Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego will now lead Climate Mayors, a coalition of 350 American mayors across 46 states working to advance progressive climate policies.
In a press release from the organization, Gallego committed to supplementing federal funding for climate initiatives using the private sector and philanthropy, expand influence of the Western Water Security Cohort into local governance, “extreme heat” mitigation, and further align member cities’ actions with Climate Mayors initiatives.
“I’ll focus on addressing extreme heat, strengthening partnerships, and ensuring all cities have the tools they need to advance climate action,” said Gallego.
I'm honored to lead as Chair of @ClimateMayors, a coalition of cities tackling the challenges of climate change.
Other members of Climate Mayors leadership include Boise, Idaho, mayor Lauren McLean; Atlanta, Georgia, mayor Andre Dickens; and Cleveland, Ohio, mayor Justin Bibb.
Last month, Climate Mayors committed to supporting the Biden administration’s new National Determined Contribution (NDC) target of 61 to 66 percent economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions reductions by 2035.
Climate Mayors executive director Kate Wright indicated the goals were feasible through commitments to energy and water efficiency programs and the expansion of “green” and “clean” infrastructure.
“Today’s announcement of a new U.S. NDC serves as an important goalpost for our unwavering ambition as subnational actors continue to lead the fight against climate change and advance America’s economic competitiveness,” said Wright. “Our membership of over 350 U.S. Mayors is ready to do its part to achieve our national target and build on the progress we’ve made over the last decade.”
The organization’s climate change initiatives include electric vehicle expansion, data collection on each city’s emission levels, a tracker for federal funding and grant opportunities, and provision of grants for partnerships between local governments and nonprofits.
Climate Mayors launched an electric vehicle purchasing collaborative in 2018 to expand city governance control and influence into county governments, transit agencies, port authorities, and colleges and universities. The coalition also committed to electrifying at least 50 percent of municipal fleets by 2030, and increasing electric vehicle chargers by at least 500 percent by 2035 (with 40 percent at least benefitting “disadvantaged” communities).
Last week, Climate Mayors announced a framework to develop equity-oriented electric vehicle plans. The coalition developed the framework alongside UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and Environment, The Greenlining Institute, and Forth Mobility. According to the framework, electric vehicle infrastructure should prioritize lower-income, non-white communities.
The coalition partnered with C40 Cities and the Urban Sustainability Directors Network to organize allocation of federal funding at the local level. Climate Mayors’ webpage for this planning links to the C40 Cities Knowledge Hub, which indicates that C40 Cities leads on the agenda for this initiative.
Gallego also sits on the steering committee of C40 Cities, serving as the North American representative on the international scale. As reported previously, a priority of C40 Cities is to eliminate meat and dairy consumption, new clothing purchases, and private car ownership.
Climate Mayors was founded in 2014 by three top Democrats: Biden’s ambassador to India and former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, president/CEO of the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund and former Houston mayor Annise Parker, and former Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter.
Several other Arizona mayors retain memberships within Climate Mayors: Tucson Mayor Regina Romero, Tempe Mayor Corey Woods, Sedona Mayor Scott Jablow, Nogales Mayor Jorge Maldonado, and Flagstaff Mayor Becky Daggett.
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A couple weeks ago, after Mayor Gallego did her interviews and headed home from the City Council meeting on September 6, she posted a photo on X of her pouring milk from a $7 half-gallon carton into an empty bowl next to a knife. (Because what normal person doesn’t enjoy eating cereal with a knife?)
While Gallego says she is not banning meat, there is no meat in the photo.
There’s been a lot of false info about my work to make PHX more sustainable.
What I’m not doing: ❌ banning meat or milk
What I am doing: ✅ increasing housing options ✅ improving walkability and transit ✅ reducing emissions and energy bills ✅ enjoying cereal pic.twitter.com/ZzViZ3bT0O
What made her post this image with these self-righteous campaign slogans under her Official X account?
The power of Public Comment.
Earlier that day, about a dozen Grassroots citizens attended the Phoenix City Council meeting and told the mayor they do not support policies banning meat.
A constant factor was brought up by multiple public speakers: Gallego is the Vice-Chair of the C40 Cities. According to the C40 Cities website, “C40 is a global network of mayors of the world’s leading cities that are united in action to confront the climate crisis.” C40 has many documents outlining the organization’s desire to reduce and abolish the consumption of meat.
And the citizens don’t want it!
The troubling fact is, on March 4, 2020, Gallego and the Council passed the 2025 Phoenix Food Action Plan. In Strategy 2, under Goal 1, the fifth “Progress on Action” creates a new policy for the Office of Environmental Programs (OEP) at the City of Phoenix to enter a contract with Arizona State University to “establish an AgriFood Tech Incubator in 2023 to accelerate ventures in sustainable food systems…”
But this is nothing new. The City of Phoenix has multiple policies for sustainable food systems in the 2020 Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory report conducted by ASU. And Gallego also has many policies tied to ASU. In fact, she is funding and has teamed up with the college for multiple environmental and sustainable projects. What type of environmentally sustainable policies does ASU believe in?
Let’s check out their degrees in “Sustainable Food Systems.” The Bachelor of Science degree states, “Students become effective agents of change” and “Students are engaged in an active community collectively working to achieve the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.” The degree for Online Master of Science in Sustainable Food Systems lists Kathleen Merrigan as the leader of the degree program.
According to ASU’s biography page for Merrigan, she is the Kelly and Brian Swette Professor in the School of Sustainability and executive director of the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems. She was listed as one of Time magazine’s Top 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2010. And she is a partner in Astanor Ventures along with being an advisor to S2G Ventures—two firms investing in ag-tech innovation. Merrigan also holds a PhD in Public Policy and Environmental Planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In an article titled, “In Light of Climate Change Debates, ASU Continues Sustainability Efforts,” Merrigan is quoted as saying, “Get rid of the plastic water bottles, eat less meat…” to make ASU more sustainable. Furthermore, ASU has a research program that is teamed up with Merrigan and the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems. The program states it is ASU’s desire to find out how to implement “dietary shifts towards plant-based diets” through “interventions.” Peoples’ eating habits in reaction to COVID-19 lockdowns, a major intervention on society, are listed in this document.
Now, consider one major food intervention taken by Mayor Gallego. Just two weeks after passing the 2025 Phoenix Food Action Plan, she decided to lock Phoenix down due to COVID. After the lockdown began, the Medical Director for Disease Control with the Maricopa County Department of Public Health, Dr. Sunenshine, gave public testimony at the March 23, 2020 Phoenix City Council meeting. Dr Sunenshine stated that the Mayor shut the city down without reaching out to her office first. Dr. Sunenshine also said she would have recommended staying open.
Locking down the city implemented the most direct intervention on eating habits we have seen in our lifetime. Shutting down restaurants cut off 50% of our food supply because the government prevents restaurant food from being sold in grocery stores. The lockdown drastically constrained supply, damaged the supply chain for food, and helped lead to the astronomical food prices we see today.
While Gallego is able to say she is not literally banning meat, she is implementing policies that make meat more expensive and will lead to major reductions of meat consumption in the future. Dare I suggest by 2030?
Just to demonstrate that Gallego is implementing an ideology and that this is not isolated to only Phoenix, consider this. On April 24, 2023, Gallego posted a video with Mayor Quinton Lucas from Kansas City celebrating his “first fully-autonomous ride with Waymo.” Does Kansas City have a plan to reduce meat consumption?
Of course, they do! Under Lucas, Kansas City passed its Climate Action Plan in September 2022. Kansas City’s Climate Action Plan Food section in each division of Kansas City lists promoting plant-based diets!
Another city recently popped up in the news cycle. Chicago is possibly going to open city-owned grocery stores, so I looked up their action plans. In 2021, Chicago began reducing red meat from its schools, juvenile detention center, and Chicago Park District menus. The same document identifying Chicago reducing meat claims Chicago wants “to foster more racially and socially equitable supply chains across the region.” They are saying the quiet part out loud! They want to disrupt the supply chain to reduce meat consumption. Now, if Chicago does end up opening city-owned grocery stores, do you think they will sell meat? Absolutely not!
But let’s get back to Mayor Gallego’s post from a little over a week ago. Her claim of reducing energy costs is another bold-faced lie. Gallego teamed up with the “Climate Mayors” from across the country to release an op-ed on September 10, 2023 claiming the implementation of green energy plans have reduced the cost of energy!
But mayors cannot claim they are reducing energy costs! The cost of energy is set by Corporation Commissions with utilities providers. Mayors have nothing to do with the cost of energy.
But let’s pretend they do. The Federal Reserve states that the cost of energy for the Greater Phoenix Area is skyrocketing! It’s higher than any point over the past five years!
The policies Mayor Gallego is implementing are detrimental to our well-being and set to a radical left agenda. They should not be accepted, and they should not be tolerated.
That’s why it’s critical for the people of Phoenix to stand up, speak up, give public comments, and more. It’s the best way to stop these radical policies that price people out of being able to afford meat, interrupt the supply chain of meat, and make energy costs skyrocket.
Jeff Caldwell currently helps with operations at EZAZ.org. He is also a Precinct Captain, State Committeeman, and Precinct Committeeman in Legislative District 2. Jeff is a huge baseball fan who enjoys camping and exploring new, tasty restaurants! You can follow him on X here.
Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego is at the forefront of a globalist effort to ban meat, dairy, and private cars by 2030.
Gallego sits on the steering committee of C40 Cities: the globalist climate coalition of over 100 cities globally planning and coordinating a centralized system controlling consumer consumption. She is the only American on the 13-member steering committee, and was elected as its vice chair in 2021.
C40 Cities first announced their consumption reduction plan in 2019, a year before Gallego had Phoenix join C40 Cities. The coalition declared that consumption in high-income cities needed to be reduced by two-thirds to avert a climate crisis. The prediction was based on a research report connecting consumption and emissions, “The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5 C World,” produced by C40 Cities, Arup, and the University of Leeds.
The report established these “ambitious target(s)” for influencing global supply chains to control consumption by 2030, dubbed “consumption interventions”: eliminating all meat and dairy consumption; eliminating all household food waste; slashing supply chain food waste by 75 percent; getting rid of all cars; requiring a 50-year lifetime for vehicles; 50 percent reduction in use of metal and plastic materials in vehicles; limiting people to three new clothing pieces annually; restricting flights to one per person every three years; achieving 100 percent sustainable (or low carbon) aviation fuel; reducing steel and cement use in buildings by 35 percent and 56 percent respectively; reducing new building demands by 20 percent; building 90 percent of residential and 70 percent of commercial buildings with timber; replacing 61 percent of cement with low-carbon alternatives; reducing virgin metal and petrochemical-based materials by 22 percent; and requiring a seven-year optimum lifetime of laptops and other electronic devices.
The report also offered “progressive target(s)” that scaled back the ambitious targets.
It appears Gallego has committed to implementing the consumption control plan proposals, as well as the greater missions of C40 Cities. The same year that the coalition named Gallego to its steering committee, Phoenix approved an updated Climate Action Plan reflecting the C40 Cities’ goal of a 50 percent emissions reduction by 2030 and zero emissions by 2050. Among the city’s Office of Environmental Programs initiatives, Gallego’s administration is rolling out a food waste and composting program, the Reinventing Cities initiative to decarbonize infrastructure, and electrification of its government vehicles.
The C40 Cities report noted that food served as the biggest sources of urban consumption-based emissions (13 percent), with animal-based foods representing 75 percent of that total compared to plant-based foods’ 25 percent. Elsewhere, C40 Cities cited the Planetary Health Diet as a model, which reflects their report’s progressive target of limiting meat intake to 35 pounds annually (just over half of a pound a week, or about 1.5 ounces daily).
The coalition hailed the Planetary Health Diet as part of “The Great Food Transformation,” advocated for by the EAT/Lancet Commission. The EAT Initiative is a project of the Stockholm Resilience Center, Professor Johan Rockstrom, and Wellcome Trust (one of the key funders of C40 Cities) under the Strawberry Foundation (formerly the Stordalen Foundation) to transform the world’s food system to XYZZ. Their partners include Nestle, World Resources Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of College London, Harvard Global Equity Initiative and T.H. Chan School of Public Health, University of California Berkeley Food Institute, and New York Academy of Sciences.
EAT leadership consists of nearly 60 individuals with professional ties to the mainstream media outlets, publications, and technology companies including Forbes, the Lancet, and Google; progressive globalist organizations including the World Health Organization (WHO), World Economic Forum (WEF), United Nations (UN); the highest levels of domestic and foreign governance, including the Obamas and Clintons, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), United Arab Emirates, China, Norway, Italy, and Sweden; major universities including Tufts University and University of Miami, as well as those listed above; and a slew of nonprofits and organizations with leftist billionaire support.
In 2020, the United Nations (UN) tasked EAT with “a wide mandate to build a broad, multistakeholder [sic] coalition” to move people into “sustainable consumption patterns.”
The report also proposed limiting people to an average of 2,500 calories daily, and reducing household food waste by 50 percent through government publicity campaigns and regulations on food retailers.
In March, C40 Cities published a renewed commitment to their consumption control plan. Although the coalition insisted that the report represented an analysis rather than plan, C40 Cities leadership has characterized the report as a blueprint of sorts for achieving a halving of emissions by 2030, as noted by The Expose.
Similar to EAT, C40 Cities leveraged the COVID-19 pandemic to implement 15-minute cities, within four months of the U.S. pandemic emergency declaration. The coalition championed the same slogan used by President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and other progressive globalist leaders: “Build Back Better.”
The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, was one of the first to implement 15-minute cities in 2020; she was elected the C40 Cities steering committee vice chair last month. Under Gallego, Phoenix is undergoing changes to reorient itself as a 15-minute city through policy changes as outlined in Vision Zero and ordinances like the parking space reduction for apartments.
Citing C40 Cities, Gallego has also been installing “cool pavement” throughout Phoenix which, contrary to the implications of its name, makes people hotter rather than cooler.
C40 launched in 2005 as “C20” under London, England’s then-Mayor Ken Livingstone. In 2006, C20 merged with former President Bill Clinton’s Climate Initiative to form C40 Cities. The Clinton Foundation remains one of C40 Cities’ key partners.
In 2007, New York’s then-mayor, Michael Bloomberg, joined C40 Cities and hosted the coalition’s second annual conference. Bloomberg remains one of the highest funders for C40 Cities, along with Oak Foundation, ClimateWorks Foundation, Google, the Wellcome Fund, the European Climate Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
In 2015, then-President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden issued a call to action for cities to join C40’s Compact of Mayors. In April, the Biden administration gave $1 million to C40 Cities to address “climate migration” in Latin American cities; that same week, the president signed an executive order to prioritize environmental justice in federal agencies, with a C40 Cities representative there to witness.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
The city of Phoenix’s “cool” pavement is making people hotter, something the city learned from their pilot program study with Arizona State University (ASU) — but chose to prioritize its sustainability goals to combat climate change instead.
The 2021 joint study discovered that the “cool” pavement makes people feel up to six degrees hotter: the material deflects sunlight, causing people to absorb it. The study declared the increased human discomfort a “necessary tradeoff” for reducing the temperature of city infrastructure.
The study not only reported negative physical impacts resulting from the pavement; survey respondents also relayed negative feelings about the aesthetics, safety, and durability of the pavement. Residents reported that the pavement was “blinding” due to its light color, and that the tire and oil marks stained the pavement in ugly ways. They also reported the pavement being slick, and even wearing off at a fast rate.
It appears that ASU researchers and Phoenix leaders were aware even prior to the study that the cool pavement would make people hotter. At the start of the pilot program, ASU professor David Sailor revealed that the same material was planned for use in the 2020 Summer Olympics marathon route in Japan, but that the material would likely make the runners hotter due to the solar reflection.
Despite the report indicating overall negative impacts to the human body and resident sentiments, the city decided to make the pavement program permanent. Since 2019, the city has spent over $12 million perArizona’s Family.
The city announced last month that it installed over 100 miles of the cool pavement.
🆒 NEWS: Three years after launching our Cool Pavement program, we've installed over 100 miles of cool coating across Phoenix!
This innovative coating is produced locally and is proven to reduce street surface temperatures by up to 12 degrees! 😎 pic.twitter.com/XLqoX3AkjM
While the city increases the coverage of pavement making people hotter, public health officials have been warning residents of the consequences of long-term exposure to record summer heat.
Temperatures are likely to reach record territory this weekend. Be careful out there and please practice good heat safety. #azwx#cawxpic.twitter.com/AlI3j0cfTh
In marketing their initiative, city leaders have pointed out that the pavement makes the ground 10-12 degrees cooler. While that may be true, the 2021 Phoenix-ASU report revealed that the surfaces cool by deflecting half of that heat to people.
Despite the 2021 report, city leaders claim that the material makes people feel cooler. Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego claimed the pavement makes the city more “comfortable.”
Cool pavement has also presented an opportunity for city leaders to market Phoenix as innovative in terms of sustainability efforts, namely with energy usage. Gallego has cited the city’s membership with C40 Cities, a progressive climate change organization on whose steering committee Gallego sits as vice chair, as the driving force behind cool pavement.
Over the past 4 years, the most meaningful movement on climate has come from cities and states. #PHX has one of the largest cool pavement projects in the country, we lead the nation for solar installed on municipal property & we’re ensuring #RenewableEnergy is accessible for all. https://t.co/Z1tlCXcWLg
Sailor, one of the ASU researchers, projected in a 2020 interview during the ASU-Phoenix pilot program that the technology would save ratepayers up to $75 million per degree in energy costs.
Another researcher on the study, ASU professor David Hondula, was named director of the office overseeing the pavement initiative within weeks of the study’s publication.
The California-based manufacturer for the pavement material, GuardTop, opened its downtown Phoenix facility to create the product in 2017. Since 2022, after Phoenix made its pavement initiative permanent, the company has exclusively produced the material at its Phoenix facility, naming it “Phoenix Gray.” Australia, Canada, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates have purchased the cool pavement material from the company.
GuardTop’s founder and CEO, Bob Koleas, is an alumnus of the University of Arizona.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
