Cincinnati officials have set an ambitious goal of reducing carbon emissions 50% by 2030, and reaching full carbon neutrality by 2050. The city is on track to meet those goals, reaching a nearly 40% reduction in carbon emissions, despite reduced support from the federal government.
Director of the city’s Office of Environment and Sustainability Ollie Kroner sat down with WVVXU’s Local Government Reporter Becca Costello to talk about how far the city has come and what happens next.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Green Cincinnati Plan was last updated in 2023 and we're about halfway through that five year plan. You recently released a progress report showing 85% of the plan's action goals are complete or in progress. When the city first started working on this version of the plan, there was a lot of federal funding available for this work. So what's changed since then, and how has that affected the city's progress?
Right, so we were preparing the current Green Cincinnati Plan in 2022, right as the Inflation Reduction Act was coming online. And that package was the largest investment in climate action in human history, alongside the bipartisan infrastructure law. So it was a change in the rules around the tax incentives for a number of clean energy solutions, electric vehicle solutions, but also direct funding to support these initiatives. And we structured the plan to position us as best as possible to draw those dollars down and make climate action happen at scale in Cincinnati, and we were very successful. We were awarded more than $50 million of federal support for different climate initiatives. And that's [just] city government — when you look at other partners, there's even more investment in the region.
There have been changes along the way. You know, as long as I've been doing climate work — and in fact, next week, I will hit my 10-year mark with city government — political change has been a constant, right? So most of the success that we have had has been without federal support. This money that the government made available really created an opportunity to scale and accelerate the work that we're doing. So today, $18 million remains intact, and much of the funding is still being deliberated at the federal level, so there's some litigation. We will wait and see what happens with that. But we are not slowing down, and we still have our North Star in the Green Cincinnati Plan, and we're doing everything we can to activate.
See the full progress report below (article continues after):
When you presented this progress report to City Council recently, you described energy as "center stage" and "the fundamental currency of our economy." Obviously, artificial intelligence is driving up energy use and utility costs for average residents are also going up rapidly. Given how quickly the energy landscape seems to be changing worldwide, what can Cincinnati do to address concerns about energy use and generation?
That is the key focus of our department right now, and is a key priority of the mayor and City Council as well, and they're asking for what strategies are on the table. And I think there are some near term strategies that we can consider, but most of the things that come to mind will take time. The core of the challenges is a supply and demand issue, right? There's so much more demand for electricity, and we're not producing new generation fast enough. The shifts at the federal level have made it harder to bring new energy online.
We're doing everything we can to become an energy generator. We are working on solar on our rooftops of our city facilities. We are working on large scale solar arrays in the region to add to the energy generation to address that supply and demand pain point. One of the key technologies that we are closely looking at is battery storage. So much of the energy price surge is caused by peak demand — moments of time when the grid needs to pull extra energy. And these extreme weather conditions that we've recently experienced are a great example of that. If we can add batteries that can store energy and then deliver energy back to the grid in those moments, we think we can shave those peak energy pricing moments.
One of the city's major accomplishments in the last several years is the 900-acre city-owned solar array in Highland County. When you were presenting this Green Cincinnati Plan progress report to City Council, you said the next big thing will be a lot of small things. What do you mean by that? What does that mean for the city's climate work moving forward?
In the development of the Green Cincinnati Plan we spoke with thousands of Cincinnatians. Many had recommendations for what city government could do, or what businesses should do, but also many had ideas of what they wanted to do if they had a little bit of resource, a little bit of support. From that inspiration came our Seeds of Change program, which has now funded more than a hundred community climate projects in virtually every neighborhood of Cincinnati. And these take all different shapes — community gardens or micro forests; we've had some organizations install solar on community facilities, some behavior change campaigns that students have led. In fact, 29 of the projects have been led by people under the age of 22. So to see that level of activation is really inspiring and helps develop this culture of sustainability that we're working toward and is envisioned in the Green Cincinnati Plan.
The progress report and the Green Cincinnati Plan at large touches on dozens of other topics, like recycling, food waste, brownfields, housing, climate migration — a lot more. Is there anything else from this progress report that you think is worth especially highlighting right now?
I think one of the key priorities of the city and the community in recent history is the focus on housing, and you can see some of the acceleration that's happening in new housing development. Alongside the housing crisis, we have the energy crisis and our climate crisis, and increasingly, I think the more we can get high-performance housing right, the more we can address all of these different challenges together. So the city has different programs to help encourage that, and I can see lots of examples of developers taking this into their own hands, really focusing on keeping utility pricing down for these buildings in a way that reduces cost of living for tenants. So that intersection of housing and energy, I think, is one of the key points of overlap, of political overlap, in the work today, not just in Cincinnati, but across the country.
See Kroner's full presentation to City Council below (article continues after):
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
I think a lot of people feel despair when it comes to climate anxiety, and I think one of the best cures is taking some form of action. For many people, that starts with recycling and grows into maybe composting too, or thinking about your diet, or purchasing an electric vehicle, thinking about solar on your own rooftop.
Many of our programs right now are shifting to make them more accessible to communities that have been left out in the past. So thinking about recycling — when that program was initially set up, recycling carts were delivered to single family homes. And there was a lot of success there, but that inherently has left out many multifamily tenants. So through external partners, we have received grant funding to expand the recycling program into the multifamily sector. We're working to do something similar with organic collections. Through a grant from USDA, the team is leading an effort to place neighborhood food waste pickups in communities across the city. So we now have north of 700 households that have signed up to do just that. They deliver their food scraps in a way that diverts organics from the landfill.
So this activation at the individual level, I think, is really empowering, and chips away at this sense that, 'it doesn't matter what I as an individual do, it's the government, it's the corporations that really need to make the change.' We need them to make changes, too, but I think there's a lot of power at the individual scale to make change and inspire change in a community, in a neighborhood, in a city.
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