. despair. The international scope of climate change means anything we do, or the United States does, can be counteracted by someone else. Moreover, seven decades of the suburban development pattern that is decried by urbanists mean we're stuck in a particular kind of built environment that constrains efforts to live more sustainably. It can seem hopeless.

Wisely, Paris to Pittsburgh focuses its effort on the despair obstacle. Its callouts are few and brief, it spends a little but not much time on the science, and it doesn't spend much time arming you for Thanksgiving arguments with your Ann Coulter-fixated uncle. But if you are inclined to ignore the climate threat because you feel powerless to do anything, the filmmakers are ready to give you the halftime locker room peptalk of your life.

"A movement was galvanized around the country" when Trump took the national government backward on the issue; "a revolution is underway." The film visits Miami, where rising ocean levels are destroying beaches, larger "king tides" regularly cause widespread flooding, and "salt water intrusion" in the Everglades threatens the supply of fresh water; Kalona, Iowa, where farmers struggle with erratic weather during growing seasons, and the state has dealt with a succession of massive floods; Ventura, California, reeling from a catastrophic fire; and, of course, Pittsburgh. In each place, locals in and out of government are taking aggressive, positive action against the climate threat--even in "very conservative politically" rural Iowa. The State of New Jersey became the 16th state to join the interstate climate alliance when Republican governor Chris Christie was succeeded by Democrat Phil Murphy in 2018. Towards the end of the film, we see scenes from the Youth for Climate Action massing in Washington, D.C. [Locally, the Iowa City City Council last night declared a "climate crisis," and voted to accelerate the town's greenhouse gas emissions targets (Smith 2019).] The kids are all right, and so are a lot of other people in a lot of places.

Sandbags against the rising river, New Bohemia, June 2013

Of what does this revolution consist? Mostly switching from fossil fuels to renewables. The City of Orlando is not just wondering where they're going to put a potential 2.5 million climate refugees from south Florida, but has moved to an all-electric bus fleet, experimented with floating solar arrays on lakes, and has facilitated citizen "fleet farming" in private yards to increase the supply of local produce. Casa Pueblo, Puerto Rico, runs entirely on alternative energy, which protected it from the long-term effects of the 2017 hurricane. The rural electric cooperative in Kalona, Iowa, is switching to all solar and wind to save money; Iowa is the nation's leader in wind energy, and the film profiles two female students at Iowa Lakes Community College planning careers in the booming field of renewable energy. The State of California has passed ambitious renewable fuel (and emissions reduction) mandates, though a lot of their state wealth comes from fossil fuel extraction.

The makers of Paris to Pittsburgh are to be commended for avoiding the pitfall of much environmental rhetoric, which tends toward the doom-and-gloom. Solar energy is more accessible and less expensive than ever, and the same goes for hybrid or all-electric cars. These are steps that require some but not that much effort, and are within the reach of many families.

Another strong point is the emphasis on local cooperative effort. The opening montage segues from various dismissive statements by President Trump to more urgency from local officials. As any urbanist will tell you, good change starts when neighbors meet to work together. Localities can be parochial, and clannish, but the need to address direct real-world problems tends to cause both public officials and citizens to be less ideological in their response.

There's a danger in making response to climate change seem too easy. If throwing on some solar panels and switching to electric vehicles were all it took to solve it, climate change wouldn't be much of a crisis. I'm no scientist, but intuition tells me even mitigating the damage is going to require some heavy lifting. And not just of sandbags: Iowa state senator Rob Hogg (D-Cedar Rapids), author of America's Climate Century (CreateSpace, 2013), who is quoted extensively in the film, hopes the "spirit of the sandbag" seen in 2016 flood protection efforts could translate into preventative measures. Those are reactions to entirely different phenomena, however.

And the economic incentives seem so strong as to be irresistible, but they aren't rooted in any sort of moral or community concern. Sure, cheaper solar got the "very conservative politically" farmers of Kalona off the dime, but if someone came up with an even cheaper fuel made from, say, meadowlarks, those farmers would switch again in a minute. It's nice that economic incentives seem to dovetail with what needs to be done--Iowa's superannuated U.S. Senator Charles Grassley is shown marveling at the jobs created by wind energy--that can turn in a minute. It's a lot easier to be an urbanist when gas is $5 a gallon than when it's half that.

Jeff Speck

The happy talk verges on what urbanist Jeff Speck calls "Gizmo green" i.e. just buy this product and both you and the Earth will be happier. In Walkable City (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2011) he quotes Witold Rybczynski:

Rather than trying to change behavior to reduce carbon emissions, politicians and entrepreneurs have sold greening to the public as a kind of accessorizing. "Keep doing what you're doing," is the message, just add another solar panel, a wind turbine, a bamboo floor, whatever. But a solar-heated house in the suburbs is still a house in the suburbs, and if you have to drive to it--even in a Prius--it's hardly green. 

Speck cites a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study finding driveable vs. walkable location had a bigger effect on climate footprint than type of car, housing material, or single- versus multi-family housing. Then he notes the EPA moved its Kansas City headquarters to a LEED-certified building in the suburbs... to which employees had to drive instead of walk to work (Speck 2012).

Enough dyspepsia. Would I rather people act against climate change, however incompletely, or not? Put that way, the answer's obvious; if people are going to be in suburbs anyway, better that they drive hybrids and install solar panels. Paris to Pittsburgh gets points for nudging us, passionately and encouragingly, in the right direction. Still, it would be better for the climate if we slammed the brakes on the suburban model of development.

Trailer for the film:

SEE ALSO:

"The Artlessness of Climate Change Policy," 31 May 2017
"Policy Responses to Climate Change," 26 August 2013