The DNC Is Aware of Its Climate Paradox

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Climate change and sustainability are on the agenda for this week’s Democratic National Convention, which started Monday in Chicago, with speakers including Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

But climate-minded delegates and voters might be wondering what’s so sustainable about a gathering that pulls in 50,000 people from across the country, most of them by plane. 

In other words, convention organizers want to make sure they walk the talk people will hear this week. 

There’s a plan for that, including a mix of carbon offset programs that will emphasize local donations, with a focus on waste diversion and recycling that should triple the impact at United Center, where the convention is headquartered.

It will also be the first Democratic convention to collect compost, organizers said.

“For large scale events, oftentimes travel is a big emissions factor — the number one emissions factor, in a lot of cases,” said Marley Finnegan, a local sustainability adviser who is part of the team implementing the green strategies for the convention. 

Delegates, journalists, volunteers and even protestors will notice the first sign of these initiatives in their inboxes and at airports and hotels. Prompts will call on guests to share their travel details anonymously, which the convention staff will then tabulate to estimate overall travel emissions. 

It’s part of a carbon mitigation program called the Travel Carbon Inset Initiative.

The idea is that convention attendees will pitch in donations to help reduce the total climate impacts organizers deem unavoidable as a result of hosting the event in Chicago. It’s much like carbon offsetting, a practice wherein entities — usually corporations — compensate third-party offset providers via credits. An example: an oil company purchases carbon offsets pledging to plant trees in the Amazon. 

Critics have another word for offsets: “greenwashing.”

But Barbara Haya sees a distinction between typical carbon offsetting programs and what the convention is trying to do. She’s the director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project at the University of California at Berkeley and has studied carbon offsets for more than two decades. 

In some cases, Haya explains, programs have exaggerated carbon credits 10 and 13 times over. But she adds that the “carbon insetting” underway at the DNC avoids these classic pitfalls, in part because it’s not exactly insetting — a variation on carbon offsetting in which companies reduce emissions within their own operations, as opposed to paying someone else to draw carbon down from the atmosphere.

At the initiative’s core, convention organizers are encouraging individuals coming to the event to make an investment in sustainable development by donating directly to a local organization. It’s not technically a carbon offset or an inset, despite the DNC’s language of carbon management. Even so, Haya called the program an ideal alternative to carbon offsetting. 

“This is more than worthwhile,” Haya said. “The DNC has created a model for what events teams should do — this is the ideal.”

The “insets” will ensure all donations go toward funding local projects, such as Growing Home, the only USDA-certified high-production urban farm in Chicago.  

“We take empty lots, concrete lots, and turn them into vegetation,” said Jenelle St. John, executive director of Growing Home in Englewood, a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. “Our existence in an urban environment is a positive outcome when you think about climate and various ways we can all chip away at this very big problem.”

The donation money will help the nonprofit fund its day-to-day operations as well as its green workforce development program.

The other sustainability initiatives this week are behind the scenes. For example, to help power the convention, organizers partnered with ComEd, the regional utility, to bring in electricity straight from the street in order to ditch the diesel-powered generators used in the past. 

Recycling is expected to play a major role, as organizers plan to supercharge the recycling capacity of the United Center, with a goal to double or triple the current recycling rate by adding more bins, dedicated staff and signage. 

As part of the convention’s upgraded waste diversion strategy, this will be the first Democratic convention in history to collect compost. Organic material as well as recyclables will be rerouted from the landfill at McCormick Place and the United Center.

“Sustainability is a critical element of the Democratic National Convention,” said Stephanie Katsaros, one of the local sustainability advisers working with the DNC. 

Katsaros and Finnegan have worked with the venues, delegates, hotels, vendors, city officials and local groups to deliver guides to encourage them to embrace sustainable practices. The pair will collect data on things such as travel emissions, energy use and even menu choices, and report key findings once the event has wrapped to see if it meets its ambitious goal: “the most sustainable convention in history.”

“This convention has the potential to leave a transformative legacy,” Katsaros said.