A handful of Iowa's biggest cities has been awarded $3 million to work on solutions to climate change at the local level.

The climate pollution reduction grants are part of a $5 billion program to assess climate change and come up with ways to address a steadily warming planet.

Pam Mackey-Taylor, director of the Iowa chapter of the Sierra Club, said when the state of Iowa declined to apply for the grants, it opened up the opportunities to individual communities. They will use the money to develop specific plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other harmful air pollution at the local level.

"The cities of Iowa City, Cedar Rapids and Des Moines decided to pursue the grants," Mackey-Taylor explained. "They are going to be doing planning for not only the cities but the counties they're in and some of the neighboring counties."

Cedar Rapids and Iowa City together were awarded $2 million, and Des Moines received $1 million. Mackey-Taylor pointed out the money will be used on things such as making buildings more energy efficient and environmentally friendly. Iowa was one of just four states not to pursue grant funding on a statewide basis. The others were Florida, South Dakota and Kentucky.

The Environmental Protection Agency will help train local and tribal leaders on how best to plan for and use the money. Mackey-Taylor noted while the smaller grants are critical to addressing the problems at the local level, Iowa may have missed an opportunity to work on bigger issues by passing on the larger grants.

"We still have some challenges," Mackey-Taylor observed. "Our agriculture sector in Iowa generates 29% of the greenhouse gases. Our residential, commercial and industrial generate 27% of the state's greenhouse gases and our electricity and power plants generate 19%."

Iowa has made strides in reducing emissions in the electricity sector. More than half of the state's power is now generated by wind.

The Biden Administration is investing $50 million from the Inflation Reduction Act in Colorado to produce more batteries to power electric vehicles.

Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, said the state is bullish on EVs, in part because gas-powered vehicle tailpipes are a major contributor to harmful ground-level ozone and climate pollution.

"When you look at both our climate goals and just the pollution problems that we have in Denver and the Front Range, switching to electric vehicles just has huge benefits for our air quality and for our climate," Toor asserted.

The new funding will allow Thornton-based manufacturer Solid Power to add at least 40 new jobs, paying production operators, chemists and engineers nearly $78,000 a year on average. Solid Power is also partnering with area high schools and community colleges for job training programs.

After he purchased his own EV, Toor noted he started tracking his electric bills and found significant fuel-cost savings compared with gas-powered vehicles.

"It's the equivalent of me paying about 90 cents per gallon for gasoline," Toor explained. "They are incredibly convenient, I basically don't have to go to the gas station, I just plug in the vehicle when I get home and let it charge overnight."

Colorado supported Solid Power's early growth with an Advanced Industries Accelerator grant in 2014, which supports the development of early-stage technologies. Their new sulfide-based batteries are expected to provide more power and range for drivers and are safer and less costly than conventional lithium-ion technology. Toor emphasized battery-powered vehicles can also help lower electric bills for everyone.

"People primarily charge their electric vehicles overnight, when there is a lot of excess capacity on the grid," Toor pointed out. "It helps to keep everybody's electric rates affordable over time as we get more and more EVs on the grid."


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By Yessenia Funes for Atmos.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Jessica Celi has lived in the Bay Area for almost her entire life. She spent most of her 20s jumping from industry to industry, trying to find her place in the professional world. She returned to school to specialize in human resources and graduated last year. Then, she was laid off from her first job. That’s when she entered the clean energy job market.

Celi, 30, is just finishing up her 11-month program as a SolarCorps fellow in the Bay Area with GRID Alternatives, a national nonprofit that provides no-cost residential solar installations for eligible low-income households in various regions and also trains locals to provide the service. This year, the organization is expanding its yearslong partnership with the U.S.-run public service agency AmeriCorps to help launch the American Climate Corps, President Joe Biden’s initiative to train and deploy a diverse workforce to, among other things, work in sectors contributing to the clean energy transition. It’s an alternative to the promised Civilian Climate Corps that Democrats axed from his landmark climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law two years ago, and Celi is part of the inaugural class. 

“I am part of something bigger, and I do look forward to moving into a career throughout the long term in the renewable industry,” she said.

Two years after the Civilian Climate Corps died in Congress, groups like GRID Alternatives and the AmeriCorps are picking up the mantle to make the president’s vision of a new green workforce a reality. Corps members do all kinds of work—from restoring wetlands to managing forests—but the SolarCorps focuses on deploying solar panel technology in California, Colorado, and Washington D.C. to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions driving the planet’s warming. This year’s SolarCorps cohort at GRID Alternatives has installed solar for over 1,170 families. Since October 2023, the organization has orchestrated some 130 job placements. As the Inflation Reduction Act injects $370 billion toward the clean energy sector through tax credits, grants, and loans, the sector sees a rare opportunity for growth. 

The American Climate Corps includes private and public partners from across the country, from the U.S. Forest Service to Operation Fresh Start, a Wisconsin-based organization that helps young people find career pathways. While the Biden administration didn’t provide the American Climate Corps with its own budget to build this new workforce, the White House is directing agency dollars and grants to invest in AmeriCorps programs already molding the green jobs of tomorrow. 

Some organizations—like GRID Alternatives—are bringing renewable energy to communities of color, low-income communities, and other communities that have historically been excluded or disinvested. President Biden committed to distributing at least 40% of his federal investment benefits to these neighborhoods that need them the most. Programs like the SolarCorps are attempting to realize that goal.

SolarCorps has been working with AmeriCorps since 2006 long before climate became a national priority. Now, the program plans to expand to more states thanks to an infusion of new grant dollars GRID Alternatives secured from the Inflation Reduction Act. The organization has provided paid fellowships to over 300 individuals like Celi to learn how to install solar panels, as well as how to engage with the community.

Celi, for instance, was an outreach fellow. Her fellowship is now ending, but her role involved building a relationship with her Bay Area community by door-knocking, calling, or emailing families that already had their solar panels installed to help them monitor their systems and ensure they know how to use the panels. On Earth Day this year, when Biden kicked off the American Climate Corps, Celi was at Richmond, California’s Unity Park with the rest of GRID’s outreach team, as well as other local community partners, to attract the public to their programs. As Celi saw local families engage with the event’s free bike repairs and free bicycle-powered smoothies, she realized the scope of her work—and how impactful that was. 

“It really felt meaningful to see that we are directly connecting with the community and sharing these resources with one another,” she said. 

After all, Richmond is home to a refinery from fossil fuel polluter Chevron. The industrial facility has been a source of air pollution for the predominantly Hispanic, Black, and Asian community. This is, in part, why GRID has been focused on communities of color, explained Adewale OgunBadejo, vice president of workforce development at the organization. 

“How can we reduce the carbon footprint in the communities that we serve? How can we have less urban oil wells because they’re causing higher incidences and rates of cancer and asthma in these communities that we serve?” he said. “We’re helping our fellows make that environmental connection in a very real way so that as you’re installing and you’re looking at an urban drilling well across the street, you understand that the more solar we can install, the more of those we can remove and create more healthy communities.”

Black, Indigenous, and other people of color bear the brunt of air pollution health impacts from dirty energy sources. In 2023, a group of researchers even coined the term “fossil fuel racism” to highlight the insidious ways the industry harms Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor populations. Communities of color are also less likely than their white peers to have installed solar panels onto their roofs. That’s where GRID comes in: The program’s solar panel installations from this year’s fellows alone have cut carbon dioxide emissions by over 78,000 tons—or nearly 15,000 cars taken off the road. 

The SolarCorps program doesn’t only focus on bringing solar panels to people of color—it also prioritizes hiring this demographic as fellows, too. Among the past year’s 51 fellows, for instance, 80% identified as Black, Indigenous, or a person of color. Over half were women or nonbinary, 27% identified as LGBTQIA+, and some 26% have been affected by the justice system (mostly through incarceration). At the national level, the solar industry is dominated by white dudes: In 2022, 73% of the workforce was white and 69% male, according to an independent report. Celi, who is Filipino, experienced that diversity disparity firsthand when in January she attended her first industry conference, where, for the first time in her solar work, she was the minority. 

“I’m very proud to have been able to attend and to create that change,” said Celi, who is also a member of Women of Renewable Industries and Sustainable Energy, or WRISE, which is dedicated to cultivating women leaders in the industry.

The SolarCorps fellowship is just a tiny piece of the U.S. government’s wider American Climate Corps. Sociologist Dana Fisher, who is also the author of the book Saving Ourselves, has been researching the existing Corps programs that have been expanding and shifting to include climate change. Many of these adjustments were already in the works before the Biden administration’s formalization of the American Climate Corps. 

Despite the existence of the Climate Corps, there’s no central agency or database tracking the integration of climate change into programs across the U.S. or following the fellows themselves after they complete their service. How many wind up in clean energy jobs? Do they leave these programs with a deeper understanding of how the planet’s rapid warming disrupts society? Fisher’s research on AmeriCorps has so far illuminated the reality that “there is no consensus about how the agency is doing its climate work,” she wrote in a paper published last month. There’s no consistent language used across AmeriCorps programs and, thus, no unified understanding of the climate crisis among program participants and leadership.

Now, Fisher is following the rollout of a handful of programs in Vermont, Maryland, Michigan, and California where she has developed a climate-centric curriculum all of their American Climate Corps members will be required to take when their fellowships begin in September. She will be adding more states to the list later this year. 

Fisher emphasized the need for more federal dollars to go toward analyzing all the varied American Climate Corps programs to assess whether the funding is doing what it’s supposed to do: educating young people (especially young people of color) about the climate crisis and placing them in jobs dedicated to building a cleaner, healthier, more equitable world.

“The infusion of money is absolutely valuable, but it’s impossible for me not to think about this without putting on my social sciences hat,” Fisher said. “The problem is that we don’t know how they’re helping because nobody is actually measuring that, and nobody is there evaluating it.”

GRID’s SolarCorps doesn’t have its own evaluation system, either. The group is working to build that out now that it’s hired a data analyst, OgunBadejo said. They’re hoping to track fellows three to 12 months after they graduate. As the program looks to expand into tribal nations and nearly 30 states like Texas and Michigan over the next few years, OgunBadejo recognizes the need to partner with local groups that know those communities best and can cater the programs to their needs.

With the hundreds of millions of dollars in grants the group has collaboratively received from the Inflation Reduction Act, they plan to work with others and bring their SolarCorps model to even more communities across the country that need access to affordable solar energy and the training to find jobs in the industry, too.

“Our approach as an organization is very holistic,” OgunBadejo said. “We really look at clean energy as a way to address environmental and economic justice.”

For too long, Black and Brown folks have been left out of the clean energy boom. SolarCorps is building an ecosystem where community members have the skills they need to transform their communities for the better—and get paid to do it.


Yessenia Funes wrote this article for Atmos.


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By Keaton Peters for Inside Climate News.
Broadcast version by Freda Ross for Texas News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Months before the Texas Panhandle erupted with destructive wildfires, fire crews in Borger were igniting fire intentionally on a seven-mile, roughly 250-foot wide ribbon of land on the edge of town.

The prescribed burn in November removed dense grass and brush next to homes on the southwest side of the town. When the Windy Deuce fire ravaged the region in February, the prescribed burn area acted as a fireproof wall that stopped the blaze in its tracks.

"I would bet my next paycheck, if that black line had not been there, we would have lost homes and, it's quite possible, lives. There's no doubt in my mind," said Archie Stone, wildland fire coordinator for Borger, located 50 miles northeast of Amarillo. Stone is a state certified and insured burn manager in Texas and has spent decades fighting wildfires around the country.

The Windy Deuce fire burned an estimated 144,045 acres before it was contained. Nearby, the Smokehouse Creek fire burned more than a million acres as it became the largest wildfire in Texas history, decimating multiple counties and crossing into Oklahoma. At least two people died, hundreds of buildings burned and thousands of livestock were killed.

The region has seen fires throughout its history, with 90 percent of the largest wildfires in Texas recorded in the months between January and May, most of them in west Texas and the panhandle. After massive fires in 2006 claimed 12 lives, the Borger fire chief and city council looked for ways to protect their town. They turned to prescribed burning.

Before modern firefighting and fire suppression techniques, fires across forests and grasslands were a part of the Earth's natural cycles. Prescribed burning is an ancient technique still practiced by some Native Americans. In the range ecosystem that dominates the United States from the Texas panhandle through the Great Plains, land managers and firefighters are recommending prescribed burns to protect communities and restore natural fire cycles. But in Texas, prescribed burning has yet to be widely accepted.

Climate change continues to increase the wildfire risk in Texas, which is part of the region in the United States most affected by high temperatures and long dry spells. Climate scientists warn that the wildfire season in the state is likely to grow longer and more intense.

"We've had a trend of increasing temperatures in the state of Texas for several decades, and that trend is expected to continue," said John Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist and a professor at Texas A&M University.

Wildfires thrive in dry and windy conditions. More swelteringly hot days contribute to increased rates of evaporation. "Essentially, that means things dry out faster between rainfall," Nielsen-Gammon said. "That would tend to lengthen the period of time over the course of the year in which wildfire is possible."

Long dry and unseasonably hot periods are "where climate change comes in," said Katharine Hayhoe, a professor at Texas Tech University and chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy. "It's the difference between smaller, more easily contained fires, and really large out of control fires."

By 2050, the number of days with wildfire danger in Texas could increase by as many as 40 days per year, according to the Desert Research Institute at the University of Nevada at Reno. Its recent study analyzed a global climate model simulation and various wildfire danger indicators and found that high heat and dry periods will lengthen the wildfire season.

In the days leading up to this year's fires, temperatures in the region surpassed 80 degrees, with the cities of Amarillo and Borger measuring record-high temperatures for late February. The panhandle was not in drought, but higher temperatures quickly dried out tall grass. Then, the winds came.

The Smokehouse Creek fire spread from 40,000 acres on Feb 27 to more than 900,000 within two days. The fire began on Feb. 26 north of Stinnett, Texas. State officials are investigating the fire, but Xcel Energy, a major U.S. electric and natural gas company, has acknowledged that "its facilities appear to have been involved" in igniting the blaze.

From Stinnett, the fire headed east and burned about 80 percent of both Hemphill and Roberts counties. "It was a massive monster of a wildfire," said Andy Holloway, a former rancher in the small city of Canadian, Texas. He was among the lucky ones, with no damage to his home, land or cattle.

Holloway is the Hemphill County agent in agriculture and natural resources for the Texas A&M Agrilife Extension. He said a wet spring and summer in 2023 brought about enormous grass growth. "Dry dead grass in the winter is like standing gasoline," Holloway said. "All it needed was a spark."

Eastern red cedars add to the risk. The trees, native to the Great Plains, were planted intentionally in Texas to control normal wind patterns but now provide ready tinder for fast-spreading fires.

Former wildland firefighter Morgan Treadwell works as a range specialist for the Texas A&M Agrilife Extension and she is an advocate for prescribed burns. Among the wildfire risk factors of fuel, wind and dryness, "the one that we can manage is fuel loads," said Treadwell, who is also an associate professor at Texas A&M University. "We can do that with livestock and we can do that with fire."

Texas state law protects the right of private landowners to ignite fires on their own land when a burn ban is not in effect. Certified and insured burn managers are typically hired to conduct burns, and they are allowed to use prescribed fire during a burn ban. Landowners or any burn managers they hire can be liable for harm if a fire they start enters and scorches someone else's land. Liability remains even if no crops or structures are damaged.

Certified burn managers are trained to monitor weather and wind conditions and to evaluate if the land has become dangerously dry. They also survey the land and plan how to use natural firebreaks to help contain the burn. But "weather is the most unpredictable factor in all of this," Tradwell said, noting that prescribed burning comes with an inherent risk.

The seven-mile prescribed burn near Borger was located on the Four Sixes Ranch, which was a willing partner with the city. But Texas landowners generally are cautious if not reluctant toward prescribed burns.

"People are scared to use a tool like controlled burning for fear they'll be sued," Holloway said, adding that "there's been a few people that have really been heavy handed" filing or threatening lawsuits.

Treadwell agreed that ranching culture is divided over prescribed burns. "Some neighbors can get pretty hateful when it comes to one neighbor burning and the other neighbor not wanting it," she said.

The Texas A&M Forest Service helps fight fires that overwhelm local departments. It has authority to conduct prescribed burns in state forests, although land in Texas is overwhelmingly owned by individuals and private corporations. The forest service offers reimbursements to qualifying landowners who do prescribed burns, but owners bear the upfront cost and legal liability.

Karen Stafford, a wildfire prevention program coordinator for the forest service, said the city of Borger "set the bar high in showing the effectiveness of prescribed burns and what it can do in community protection."

Stone, who now oversees Borger's wildlands, said public engagement on prescribed burning has been crucial. Stone, who joined the fire department there in 2011, said fire personnel continue to personally visit houses near future burn areas and distribute pamphlets with information and a phone number to call with questions. He said the department works hard to engage and meet with residents, the city council and the mayor before starting new prescribed burns. "Now people don't even think twice," he said. "We put out notifications, and they know they're going to see some smoke in the air. They understand why we're doing it."

The Texas A&M Forest Service also encourages cities and counties to develop community wildfire protection plans that identify ways to lower wildfire risk and to protect lives and structures. As of this month, only three municipalities-including the city of Borger-and two counties in the Texas Panhandle have a community wildfire protection plan.

The state forest service's wildfire protection plan contains no mention of climate change, rising temperatures or heat. Stafford would not comment on global climate change as a factor in the state's wildfire plans. The forest service publishes quarterly wildfire outlook reports as well as daily assessments based on actual weather conditions at more than 150 stations across the state.

The wildfire outlook report published in December for the "dormant" season of winter and early spring predicted "fire season will be normal to below normal."

As climate change spurs more days of hot dry weather, the months and weeks of ideal conditions for prescribed burns will shorten. Still, after a historically destructive 2024 wildfire season, the success of Borger's prescribed burn has generated interest in that mitigation technique.

In the town of Canadian, Holloway knows ranchers who have lost everything and he thinks residents across Texas may "reconsider" their aversion to prescribed burns.

"Fire is a good tool to use," he said. "I think this is a big wake up call."


Keaton Peters wrote this article for Inside Climate News.


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