PublicSource (https://www.publicsource.org/category/environment/)
More than 100 people showed up to Sixth Presbyterian Church in Squirrel Hill to listen to and ask questions of Larry Schweiger, one of the region’s most prominent environmentalists. Schweiger has led both the National Wildlife Federation and more recently PennFuture, a Pennsylvania-based environmental advocacy group.
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Bob Weimar has been serving as the interim executive director of the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority for almost a year. And he is forging ahead with plans to revamp the organization and tackle the city’s lead issue despite numerous water main breaks and other setbacks, he said in an interview with PublicSource on Wednesday. One of Weimar’s priorities is to change the chemical that PWSA uses to control lead corrosion in its service lines, a move he hopes will drop lead levels down to single digits citywide and buy the organization the time it needs to locate, remove and replace the lead lines. He said Wednesday that he is awaiting approval from the state Department of Environmental Protection [DEP] to make the chemical change, and hopes to add it to PWSA’s systems by the spring. Weimar is taking other changes — including those to PWSA’s governing structure — in stride.
Grant Ervin, Pittsburgh’s chief resilience officer, sat down with PublicSource for a Facebook Live interview about the city’s plans to tackle climate change.
It was a busy fall in the city. Without leaving town, many Pittsburghers – myself included – were able to participate in multiple international gatherings related to the environment and sustainability. The first big event was the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) annual conference. Then came the greatly anticipated Climate Reality Leadership Corps training, with more than 1,300 trainees from around the world, led by founder and former Vice President Al Gore. October closed with the Natural History Museums in the Age of Humanity conference at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, coinciding with the opening of its We Are Nature: Living in the Anthropocene exhibit about life in the time of climate change.
The city of Pittsburgh wants its residents to eat 50 percent less meat by 2030, according to a goal laid out in its climate action plan.
In its recently proposed climate action plan, Pittsburgh committed to increasing its tree canopy about 50 percent by 2030. Right now, there are about 2.5 million trees in the city, more than most cities its size. The plan is to actively plant 780,000 more trees over 12 years, to increase the tree cover from about 40 percent to 60 percent.
The city of Pittsburgh has made reducing emissions from driving a central part of its plan to tackle climate change. And electrifying the city’s cars is one of its key strategies.
Buildings create 81 percent of emissions here, mostly from the use of electricity and natural gas, and the majority of those emissions come from commercial buildings, such as offices, hospitals, schools and churches.
The plan includes many changes, from cutting the city’s meat consumption in half to planting 780,000 trees, which could transform life in the city, including where Pittsburghers live and how they get to work.
