🌍 Tackling Climate Change: A Race We Can Win Together! 🏃♀️🏃♂️
Mitigating climate change is both a sprint and a marathon. The challenge? We need to cut our emissions and local air pollution drastically in the near term while investing in projects that can have sustained impact over time. The good news? The Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act has provided billions of dollars in federal funding to support climate action. If we make a compelling emissions reduction plan, we can apply for implementation funds to execute.
Salt Lake City has been a leader on climate initiatives for nearly two decades, taking on progressively more ambitious projects.
In 2016, the City passed a joint resolution establishing our “Climate Positive” goals, which include powering the entire Salt Lake City community with net-100% renewable electricity by 2032. This date was moved up to 2030 in a resolution from 2019.
We’ve been busy making progress on these and other climate efforts over the last several years, most notably our work on the Community Renewable Energy Program (C-REP).
What is the Community Renewable Energy Program?
It began in 2019 when the Community Renewable Energy Act, also known as HB411, was passed by the State Legislature. HB 411 created a pathway for interested communities served by Rocky Mountain Power to work with the company to develop a program that will allow communities to match 100% of their annual electricity consumption with renewable energy flowing to the grid by 2030.
Salt Lake City became eligible to participate in this Program due to the adoption of a Joint Resolution which resolves to achieve the goal of 100% renewable energy for community electricity supply by 2030.
Today, Salt Lake City is working alongside 17 other communities to develop the Community Renewable Energy Program.
All residents, businesses, and industrial customers in participating communities will be automatically opted-in to the renewable energy program with the option to opt-out at several opportunities.
How do you envision the future of Utah?By 2050, our population will nearly double, and Utah will add an estimated 2.5 million residents. Will we have enough water to drink? Will our air be clean? How will we educate twice as many students? Will our economy remain strong? What kind of future will we leave for our children and grandchildren?
Envision Utah has created a survey called “Your Utah, Your Future” commissioned by Governor Herbert. The survey gives five scenarios for the future of Utah. Each scenario includes 11 topics affected by our population growth. In the survey you select the choices you want to make in each topic area and then choose an overall scenario for Utah in 2050.
The survey will close on May 31, and at over 31,000 recorded responses, it is already the single largest community visioning effort ever undertaken in the US. The goal is 50,000 participants. Take the survey!
Please consider sharing it with your employees and coworkers, family and friends, and encourage them to take it, also.
Additionally, over 300 schools have registered across the state. You can earn money for your local schools- $1 for every response collected!
Salt Lake City’s Planning Division invites residents and users of Parley’s Way to help shape the future of one of the Capital City’s busiest travel corridors.
Parley’s Way has long been identified as an important gateway into Salt Lake City and regular users have expressed their interest in enhancing the safety, efficiency and aesthetics of the corridor for pedestrians, cyclists, drivers and transit riders. The City’s Planning Division is requesting public input to shape the Parley’s Way Corridor Plan.
Participants will have the opportunity to weigh-in on four focus areas:
Envision Utah needs 50,000 Utahns like you to help make history and participate in the Your Utah Your Future project. Over the past few months, they have been using your input from the BUILD YOUR 2050 UTAH WEB APP and working with more than 400 task force members to create a survey to find out what you want Utah to be like in 2050.
Utah Geek Events, the Big Data User groups and many other groups have joined forces to learn more about the air quality in Utah. For the past two months, technologists, scientists, air quality experts, and experts from related fields have been gathering information and data with correlations to Utah’s air.
Air quality is a complex problem that influences many aspects of our lives, including our health, economy and quality of life. Part of that complexity is understanding the entire puzzle of our air — why is it bad and how does it really affect our lives?
Get involved!
Now that we have the information to start gaining answers, we need the questions. Teams will be breaking off to compete to create amazing results with the latest technologies in Big Data, but we need your help.
We are looking for ideas of what to look for from the public. We are open to all ideas and suggestions regardless of how far-fetched or mundane they may seem. Feel free to share this survey with others.
Salt Lake City Green is asking residents one very important question — “What goes in your curbside bin?”
The survey is part of an effort to improve Salt Lake City’s curbside garbage, recycling and composting services.
In the coming months, residents will see a fresh, retooled #WhyWasteIt campaign roll out on Salt Lake City Sanitation trucks, social media and more. The campaign will be focus on optimizing the curbside programs and diverting as much waste as possible from the landfill.
slcGreen Blog 