Two years after Houston came under new leadership, a woke relic of the prior administration remains. The city’s Climate Action Plan, adopted in 2020 under former Mayor Sylvester Turner, is still in effect today, even as President Trump pulls back on green energy initiatives, including withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords. Houston’s plan was particularly patterned after the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The plan includes vague goals about switching Houston’s vehicle fleet to electric and installing more energy efficient items in city buildings.
Now, nearly six years later, there is no record of Houston contributing to any such global temperature goal, nor any info on whether the climate plan is accomplishing anything at all. “This made sense for the Turner administration because they liked to pay people off,” says Greg Travis, former Houston Council Member who voted against the plan in 2020. “This was a good way to send money to people by having them do these things…I don’t see any improvement by ‘going green’…in fact I see a lot of costs and very little improvement anywhere.”
Travis tells KTRH the city’s climate plan was a waste from the start. “They tried to make police cars electric—you know, police cars need to be powerful, to be able to go where they need to—same thing, they wanted to make fire trucks with batteries in them…I don’t need a fire truck with a battery being too close to a fire.”
“There were a lot of stupid things that occurred because people were trying to virtue signal,” he continues.
Mayor John Whitmire shifted the Climate Action Plan into the new Office of Recovery and Resilience upon taking office in 2024, but hasn’t commented much on it since. “I would scrap it, I would hope the mayor would do that,” says Travis. “I know there’s a lot of pressure on him to not do that, coming from some of the people he has to keep happy…but he’s a rational person, and I think if he had a chance to look at it, he’d scrap it too.”