By the end of his tenure, former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who held office from 1989 to 2011, became known as “America’s green mayor” by national pundits and supporters. The accolade was awarded thanks to a green roof on City Hall and some tree-planting and bike lanes, even as the city still hosted two archaic coal-fired power plants and a stinking polluted river — and lacked a full recycling program.
“It’s great that Chicago City Hall has a green roof,” new Mayor Brandon Johnson wrote in his campaign platform, “but that commitment to environmental sustainability needs to filter down through the entire building.”
In that vein, Johnson has promised an environmental justice agenda based on a “Green New Deal” for housing, education, clean air and clean water. This means replacing lead water service lines, retrofitting buildings, installing solar, electrifying transit and more. In the process, Johnsons said his administration would create union or prevailing wage jobs, employ people from marginalized and pollution front-line neighborhoods, and prepare youth for advanced clean energy careers.
Now Johnson — who took office Monday after defeating
conservative law-and-order candidate Paul Vallas in an April run-off — has the chance to implement his promises, and the timing couldn’t be better.
His ambitious plan dovetails with, and can leverage resources from, a recent state energy law and the federal Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), both of which prioritize environmental justice and equity in creating significant funding and supports for clean energy and sustainability investments.
Illinois’s Climate & Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA), passed in 2021, allocated resources for solar arrays and by extension solar jobs in marginalized communities, including those most impacted by the fossil fuel economy. Rural and downstate Illinois has indeed enjoyed a solar boom thanks to that measure and a 2017 state law with similar provisions.
But Chicago — where for decades two coal plants spewed toxins over low-income immigrant communities — has so far seen little solar development or clean energy employment.
The reasons showcase how difficult it can be to achieve a “just transition” to a cleaner economy. Even when subsidies for solar exist, city dwellers often can’t access solar power if they are renters or have substandard roofs, or are simply too busy with other challenges.
Similarly, Chicagoans were slow to take advantage of solar job training programs, because of difficulties like transportation and childcare, or the fact they never saw solar as a positive for their community.
Installing solar panels on homes and businesses also isn’t usually the kind of union, well-paying, stable job that sustains communities for generations, or helps replace defunct industries like the steel mills that once fostered thriving neighborhoods on Chicago’s Southeast Side. The solar industry can be seasonal and fickle, with demand rising and falling sharply based on availability of subsidies and changing policies.
Bureaucracy and global trade issues can also cause bottlenecks that kill jobs and enthusiasm for the sector. Even as CEJA made solar theoretically available cost-free to many families and funded workforce development hubs across the state, many residents remain on months-long waiting lists to actually get solar, and the workforce hubs are still in very early planning stages and won’t be open any time soon.
Other parts of Johnson’s proposed Green New Deal could be more straightforward to implement, like replacing lead service lines for water and modernizing weatherization and climate controls in public schools. But even those plans are bound to raise logistical challenges and involve potentially long time frames.
An effective mayor not only has bold vision, but figures out how to wade through the countless bureaucratic and political obstacles that too often torpedo good intentions. A successful civic leader, much like a successful community organizer, instinctively takes into account the realities of working people’s lives and the deep ripple effects of systemic injustice, and addresses how those nuances relate to sectors like clean energy job training and vehicle electrification.
As a father from Chicago’s West Side and a former educator and union organizer, Johnson has plenty of first-hand experience with the daily struggles that must be addressed while revamping housing, education and energy.
And he may indeed have the political will and genuine community connections to successfully tap state-level solar and job training resources along with opportunities created by…
Read More: Can Mayor Brandon Johnson Create a Green New Deal for Chicago?