The documentary Paris to Pittsburgh works hard at separating the politics of the climate change debate from the science of climate change.
Paris to Pittsburgh, which premieres Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET on National Geographic, mostly succeeds. Unfortunately, it can’t completely get around the fact that politics drives a significant portion of our response to the science.
The documentary, funded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Bloomberg Philanthropies, takes its title from the punchline of the 2017 speech in which President Donald Trump announced he was pulling the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
That was the agreement, reached after years of frustrating dead-end negotiations, under which every major country agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a major human driver of climate change, by 2025.
Trump argued that pursuing those goals would put the United States at an economic disadvantage – a warning long sounded by, among others, the American coal industry, which had complained that strict fossil fuel emissions standards were crippling coal production and costing jobs in coal-mining regions like Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, and western Pennsylvania.
In his speech rejecting the agreement, Trump concluded by saying, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”
Much of Paris to Pittsburgh is devoted to explaining that the consequences of climate change affect the entire planet and that working to minimize the human contribution is a win for everyone.
Directors Sidney Beaumont and Michael Bonfiglio focus primarily on efforts to reduce dependence on fossil fuel, noting the growth of the renewable energy industry over the past decade. As of 2017, there were about 800,000 renewable energy jobs in the U.S. and more than 10 million worldwide, with investment in clean energy like wind and solar now in the trillions of dollars.
Equally significant, Paris to Pittsburgh argues, that thrust and that investment isn’t coming from small communes of tree-huggers.
It’s coming from major institutions and communities whose politics cover the spectrum from red to blue. They’re on board for results, not do-gooding.
A small rural electrical co-op in Iowa, serving about 620 customers, has bet heavily on solar power and says the bet is paying off because it’s saving money. Iowa gets 37% of energy from renewable sources, the highest percentage in the country.
On a larger municipal scale, we have Los Angeles, which the documentary notes is at the forefront of both the clean-energy movement and fossil fuel production. Among numerous other steps, Los Angeles is installing oversized electrical plugs at its docks so incoming cargo ships can run on electricity.
Pittsburgh, which was surprised to find itself singled out by the president as an economic beneficiary of relaxed emission standards, has one of the most ambitious greenhouse gas reduction policies in the country.
By 2030, says the mayor, Pittsburgh aims to be using 100% renewable energy in its municipal operations. As much as Pittsburgh’s past owes to the steels mills that made all those old photographs so smoky and grey, the city envisions its future air as clean.
Like hundreds of governmental agencies, institutions, and corporations, Pittsburgh has declared it will continue working to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement.
As all this suggests, Paris to Pittsburgh takes a strong point of view and underscores it with a tacit call to action. While acknowledging America probably won’t meet all the Paris Agreement's goals without the support and leadership of the federal government, it hails the grassroots as a powerful driver of the American will to do just that.
And warns that if the grassroots don’t win this one, the next couple of generations will have a whole lot less to preserve.