Jack Jordan, executive director at Climate Action Evanston, said that, with the second Trump administration at the levers of the federal government, any efforts to reduce carbon emissions, pollution and waste would have to be done on the local level — something that, he said, Evanston has plenty of experience with.
This was a major takeaway from a talk Jordan gave at the Evanston History Center Wednesday evening. The event was billed as an oral history of climate activism in Evanston, as well as a reflection on the present and future of the movement.
Jordan noted that some of Evanston’s major sustainability initiatives came about because past Republican administrations pulled the United States out of climate treaties. During the second Trump administration, he argued, Climate Action Evanston must work with civic institutions throughout the city and build alliances throughout the Chicago region and potentially beyond.
Historical context
Much of the presentation built from the senior thesis Jordan completed as a Northwestern student. “Participating in Change: An Oral History of Community Climate Action Planning in Evanston, IL” covered two decades of climate activism in Evanston, drawing on oral interviews and media accounts.
Evanston has been relatively successful in getting climate action plans and other environmental sustainability measures codified because of “involved and engaged residents,” Jordan said.
He went through history, noting that, when, in 2005, then President George W. Bush declined to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, then Mayor Lorraine Morton signed Evanston onto the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, which committed signatory cities to meet or exceed the protocol’s emission reduction goals. This, Jordan said, only happened after a push from Evanston activists.
A sustainability first
In 2007, Network for Evanston’s Future, one of Climate Action Evanston’sspredecessors, successfully pushed the city to hire its first sustainability staff person and conduct the citywide greenhouse gas inventory. A year later, the network worked with the city to create the Evanston Climate Action Plan.
In 2017, during his first term, Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Accords climate agreement. Mayor Steve Hagerty committed Evanston to meeting the agreement’s goals, and launched a resident task force to develop the city’s Climate Action and Resilience Plan. The plan is still on the books, and the task force still meets monthly to discuss how well the city follows the plan.
“[CARP] is like a gospel for climate work in Evanston,” Jordan said.
He mentioned several other milestones — Evanston Township High School and Evanston/Skokie School District 65 hiring sustainability coordinators, ETHS adopting a Green New Deal policy in February 2024 and, most recently, the City Council passing the Healthy Buildings Ordinance to phase out natural gas use in larger buildings and generally make multi-unit buildings more energy efficient. As Jordan noted, specific rules are being developed.
Evanston’s climate future
Jordan said that what organizations should do is improve the “social infrastructure,” increasing collaboration between advocacy organizations, community organizations, other nonprofits, businesses and media outlets. This includes making sure kids are taught about climate change and sustainability, and raising money for nonprofits like Climate Action Evanston.
“At Climate Action Evanston, we’re very lucky I’m a full-time staff person, but i’m only one staff person,” Jordan said.
Finally, that includes increasing collaboration across municipal boundaries. Jordan said his position is funded through a grant Climate Action Evanston got from Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, a longtime environmental advocacy organization based in the eponymous Chicago neighborhood.
“ComEd doesn’t exist just in Evanston; Metra doesn’t run just in Evanston; MWRD doesn’t run just in Evanston,” he said.
Municipalities can share experiences, Jordan said. Chicago, for example, could use Evanston’s experience developing CARP. While it may be a larger city, they have similar types of buildings, a major university and other community features, Jordan said.
“Basically, the pitch here — look, folks, you need to [look at] how this plays out in Evanston,” he said.
Jordan felt two major initiatives are worth pursuing. One is a Lake Michigan bill of rights. This is based on a legal theory that natural bodies such as lakes have the “right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles,” and residents have a right to sue polluters for harm to a natural asset. But Jordan acknowledged the attempt to put it into practice in the United States with the Lake Erie Bill of Rights referendum in Toledo, Ohio, was ruled unconstitutional.
Another concept is virtual power plants, where electricity from power plants and batteries is pooled at times of high demand when a traditional energy grid would struggle, or stored for later when there’s less demand.
At the Q&A after his talk, Jordan was asked whether federal funding cuts affected Climate Action Evanston. He said that they hadn’t — though they did affect a $20 million EPA grant the group applied for. The program the grant is part of, Jordan said, was slashed — but the group was able to repurpose the completed application to use for other grants.
“We already applied for two to three things out of that 90-page behemoth,” he said.
Get local, Climate Action advocate urges, as a tactic to meet federal funding cuts is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston’s most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.
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April 24, 2025 at 09:10PM
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