Bill Gates, other leaders in Pittsburgh for climate change forum
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — Global dignities and innovators like Bill Gates are in Pittsburgh over the next couple of days to combat climate change.
A forum at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center wants to address the decarbonization and building of a greener economy.
"We've already been doing a lot of this. So we're ahead of many other regions and many other places around the world and we want to capitalize on it," Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald said.
The convention center is hosting the Global Clean Energy Action Forum. Its goal is to work on decarbonizing economies.
"This is just not a problem that can be solved by any individual entity or state or country. This is the kind of thing that requires collective action," Team Pennsylvania Foundation President and CEO Abby Smith said.
Leaders from 31 countries, CEOs, the U.S. secretary of energy and innovators like Gates will all meet on how to tackle this issue. A fear of greener economies is job loss, and these leaders want to solve that. U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm says the clean energy market will exceed $23 trillion by 2030.
"That's a lot of jobs. That's a lot of business that can happen here in western Pennsylvania and throughout the country," Fitzgerald said Wednesday.
Groups like the Breathe Project fear this forum will not do enough to address the issues of climate change. It believes we need to move past fossil fuels entirely to have true sustainability.
"Rather than advocating like these ministers seem like they may be doing, advocating for what we will call false solutions to our climate crisis," executive director Matthew Mehalik said.
The Breathe Project has more than 45 organizations from around the world in town to highlight the damages of fossil fuels on communities. It wants more innovative solutions to come out of these meetings.
"People who live with impacts from fossil fuel development need to have their voices heard and expressed as part of this process here," Mehalik said.
Groups in the forum say they are not able to please everyone and some industries still rely on fossil fuels like transportation. Still, they say, significant steps can be made in reducing their carbon footprint.
"Our ability to do it together is a heck a lot more likely to succeed than if we all try to pick everyone's arguments apart," Smith said.
According to Fitzgerald, several buildings in the city are on pace to reduce their energy and water consumption by 50 percent by 2030.
The forum got started Wednesday with an opening ceremony this afternoon, but many of the discussions will start Thursday and carry into Friday.
