By Richard L. Gaw
Staff Writer

Making up a total area of 15.1 miles and home to a little more than 9,000 residents, Kennett Township forms a mere speck in the widening spectrum of the world’s global environment, but in many ways, it is a smallish representation of a larger conversation, concern and problem that the entire world has been forced to recognize.

In recognition of the impact of climate change on the environment, Kennett Township’s Environmental Advisory Council sponsored a presentation by Penn State University on Dec. 17 that measured greenhouse gas emissions in the township during 2023. The presentation was a collaboration between the Council, Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI), the Local Climate Action Program at Penn State University (LCAP) and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

Moderated by Alison Bucher-Rubilar, an undergraduate student studying energy and sustainability policy at Penn State and a resident of Chester County, the presentation delivered the findings of data tracker software inventory in the township and opened up discussion about possible measures to reduce emissions in the future.

While the impact of climate change continues to have a disastrous and irreversible effect on the world’s environment, it is also being felt here in Chester County. Referring to recent weather events in the region, Bucher-Rubilar said that over 47,000 people were without power during July for multiple days. During August, Gov. Shapiro declared Pennsylvania a disaster emergency, as thousands of people were displaced from their homes due to flooding. In October, the county enacted an emergency burn ban, due to a record drought. 

“Climate change is a global problem with local impacts,” Bucher-Rubilar said. “In the next twenty years, we are looking at Pennsylvania’s average temperature increasing by five degrees Fahrenheit. We are also looking at thirty-plus days of 90-degree weather and twenty-plus days of heavy precipitation which could severely impact our infrastructure.

“This will cause strain on our electrical grid, and cause people to not work as well and possibly create illnesses.

“Climate change starts with greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane,” added Bucher-Rubilar, who focused on these three gases in her inventory. “We humans would not be able to survive on Earth without the greenhouse gas effect. Those gases in the atmosphere help to trap heat seen in the form of energy from the sun that hits land and gets absorbed by those gases and the remainder goes up into space.

“We are creating a lot more greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, so when that energy is trying to escape back into space it is not able to. We are heating up our planet more and more by the gases that we are contributing to the greenhouse gas effect.”

Transportation is township’s largest producer of greenhouse gases

Using PECO data, Bucher-Rubilar’s study of the township registered 101,382 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent were emitted into the air during the course of the study. The key sectors contributing to greenhouse gas emissions included transportation, which made up 51 percent of the total gases measured – mostly due to passenger vehicle use -- which was followed by residential energy (23 percent), industrial energy (19 percent), solid waste in landfills (4 percent) and commercial energy (3 percent). 

Broken down per capita, Bucher-Rubilar said each of the 9,100 residents in Kennett Township is responsible for 11 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

The study then compared Kennett Township to Uwchlan Township who, with its 19,000 residents, recorded total emissions of 210,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, although Uwchlan’s per capita emissions were less than Kennett Township’s. Comparatively, Chester County – with a population of 549,000 -- generated 7.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, and its per capita output was larger than Kennett Township. 

The findings also looked at the State of Pennsylvania – which has a current population of 12.96 million – and generates 233.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, with electricity generation, transportation and industrial utilities serving as the top three contributing sectors to greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2021, (the most recent data available for the 2024 Inventory) Pennsylvania was responsible for approximately 258 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) being emitted into the atmosphere. Production and consumption of energy accounted for nearly 90 percent of these emissions.

The Kennett Township study forms a small slice of a larger overall climate picture in Pennsylvania, whose forecast calls for more severe changes in the near future. As published in the Pennsylvania Environmental Protection Agency’s 2024 Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report, the impact of greenhouse gases trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere will lead to the average annual temperature increasing in the Commonwealth 5.9 degrees Fahrenheit by mid-century, while the average annual precipitation is projected to increase by eight percent over the same timeframe.

As a measure of combatting this dire forecast, Pennsylvania is taking a bold step to combat air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions with over $2.55 million in grants that will lead to cleaner fuel transportation infrastructure throughout the state, particularly in the transportation sector. This grant, offered through the 2024 Alternative Fuel Incentive Grant (AFIG) program, will be given to 14 recipients in the state and fund a mix of innovative vehicle upgrades and critical infrastructure projects. 

‘Choose your own climate policy adventure’

Heading into the new year, Bucher-Rubilar – along with Brandi Robinson, an associate teaching professor in energy and mineral engineering at Penn State and the co-director of the Local Climate Action Program – pledged to continue to communicate with the township’s Environmental Advisory Council in early 2025 to explore what steps – and potential deliverables - the township would like to address in the future. Robinson said that Kennett Township is at an advantage because it is in a part of the state that is “far and away the most active” in addressing the issue of climate change control. She advised the formation of a county-wide plan that combines the work being done by other townships and incorporates ideas from key stakeholders.

“We love to think of your time with us as a ‘choose your own climate policy adventure,’” Robinson told members of the Council. “For some of the communities that we have worked with, it involves trying to draft out at least the start of a climate action plan. We have communities we work with who have a gashouse emission goal in mind, and we work with communities who won’t touch a reduction goal with a ten-foot pole. In some communities, it’s a political hot potato so they don’t want to deal with it.

“We like to leave it entirely up to the communities we’re working with, to direct where we go, because we recognize that everyone is starting from a different point and has a different end goal in mind. We will tailor our work to what best suits [Kennett Township].”

Keep moving forward, locally

The severity of what has become a global emergency, however, was of very little interest to voters during the recent U.S. presidential election. Despite sweltering and deadly temperatures and the continuing onslaught of hurricanes that brought catastrophic damage and took hundreds of U.S. lives this year, fewer than five percent of respondents in 2023 and 2024 Gallup surveys said that climate change was the most important problem facing the country. 

Against that sentiment, the United States has been the world’s largest historical contributor to global warming -- emitting 400 billion tons of carbon dioxide since the mid-1700s -- and is responsible for 25 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions in the world, second only to China.

To further compound the issue of addressing climate change, the U.S. is poised to renege on the 2015 Paris Agreement, that received the pledge of 195 countries to submit their plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. While President Biden's administration targeted the U.S. to decrease greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 65 percent below 2005 levels by 2035, President-elect Donald Trump vows to remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement – similar to what he did during his first term in office.

“In the U.S., we have been used to the federal government moving slowly on climate [change], so subnational efforts have been driving innovation in this space in terms of climate policy in the U.S.,” Robinson said. “It’s a setback, but it’s not a catastrophe.

“The thing that I keep my focus on is doing work on the local scale. I can’t as an individual move the needle on the global average temperature, but I will not let the ‘bigness’ of this problem prevent me from doing anything about it. I try to ask, ‘What can we do in a place like Kennett Township to make it a better place to live, work and play?’ This is about taking care of the places we call home and helping them become thriving communities that people want to be a part of.

“It will be challenging over the next four years, but the work that [Kennett Township] and other communities around the state and the country are doing will allow us to keep moving forward.”

To learn more about Kennett Township’s Environmental Advisory Council, visit https://kennett.pa.us/197/Environmental-Advisory-Council.

To contact Staff Writer Richard L. Gaw, email [email protected].