"They’re living beings that come and go,” Lisa Ortega says, swaying slightly, full of kinetic energy. “And they’re misunderstood. They just can’t be the only answer.”
She’s talking about trees, of course. Ortega is the executive director of Nevada Plants, a tree-planting nonprofit she founded in 2021. While environmentalists have long been stereotyped as “treehuggers,” we’ve come to learn that simple acts, such as planting trees, are part of a much broader network of solutions to a more complex set of problems. The conversation now also includes how to transform urban development, infrastructure, transportation, residential energy use, and social behaviors in order to shift society toward a more sustainable energy future. Ortega understands this.
“We’re a tree-planting organization, but now we have a bigger mission, especially with the urban heat islands,” she says.
Urban heat islands (UHIs), one of climate change’s most palpable effects, are areas in which man-made infrastructure absorbs and re-emits the sun’s heat, creating temperatures that are on average one to seven degrees higher than in outlying areas. While climate change is a global problem, Nevada residents feel some of the effects more acutely. “Las Vegas has the largest heat-island effect in the country,” says Dr. Joanne Leovy, a volunteer with Citizens’ Climate Lobby.
A focus of Nevada Plants is to alleviate the effects of UHIs on residential property. Ortega shares a story about a resident who asked for a tree to be planted outside of her three-year-old son’s south-facing window. In addition to cooling his room, it allowed him to have more fun.
“She cried because it was the beginning of outdoor space that her kid could have to play,” Ortega says. “We get stuck inside because, in low canopy areas, kids don’t have shade to play in.” To date, Nevada Plants has planted and provided follow-up care to over 1,700 trees at private residences and in community spaces.
Phillip Zawarus, an associate professor at UNLV’s School of Architecture, studies UHIs and development in Southern Nevada.
“People perceive UHIs as those daytime high temperatures,” Zawarus says, “but it’s actually about how we’re reducing those temperatures at night. When you replace natural materials that have a lower retention of heat with materials that don’t cool down at night, it’s only going to compound. That’s why we get such drastic high temperatures, because there’s no time for the material to cool down.” But changing the ratio of hard, impervious building materials versus eco-friendly materials in the rapid development of Southern Nevada is only part of the solution, he says.
“We also have to protect our carbon sinks, our natural ecologies that are there to absorb the CO2 in the air,” Zawarus says. Desert soil is effective at this, but too much of it is being subsumed by “really wide roads and expansive parking lots.”
As consumers move away from brick-and-mortar stores, a few cities across the country have decreased or eliminated parking requirements, including Nashville, Tennessee, and Anchorage, Alaska. Buffalo, New York, was the first U.S. city to eliminate minimum parking requirements on new development in 2017, which has allowed for the revitalization of underused commercial spaces, historical sites, and vacant parcels. However, this might be an uphill battle in Las Vegas, where many of us consider convenient parking a vital quality-of-life issue.
The effects of climate change, including the impact of UHIs, are not distributed equally across Southern Nevada. “Low-income neighborhoods are in the hottest parts of the valley,” says Leovy, who is also a family practice doctor, “and they’re already populated with people who have barriers to health. ... It increases the chances of heart attacks and respiratory problems.”
Mercedes McKinley, a former Nevada state coordinator with Moms Clean Air Force, knows the impacts of environmental injustice firsthand. She grew up next to a busy highway and intersection in East Las Vegas, which she believes contributed to her mother’s breast cancer and Alzheimer’s, and her father’s fatal COVID infection. Once she had her own child, she moved to Henderson for the cleaner air quality. Her rent tripled, she says, but it’s worth it.
“In East (and North) Las Vegas, the asthma rate is 11.1 percent,” McKinley says. “Here, it’s 9.5 percent. The national average is 7.7 percent. We are still higher than the average because of our transportation sector.”
DROUGHT, FLASH FLOODS, water shortages, increased heat — those are some of the local effects of climate change, as enumerated by George Cavros, the Nevada clean energy manager and senior attorney for Western Resource Advocates. He credits Clark County for taking steps to address some of them. “They developed an inventory to identify where carbon is coming from regionally, engaged the community on solutions, and developed pathways to implementing those solutions.”
The Clark County Regional Community Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report, covering 2019 and published in 2021, found that the biggest single source of emissions was electricity use in buildings, at 33.2 percent of total regional emissions, with commercial buildings accounting for 52 percent of that number. The next largest source was gasoline consumption by “on-road transportation,” which includes both local and visiting vehicles, at 19.6 percent. That’s followed by “landfilled waste” at 12.4 percent. (A caveat: The metrics used by the county emphasize electricity as a greenhouse gas source, while most other estimations, and nearly every source interviewed for this piece, identify transportation as the biggest culprit. However, there’s no single methodology for determining emissions, let alone those of an individual city or county.)
Last year’s Clark County Community Sustainability & Climate Action Plan includes ambitious greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goals and dozens of solutions that local residents can advocate, including: investing in increased and equitable access to public transportation, passing legislation to develop renewable sources of energy, diverting waste from landfills, and using a “program stacking” financial model that reduces the costs of transitioning to sustainable energy for homeowners and developers.
DESPITE THE SIZE of the problem, there are actions that individuals, institutions, corporations, and governments can take to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. So part of the question for local activists is what the most urgent and effective methods are to address climate change — a question for which they often have different answers.
For her part, Leovy eschews the idea of individual action.
“I’ve been really concerned about climate change for a decade,” she says. “We did desert landscaping, installed solar panels, hung out our clothes to dry, all that stuff. And you come to realize that that’s not addressing the core of the problem, which is social and political.” Part of the reason she joined Citizens’ Climate Lobby, she says, is because the group focuses on nationwide policy solutions. “This isn’t about an individual carbon footprint; it’s about how we as a country become leaders in a new carbon future.”
Citizens’ Climate Lobby and Moms Clean Air Force focus on policy change at the federal level, though both groups organize locally. One issue that McKinley used to focus on in her work with Moms Clean Air Force was “calling out Southwest Gas and the greenwashing they do in our communities.” That’s true across the energy sector, Cavros says: Regardless of the goals that governments or institutions set for themselves, if they rely on energy produced by utilities that use fossil fuels, they’re never going to completely eliminate their GHG emissions.
For its part, the Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) of Southern Nevada has set an ambitious goal to transition its buses to clean energy. By 2050, all of its buses will produce zero emissions — “pending available funding,” says Andrew Kjellman, the senior director of its Metropolitan Planning Organization. That’s a sizable task — among RTC’s fleet of 415 fixed-route buses and 437 paratransit buses, only two now run on hydrogen and four on battery-electric; six down, 846 to go. While the Federal Transit Administration will reimburse most of the upfront costs of purchasing these buses, federal funds come with “buy American” requirements. According to Kjellman, there are two main suppliers of clean energy buses in the United States, which are both dealing with supply chain issues. That means it can take years for an order of buses to be fulfilled. In addition, the RTC, like many transit agencies, is facing a fiscal cliff caused by the end of COVID-era subsidies and rising expenses because of inflation. It needs to obtain funding from local sources that would allow them to maintain these clean energy vehicles.
Still, the RTC says, it’s on track to meet its 2050 transition goals.
Meanwhile, the agency is addressing climate issues by redesigning bus shelters to shield riders from the heat, and encouraging carpooling, ride-share matching, and alternative types of commutes. Working with municipalities, the RTC is trying to build “complete streets” — in both new and existing neighborhoods — which are roads lined with trees and that have bike lanes and speed limits, making all forms of transportation other than driving “comfortable, appealing, and safe.” And the agency has an internal department, Freeway and Arterial System of Transportation, or FAST, that manages traffic signals and flow to decrease a driver’s time idling in congestion or at a stoplight.
Ideally, the last resort is “adding lanes and interchanges,” Kjellman says. “You may solve for increased emissions in the near term, but through induced demand, you may end up increasing traffic.”
FOR INDIVIDUALS LOOKING to make a difference, especially homeowners, many local and federal initiatives support the switch to more sustainable, green energy.
One of Nevada’s unique strengths in combating climate change is the abundance of solar energy. Installing solar hot water heaters and solar panels not only reduces your carbon emissions, but it also means you’re using an energy source that is not subject to politics or sudden price hikes. Noting that gas bills have doubled and tripled, McKinley asks, “Why do we depend on a natural resource that’s so volatile?” As Zawarus points out, installing solar on your property may be better for the environment than massive solar farms, which have a large impact on utility lines and often block large parcels of the desert soil that could be helpful in carbon sequestration.
Under the federal Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022, Nevada is eligible for $48 million in funding for the Home Efficiency Rebates Program, and another nearly $48 million for the Home Electrification and Appliance Rebates Program. According to Cavros, the former program provides up to $8,000 for low-income families for “whole-home energy-efficiency upgrades,” while the latter program will provide rebates of $8,000-$14,000 per family for switching out gas appliances for electrical ones. (Applications for both programs are set to open in early 2025.) Homeowners can also reach out to Nevada Plants to request shade and fruit trees.
One suggestion that all of these advocates agree on is the need for bold, meaningful leadership by government officials.
Clark County, Cavros says, stepped in where the state government has failed. Under Gov. Joe Lombardo, he says, the state has actually gone backward, removing the state climate plan enacted in 2020 and withdrawing from the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of governors advancing state-led climate actions. In a letter to the Alliance, Lombardo said its goals are at odds with Nevada’s energy objectives, which are “focused on developing and maintaining a diverse energy supply portfolio and utilizing a balanced approach to electric and natural gas energy supply and transportation fuels that emphasizes affordability and reliability for consumers.”
“If you don’t have strong executive leadership, the utilities will fill that void, and that often means more fossil fuels, which increases costs and health risks to citizens,” Cavros says.
At this point in Southern Nevada, climate change is an inescapable reality that needs urgent solutions. Indeed, no matter what one’s politics are, there is a scientific consensus about the causes of global warming and what needs to be done: Invest in alternative energy and sustainable transportation; maintain diverse, healthy ecosystems; and curtail “fast” consumerism, which perpetuates waste in landfills (much of this waste emits methane, which the Environmental Protection Agency says is 28 times better than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere).
As McKinley puts it, “We’ve operated as a society for far too long without taking in the consequences of our actions.”