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Chicago elected a new mayor. Is more climate action next?
Brandon Johnson won a runoff election last week to succeed Mayor Lori Lightfoot. During the campaign, Johnson pledged to address building emissions
The election of a progressive candidate as Chicago's new mayor is raising hopes that the nation's third-largest city will enact regulations to limit building emissions and join the growing movement of cities aggressively addressing climate change.
Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson, a former Chicago public school teacher and a Cook County Board commissioner, vowed during his campaign to prioritize enacting a building regulation that would reduce emissions and keep energy bills low for tenants. Johnson, who was elected last week and takes office May 15, also pledged to bring back the Department of Environment, which then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel abolished in 2011 citing cost concerns and redundancy in the city bureaucracy.
“Brandon Johnson is a candidate who ran with climate and environmental justice in the center of his platform,” said Kady McFadden, a Chicago campaign strategist and climate policy advocate for the Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition. “It’s not just the mayor. This is an issue that a lot of city council members were strong on and talked about throughout their campaign.”
Once a leader in local efforts to address climate change, Chicago has fallen behind in recent years, McFadden and other local environmental advocates say.
In 2019, Chicago was one of first U.S. cities to launch an energy rating system, which requires buildings over 50,000 square feet to display signs showing their energy-efficiency level. Chicago also committed that year to having 100 percent of its energy supply from renewable sources by 2035.
One of Chicago's earliest environmental initiatives occurred after a deadly heat wave in 1995, which prompted the city to launch a green-roof program that led to more than 500 roofs with rooftop gardens and tree canopies.
But more recently, cities such as New York, Washington, D.C., Boston and St. Louis have led the way, adopting performance standards that require new and existing buildings to meet emissions caps and energy-efficiency targets.
In densely populated cities such as Chicago, limiting building emissions is the most viable and effective way to reduce carbon pollution, said Danielle Spiegel-Feld, an environmental lawyer and executive director at New York University’s Guarini Center on Environmental, Energy and Land Use Law.
Buildings account for a majority of emissions for most big cities, according to the Institute for Market Transformation, a policy nonprofit advocating for building decarbonization.
The other major emissions source — motor vehicles — is difficult for city officials to regulate, Spiegel-Feld said. The Clean Air Act prohibits state and local governments from adopting their own vehicle-emission standards, although California is the only exception, she said.
“No city can say, ‘All the cars in our jurisdiction have to have a minimum fuel efficiency.’ ” Spiegel-Feld said. “That's totally preempted.”
A greenhouse gas report by Chicago showed that in 2017, residential and commercial buildings accounted for 52 percent of the city’s carbon emissions.
In Toronto, the city reduced emissions by 43 percent from 1990 levels through emissions standards and subsidies for building improvements, said David Miller, the city's mayor from 2003 to 2010. Toronto also slashed electricity use for air conditioning by building a cooling system that uses water from Lake Ontario — a system Chicago might be able to replicate with Lake Michigan, Miller said.
McFadden’s Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition is pushing a city ordinance that would grant new construction permits only for “all-electric buildings” that don't burn gas, fuel oil or propane. The requirement would apply to new buildings and to existing buildings undergoing substantial renovation.
The coalition also wants to cap annual emissions on buildings that are more than 25,000 square feet, which would include the legendary Art Deco skyscrapers that hug the Chicago River in the city's famous Loop.
In New York City, the emissions caps for individual structures ratchet down every year in a gradual trajectory aimed at an 80 percent reduction in building emissions by 2050. Building owners can buy offsets or renewable energy credits to keep emissions under their yearly limit — or face fines that could reach millions of dollars for noncompliance.
Existing buildings also can cut emissions through retrofits that reduce energy consumption — and utility bills, said Cliff Majersik, a senior adviser for policy and programs at the Institute for Market Transformation.
City officials could promote retrofits by establishing model leases that would be structured so that both landlords and tenants benefit from the cost savings, Majersik said.
“Almost every city is both a landlord and a tenant, and they can put in place these win-win, high-performance leases,” Majersik said.
The city also could encourage retrofits by ensuring that fines for violating emissions caps are shared by landlords and commercial tenants — a system that Majersik said would increase the incentives for building improvements.
Efforts to mandate building improvements come at a propitious time, with billions of dollars available through the Inflation Reduction Act.
“Let's seize the opportunity of federal financial support for energy-efficiency improvements in commercial and residential buildings in Chicago," said Howard Learner, president and executive director at Environmental Law and Policy Center, an environmental advocacy group focused on the Midwest.
The inflation law provides $27 billion in low-interest loans to finance building renovations projects designed to reduce emissions. It also offers building owners who reduce energy usage by more than 25 percent a tax credit of $5 per square foot.
“There's a lot of energy efficiency that gets left on the table,” Learner said. “This is a time for the city of Chicago to be encouraging commercial office building owners to be very bullish on seizing the energy efficiency savings.”
In Chicago, Johnson will need a majority of votes from the 50 city council members — or "alderpersons" in local vernacular — to enact new building regulations. Climate advocates believe the council would support emissions ordinances.
Last week, four out of five candidates endorsed by the Illinois Sierra Club were elected to the council, and a majority of newly elected members are progressives, said Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, a Chicago alderperson from Ward 35.
McFadden of the jobs coalition said there is support “across the political spectrum” in Chicago to address climate change. Johnson’s opponent, former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, also embraced messaging around environmental justice during his campaign.
The broad support for climate legislation is partly a result of major flooding that paralyzed the city in September, as well as Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s reneged promise on bringing back the Department of Environment, said Gerald Adelmann, president of local conservation group Openlands. Lightfoot was defeated in a first-round election on Feb. 28 that sent Johnson and Vallas to a runoff.
An emissions ordinance fell "to the bottom of a prioritization list for our last mayor,” McFadden said. “We're hoping that's not going to be the case with the new administration and with the new council.”
