Anita Prizio: Pennsylvanians deserve bold climate action — and accountability

We don’t need to imagine a future where climate change is devastating our communities — we’re living it right now. Deadly storms in Western Pennsylvania. Hotter and hotter summers. One-in-100-years floods arriving with regularity in Allegheny County.

We all deserve to live in a safe climate where our children can grow up without fear of their environment becoming unrecognizable. While climate change has already altered our reality and challenged the safety of Pennsylvania communities, we have the power to adapt to new environmental conditions and invest in our resilience in the face of climate change — but it’s going to be expensive.

According to a new statewide study, municipalities in Allegheny County will need to spend $1.6 billion to protect our residents and infrastructure from the escalating impacts of climate change by 2040. That figure, while staggering, only covers some of the measures we’ll need to take such as building retaining walls to prevent more frequent landslides and installing air conditioning in overheating schools. Overall, the study found it will cost Pennsylvania municipalities more than $15 billion to adapt to climate change by 2040 — and that doesn’t include the costs to clean up and repair from possible disasters in the future.

This massive bill to protect our communities from climate change will currently fall on the shoulders of our taxpayers. It’s not fair that our residents — including the most vulnerable members of our communities — could be stuck paying to adapt to a crisis they did not cause.

Working-class families in Pennsylvania did not cause climate change; giant oil and gas companies did. For decades, Big Oil knew their products were polluting our air, warming our climate and creating a dangerous future for generations to come. Instead of sounding the alarm or genuinely pursuing clean-energy alternatives, the oil industry lied about climate science, intentionally misled the public about the impacts of fossil fuels and continued pushing their products, all the while raking in untold billions in profits.

Now, Allegheny County’s municipalities are facing major costs to protect our residents from climate change. More than $986 million to prevent climate-fueled rains from overwhelming our stormwater systems and sending billions of gallons of raw sewage streaming into our waterways; $99.7 million to install air conditioning in schools to protect our students from hot classrooms that disrupt their learning; $142.7 to repair roads from more water and heat damage; nearly $330 million to reduce the rising risk of landslides.

We must reckon with the fact that if we don’t find funding sources for these challenges, we won’t be able to adequately protect ourselves.

There is a growing movement of states and communities suing fossil-fuel companies for their years of climate deception and demanding accountability. These cases use the same legal arguments that forced tobacco companies and opioid manufacturers to admit their lies and pay up. I think it’s time Allegheny County considers joining them.

The concept is simple: If you make a mess, you need to clean it up. From abandoned oil wells that leak into lands and rivers throughout the state, to climate-fueled heat waves and flash flooding, oil companies have been making a mess in Allegheny County for decades and it’s time for them to invest in cleaning it up.

There is no silver bullet when it comes to responding to the climate crisis. It’s the responsibility of elected officials like myself and fellow council members to urgently push for climate solutions, including the transition to cleaner energy sources. At the same time, we need to adapt to the climate change impacts that are no longer avoidable and make our communities resilient to our new reality. It’s only fair that the fossil-fuel giants that obscured climate science and lobbied against energy alternatives dip into their deep pockets and help pay their fair share of the adaptation costs.

We cannot freeze in the face of climate change. Pennsylvania needs bold leadership at every level — from our cities and counties to the attorney general’s office — to stand up to Big Oil and protect Pennsylvanians from being bulldozed by these greedy, polluting companies.

It’s time for bold action. It’s time to demand climate accountability.

Anita Prizio is an Allegheny County Council member.