What Pittsburgers Know About the Environment Trump Has yet to Study
In a speech announcing that he intends to withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Agreement , President Trump said he was “elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” And yet, as I sit here, near Pittsburgh, I get the feeling that he is not acting in my interests and the interests of my neighbors.
Memo to Trump: Hillary won Pittsburgh.
Somehow my hometown, the good old Steel City, is burdened with a reputation it doesn’t really have: factory workers, miners, people who don’t care if the air is smoke-filled. You can find pictures of Pittsburgh with an almost black atmosphere, but none of them have been taken in recent years. My parents took me to the Carnegie Library, built a century earlier with money from a steel tycoon. I thought it was made of some kind of black stone, and one day in 1990 I was shocked to see that it was painted white. Why do they do it? I have asked.
My mom and dad laughed. “Clean off the soot!”
Steel is our history, not the future. Pittsburgh didn’t choke on smoke during my lifetime, thanks to the Clean Air Act of 1963 and the collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s. President Trump is half a century late; steel production is non-refundable.
Coal mining is even older; There are mines in other parts of Pennsylvania, but they are abandoned in our city. In the area where I grew up, many houses had cracks in the brickwork because the ground below us consisted of spent coal mines. In one house on my street, the basement had to be rebuilt. Another time, a crater formed a few blocks from the house.
Pittsburgh residents have a lot of experience with a stance that says, “Fuck the environment, let’s do what makes money.” This is what we have been working on for decades. Pittsburgh is a poster city showing how to recover from coal, steel and manufacturing ruined.
Look at us now. Who are the biggest employers in Pittsburgh? No factory, no factory. Our largest employers are hospital and university. In fact, seven out of the top 10 work in the healthcare industry. United States Steel, sandwiched between Walmart and Pittsburgh itself, does indeed rank 13th on the list. But this is his corporate headquarters. Browse their listings for hourly jobs, and there is only one at the moment: a railroad car repairman .
The city itself is all about services, healthcare, technology, etc. E. Eight years ago we had another guy as our new president and he said, “Pittsburgh is a bold example of how to create new jobs and industries in the transition to the 21st century economy.” Heck, we already have self-driving cars .
I am not saying that we are perfect. Fracking is the big business in the countryside around us, and it poses its own environmental issues that need to be taken care of. Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Environmental Protection Council has just held a summit here to discuss how to reduce our dependence on coal-fired power plants. Our state produces a lot of greenhouse gases and exports a lot of the country’s electricity. We are on track to reduce emissions by a third by 2030, but we need to go even further. And so does the rest of the country.
In this regard, we have a lot in common with the rest of the United States. Check out the Yale University Climate Communication project data on how people view CO2 reduction as a pollutant. Most of us in every state think this is what we need to do. And notice the color of Pittsburgh on the map: we are not yellow, not peach or orange. Pittsburgh looks cherry red. We know what the matter is.
Sure, there are Trump voters in Pittsburgh, but when people here walk to the polling booth, the officials don’t have a mandate that will take us back to the Smoky City days. Take our mayor, for example, who tweeted this in response to the Paris news:
So, Mr. President, if you want to represent the people of Pittsburgh, you need to reconsider your position on Paris.