There really is something quite equanimous in the way Garcetti talks about the deep political rift in the United States over low-carbon energy. Garcetti currently serves as chief ambassador for global climate diplomacy at C40 Cities, an international network of nearly 100 mayors committed to advancing climate action. He served as the group’s chair from 2019 to 2021, during the last part of his nine-year tenure as L.A.’s top official.

Garcetti is on a mission to remind the world that President Donald Trump doesn’t have the last word on the state of climate action in the United States, nor is he the most reliable authority. If you pay attention only to the current administration, you’re missing the bigger story about where climate adaptation and mitigation are headed in the world’s largest economy, Garcetti says.

We spoke with Garcetti about the power of cities and states to implement the green transition, how climate communications are evolving, and why Washington can’t stop the low-carbon economy.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

MARK MANN: Are you building a parallel order of climate diplomacy?

ERIC GARCETTI: Look, we know that things like a pandemic and disease and certainly climate, these things don’t care where we draw borders between cities or countries. It demands a diplomacy that also doesn’t ignore borders but works across them, and that’s really what we’re doing.

MM: You’re here at the Montreal Climate Summit with Gina McCarthy, chair of the America Is All In coalition and former climate adviser to President Biden, who argues that Trump’s power to stymie climate action is exaggerated. I’ve noticed it in the media, that sometimes Trump’s attacks are much more amply covered than the rebuttals. What’s going on there?

EG: Well, go to your business model: what generates clicks is conflict. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what generates clicks; what matters is what generates electricity in a sustainable way. Wind might be controversial in one project off the coast, but meanwhile, take Texas. It’s a very conservative political state right now, run by Republicans, and they’re decarbonizing the Permian Basin, the largest oil field in America, primarily with wind and solar. Maybe they don’t brag about it because it doesn’t fit their politics, but they’re not stopping.

MM: Do you take a page and talk less about climate?

EG: Yeah, not because of Trump, but because I think “climate” is an abstract word for many people. Climate literally means weather. It doesn’t have a value to it. Climate isn’t environmentalism or green, and those things, while they were good early on, were too segregated. You felt very special if you were a green activist or if you worked on environmental issues, when it requires a billion people to be incorporating sustainable values.

I like talking about jobs, health and safety. And in the face of extreme weather and climate change, we have communities that don’t feel safe because of floods and fires and everything else. The economy is rapidly changing, and so responding to what’s happening requires us to retrain people and to generate jobs through the work that needs to be done.

MM: What’s the best evidence, in your view, that climate action is still winning in the United States? That the momentum is still there?

EG: Sometimes there are setbacks that reduce the acceleration, but there’s nothing that’s reversing the direction. You read headlines and you think, “Oh, people are going backwards.” No. Coal plants are still being shut down, even if the president is trying to save a handful of them over the wishes of the actual power companies that own them. We are seeing the more conservative states – like, 70% of the new [low-carbon power] installation was done in Texas, Ohio and Florida, all run by Republican governors.

California continues that. Los Angeles, the largest municipal utility, is still on path to be at 97% carbon-free power in four years – it’s so exciting to even say that – and 100% by 2035. Transportation investments are continuing. The number-one car sold in California is still an electric car.

It’s hard to find a measure where we are moving backwards. When you look at capital flows, too, there’s never been more deals at a better price than right now. When I talk to investors, they’re like, “Maybe we don’t talk about it as loudly, but in some ways all that shouting coming out of Washington has helped us find even better deals.” Everybody knows it’s the cheapest way to get power. It’s the best way to move forward with transportation. It’s the healthiest thing to do for communities. We struggle to find evidence against it, [despite] what the White House claims.

MM: Do you think energy is shifting to the local level? Is there any sense that the centre of gravity is moving away from federal politics?

EG: No, I don’t think many people ever cared what Washington was doing, even when they might be pro–climate action. I mean, there have been moments, like when Joe Biden passed the Inflation Reduction Act. That was huge. It was the biggest piece of environmental legislation ever passed by any nation. But they also knew that if you could add up all the local and state money spent, it would dwarf [the IRA]. We’re the ones who maintain sewer systems, who do private investment, build houses. We invest and build our transportation networks. In America, most spending on climate-related sectors is done at the sub-national level. I think anybody who has been active has always known that’s where the fight is.

MM: In Canada, cities can be disempowered relative to the provinces. Often there’s a dynamic where politicians at the provincial level gain more power from rural voters than from urban voters. I’m wondering how powerful cities really are?

EG: It’s different from state to state, but in the United States, big cities have tremendous power, whether it’s formal or informal. Even if you’re a drop of blue in a red state, the state leaders know they need to have a Houston work, or Atlanta work or Nashville work. There’s often political conflict, but when it comes to spending money and getting things done, it’s the same voters and the same people who are demanding answers.

I also think that urban–rural divide is disappearing a little bit based on some issues. For instance, data centres are being built in the most rural areas and the most urban areas. And people are like, “Whoa, why are my energy bills going up 20% in a year? What is the impact of having this around me? How are we actually generating that electricity?” Folks who might not have in the past cared about whether it was coal or gas are suddenly questioning, “Do I really want that, just to help an AI system develop?” In urban areas, they’re finding new coalitions between people.

The majority of people really do live now in urban areas in America, overwhelmingly. Depending on how you measure it, up to 80% of Americans live in cities. So that is allowing cities to hit above their weight class, even if they don’t have the formal power. They really have the influence, even sometimes when they’re led by people from a different party.

MM: I don’t know if people are still talking about “abundance” as much, but I’m curious if you think that’s the type of shift that we need?

EG: I’m not a huge fan of the word “abundance,” because what does that mean? It’s another one of these academic-sounding words. But making shit easier to get done: yes.

There are some basics we should never, ever sacrifice. But we’ve put so many boulders in our backpack, it’s so slow to move. For instance, imagine a New York subway system getting built in this day and age. It would take 100 years to build that, and it would cost a trillion dollars.

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U.S. states and cities are building a parallel system for climate diplomacy

I’ve become simultaneously more progressive and libertarian as I age. Libertarian, like, get the hell out of the way. Get the basics covered, but let people do stuff because there’s a crisis. And more progressive: make sure it has a conscience. Don’t just let bad design and capital flow in however it wants. But if you let capital flow in in a predictable way, there are smart ways to be both progressive and caring, but also a little bit more libertarian and less regulatory.

MM: Do U.S. mayors who engage in the C40 or in other types of sub-national climate diplomacy face threat or pushback from the federal government?

EG: Yeah, when they’re not focused on something else, like wars in the Middle East or going after our immigrants. It’s somewhere in that agenda. It’s not frequent, and it’s not a friendly partnership, but [Washington doesn’t have] a lot of tools. They can’t tell Los Angeles “You can’t create renewable energy for your energy mix.” They can’t write our building code. They can’t tell us where to invest our transportation dollars.

There are moments when federal funds would be useful, and can help accelerate the greening of our ports, the building of more public transportation, the environmental-justice issues of restoring communities cut up by bad infrastructure decisions, and that’s frustrating at times.

But no, I think that there are bigger targets that they have their attention on. And we actually welcome collaboration with them. If you can get past some of the fixations they have, whether it’s offshore wind or this, that and the other, there are opportunities for America to be strong and have jobs the same way that Prime Minister Carney is talking about. This is the age of more national sovereignty, reshoring jobs. I’d love for us to be talking about in the United States, as Canada is doing, really being one of the green manufacturing hubs that can export to the world. Don’t cede that to China, as marvellous a job as they’ve done. They shouldn’t be creating every future car. We should have Canadians and Americans that build cars, but it’s probably not going to be an internal combustion engine 20 years from now. So we’re going to lose a decade by winding away all those subsidies. And we’re going to be behind the eight ball for a long time.

Mark Mann is the managing editor of Corporate Knights. He lives in Montreal. 

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The C40 is one fairly robust example of subnational climate diplomacy, but it’s not the only one. The U.S. Climate Alliance, a league of more than 20 blue states, partners informally with European Union institutions and member states. The conjoined California-Quebec cap-and-trade market, which has been operating for about 12 years, shows how regional governments on different sides of a national border can create carbon markets. Earlier this year, in fact, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, went one step further and pushed his state’s climate diplomacy all the way across the Atlantic, inking a memorandum of understanding with the United Kingdom’s Labour government to support decarbonization efforts, promote resilience, exchange technical expertise and “engage in mutually beneficial economic and innovation activities through increased research and academic cooperation.”

News of California’s deal with Westminster attracted, predictably, the ire of President Donald Trump, who first belittled Newsom and then stated that it is “inappropriate” for the United Kingdom to be dealing with a climate-minded governor. After all, the U.S. government’s national policy on climate change and the energy transition tacks in precisely the opposition direction, as evidenced by billions in stalled or cancelled clean-energy subsidies (although some offshore wind received reprieves in the courts), the declawing of the Environmental Protection Agency and the administration’s seemingly inexhaustible support for coal.

This latest clash between Trump and Newsom – hardly the first and unlikely the last – raises a tricky question: if international affairs is the natural purview of national governments, should subnational entities – states, regions, even cities – have the latitude to go their own way, especially when the climate stakes are so stark?

During Trump’s first term, the White House went to court to kill the California-Quebec cap-and-trade market, citing a provision in the U.S. Constitution that grants Washington the exclusive right to conduct international diplomacy unless Congress provides an exemption. But the Trump administration’s resulting lawsuit didn’t survive regime change, and the Biden administration dropped the case in 2021. A year later, Biden signed a law formalizing the role of subnational diplomacy, and even set up a dedicated division within the State Department, complete with its very own “special representative for city and state diplomacy.” That gesture, unsurprisingly, did not survive into Trump’s second term.

The case for a transatlantic framework

So now what? “In the absence of federal-level commitment and in the presence of federal contestation of climate change and energy security policy,” says Jakob Wiedekind, a professor of political science and international relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “it is clear that we are looking for other channels and avenues to cooperate across the Atlantic . . . This is not the first time we had to do that [because] American positions and climate change policy have fluctuated.”

In a recent article in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Wiedekind laid out the case for creating what he dubs a “Transatlantic Subnational Resilience Framework” that could help sustain international dialogue on climate change and renewable energy in a period when Washington is very much not in the mood to engage, especially with the European Union.

The EU, of course, has plenty of its own experience with subnational diplomacy and what Wiedekind calls “multi-level governance.” For example, he cites the diverse ways in which EU member states sought to wean themselves off Russian natural gas after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with a heavy emphasis on renewables. That exercise, dubbed REPowerEU, originated with directives from the European Commission but “allowed member states specifically and regional actors to share expertise on how that would be done,” he says, adding there could be other such top-down/bottom-up efforts to confront issues such as the wildfires and flooding that have swept through much of Western Europe and the United States in recent years.

Wiedekind argues that a transatlantic framework for subnational climate diplomacy could work in a similarly flexible and decentralized way, through regular meetings, leveraging commercialized clean technologies, and shared commitments to achieve resilience goals. Wiedekind, however, stresses that any such group should not become part of the annual conference of the parties (COP) that have joined the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which, he says, has become too politicized.

Indeed, the whole point of the exercise Wiedekind envisions is to depoliticize those international conversations as much as possible so they don’t become a target. He also contends that shifting the focus to climate-adjacent topics like wildfires, flooding and profitable clean-energy ventures could evolve into a strategy for engaging state-level Republican lawmakers who might otherwise steer clear of climate policy per se.

Such ideas reveal both the desperation and opportunities of a moment when the world’s most powerful government has become consumed by climate denial. No matter how hard it tries, the Trump administration can project its philosophy only so far. Other nations and other jurisdictions are resisting. The resulting conversations around collaboration and work-arounds offer evidence, however slight, that climate diplomacy will persist until this storm passes.

John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist who writes about cities, climate and business.

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About a decade ago, Lynn Mueller, then in his mid-50s, had just retired from a run leading a geothermal firm. As he was casting about for his next act, Mueller noticed that his annual water bill had soared to more than $1,000 – a fact of domestic life he attributed to the presence of two teenagers. “Being a cheapskate,” he recalls with a chuckle, “I wanted to figure out how to get that money back.”

Leaning in, Mueller realized those dollars were literally flowing down the drain, in the form of hot water from showers, meaning, he knew, that the natural-gas-generated energy used to run the water heater was also going to waste.

The Vancouver entrepreneur didn’t invent drain-water heat exchangers. But he has spent the last several years engineering a more efficient version of the technology, which he’s now selling through Sharc Energy Systems, a publicly traded company he founded that designs “wastewater heat recovery systems” that use heat pumps to capture and recycle thermal energy from drains and sewer lines.

The firm began commercializing its technology about five years ago. Sharc has won customers in Washington, D.C., Seattle and Vancouver, which has fostered a thriving green-buildings sector with demanding energy codes and projects such as the False Creek Neighbourhood Energy Utility, a City of Vancouver venture that reuses waste energy from sewer mains to heat about 5.7 million square feet of residential, institutional and commercial space downtown. Sharc developed the waste-water filtration systems that have been used in the facility since 2016.

Mueller says his company has a few high-profile advocates in its corner: former B.C. premier Mike Harcourt sits on the board, while the potential of waste-water energy recovery has been talked up to municipalities by former Toronto mayor David Miller, a prominent green building advocate through the C40 network of megacities committed to climate action.

In his new book, Solved: How the World’s Great Cities are Fixing the Climate Crisis, Miller describes waste-water heat recovery as an emerging technology that is not only relatively simple, but uses heat sources “that have not been traditionally thought of as a resource which exists in all buildings, and are renewable.”

“There’s massive potential with these technologies,” he said in a recent interview.

In the case of New York City – where Sharc has a two-year-old partnership with Highmark, an HVAC and energy-efficiency contractor, and utility giant Consolidated Edison – there are 100,000 buildings, and half of them need energy retrofits.

New York figures in Miller’s book as one example of how big cities can drive energy savings and reduce the carbon used by buildings, estimated to be responsible for about 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions. The city has, since 2009, required certain building owners – mainly large commercial landlords – to benchmark and publicly disclose their energy- and water-efficiency levels.

Subsequent changes to the policy have widened the net of buildings required to comply and added a standardized scoring system. Technologies like Sharc and other upgrades to mechanical systems, like high-efficiency HVAC, play a large role for property managers who have to hit those targets. Mayor Bill de Blasio last year pushed through an even more aggressive timetable for building owners to slash emissions.

“The case for benchmarking is quite simple,” Miller says. “Requiring building owners to publicly state the energy efficiency of their buildings will cause the market to change its behaviour. Once prospective tenants, who are responsible for paying the cost of heating and cooling, know how inefficient the building is, the owners [will] adapt in order to accommodate the desires of the tenants.”

The former Ontario Liberal government introduced mandatory benchmarking for large buildings in 2017, and a somewhat watered-down version remains in effect. The City of Edmonton three years ago introduced voluntary benchmarking, with incentives for owners to comply, according to Abhishek Chakraborti, senior environmental project manager. The number of participating buildings has risen from 99 to 278. Chakraborti says that the city is looking at making the program mandatory.

You need to mandate energy efficiency. It’s such an obvious thing, because  it pays for itself.”

– David Miller

Miller says that required benchmarking and disclosure is the only way to confront the dilemma of “split incentives” – that is, that for the developers and owners of buildings, there’s often no financial upside to energy-efficiency improvements because it’s the tenants or condo investors who bear the cost.

“There is a structural market failure, [so] you need to mandate energy efficiency. And it’s such an obvious thing, because it pays for itself. It’s the right thing to do. It creates jobs, and you end up with a better building, better air quality, and probably better conditions for people to work in.”

In Solved, Miller discusses an even more ambitious city-focused green building program: Tokyo’s cap-and-trade system, which has been in effect since 2010 and applies to every building. The municipality proscribes emission reductions but also offers “a solution for buildings that are so difficult to improve that they cannot meet the targets: trading carbon credits.” Those owners that can’t boost efficiency must buy credits from buildings that have exceeded theirs. According to Miller, Tokyo buildings subject to the cap-and-trade program have cut their emissions by 27% compared to 2009 levels.

Overall, Miller adds, enforceable building-related energy-efficiency goals – in the form of building codes, benchmarks or other mechanisms – are driving investment in sustainable building materials, components and technologies. Indeed, B.C., with its increasingly stringent building codes, has become a magnet for sustainability entrepreneurs like Lynn Mueller, who can not only see the writing on – and in – the walls, but understand how to profit from it.

As he says of waste-water heat recovery, “The billions of dollars that goes down the drain around the world is worth recovering. It’s not rocket science.”

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