Peter Walks for Democracy

Last week, our Local Climate Action Program (LCAP) graduate Joe Thompson accepted an award on behalf of the Orange Sustainability Plan. Joe has taken a remarkable step that we hope for and dream of: applying the skills he learned in the LCAP and in his Energy & Sustainability Policy degree to his civic and professional life. He did this by collaborating with a professor and class at Chapman University and by serving on the City’s Sustainability Committee. Basically, he created an LCAP in California.

While he was in the LCAP, Joe worked with Doylestown Borough in Bucks County. He, like all of our students, worked in an immersive two-semester asynchronous course that partners upper-level undergraduates and graduate students in energy, environment, and sustainability programs with a Pennsylvania substate government partner. The conduct a greenhouse gas emissions inventory for them using ICLEI’s ClearPath software and then work on climate planning. In Joe’s case, he drafted a framework climate action plan for Doylestown, and provided guidance for their next step on how to incorporate climate action into their Comprehensive Plan. He now works at Sunnova Energy on interconnection and is a super citizen!

Joe is not alone in the accomplishments coming out of the LCAP. We’ve had other folks complete the program who are working at major firms covering the energy transition to a low- or zero-carbon future, work at the United Nations Joint Sustainable Development Goal Fund, work at solar developers, provide greenhouse gas emissions inventories and emissions scenarios for the Lower Merion and Bucks County Sustainability Plans, develop Scope 3 emissions inventories for a major hospital, and more. Last year, we sent a student to Dubai to attend the 28th Conference of Parties for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Each of these students’ successes are successes for small “d” democracy. Joe and all our students approach their communities as places to be loved and cared for. They work with their government partners–whether they are staff, appointed, or elected officials–as professionals and civic servants worthy of respect and the truth. Of course, they treat climate impacts, greenhouse gas emissions inventories and reductions, and the policy, projects, programs, partnerships, and investments they might recommend with scientific rigor and caution. So whether they are delivering an inventory, a to Doylestown or Homestead, an open space and carbon sequestration report to Lower Macungie Township, a zoning review to Uwchlan Township, or a memo on orphaned and abandoned wells to the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, they do so to empower officials with the best information we can provide to make the best decision possible on behalf of residents and taxpayers and in the spirit of Pennsylvania’s Constitutional “Green Amendment,” Article 1, Section 27..

It is no surprise, then, that the LCAP is being awarded the Ryan, Moser, Reilly Award for Excellence in Community Engagement Institutional Leadership from the Engagement Scholarship Consortium for 2024 and that we were recognized on the House floor of the PA General Assembly for our work for Pennsylvania communities. Joe and his peers are making the difference!

I could not be happier, more grateful, or more proud to have worked with Joe (and our other students) and call him my peer and friend. I’ve shared a screenshot of the celebration below.

Onward!