The climate power of cities, and the people in them
On the pod this week, the Denver Office of Climate Action as a model for community engagement; plus, why does the US refrigerate eggs?
This week on Everybody in the Pool
Greetings from Paris! I’m on a little vacation this week; I was visiting some friends in the south of France at the end of last week, and now I’m in Paris for a few days to indulge in some art. This will become relevant later on. But the show goes on!
This week on Everybody in the Pool, I wanted to stay on the theme of climate communications—but with a specific lens: what it looks like when climate solutions get built at the local level, in ways that people can actually see and feel. My guest is Chelsea Warren, the marketing communications manager for Denver’s Office of Climate Action, Sustainability, and Resiliency. (She says we can call it the Office of Climate Action for short.)
I love this conversation because, in the absence of friendly federal policy — and really, at any time at all — a huge part of the climate story right now is about turning “the climate crisis” back into daily life. Your neighborhood, your air, your energy bill, your commute, your kid’s school, your grocery bags. Denver’s work is powered by a voter-approved Climate Protection Fund, funded by a small sales tax increase, which allows the city to invest in a mix of programs like rebates, upgrades, marketing, and clean energy projects, and then support the policies that enable adoption at scale.
Chelsea helped lead the launch of the Denver Climate Project, a behavior-change campaign built around a deceptively perfect tagline: “Do More, Do Less, Do Something.” The point isn’t to lecture people into climate virtue; it’s to give people an “in” wherever they are. That might mean watering less, driving less, buying fewer single-use items, or taking a first step toward something bigger, like running for office or a community solar project or whatever else people come up with. It’s also to make climate action feel visible and doable, instead of private and isolating.
The early results are wild: the campaign generated 128 million impressions in a city of under a million people, and in pre/post surveys, people who reported seeing it also reported a 24% increase in the number of climate-friendly actions they planned to take. Crucially, Chelsea told me the campaign aims to close what’s called the “perception gap,” which means people care about climate, but they think no one else does.
“So the research shows that people tend to underestimate how many people care about taking climate or, like, are supportive of climate policy by over half. And right, and if you think you’re in the minority, you’re less likely to act.” - Chelsea Warren, Denver Office of Climate Action
Denver isn’t alone in treating climate action like a municipal priority. A growing number of cities are creating dedicated local funding streams to pay for upgrades and incentives at meaningful scale. Portland’s Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund, for example, invests in community-led projects that cut emissions while also focusing on resilience, workforce development, and equity.
At the same time, cities are taking on some of the biggest sources of urban emissions with building policy. New York City’s Local Law 97 puts emissions caps on large buildings and is forcing owners to retrofit and clean up heating and cooling over time. The city is also running pilot programs to electrify low-income housing, replacing gas cooking and heating that can be inconsistent, unreliable, and dangerous — this is how up to 10,000 buildings in New York will eventually end up with Copper plug-in electric ranges, for example.
In Los Angeles, the city has moved toward requiring full electrification for new construction and major renovations. And in transportation, cities have direct control over fleet procurement, permitting, charging infrastructure, and the design choices that make it easier to replace short car trips with lower-carbon alternatives — repeatable projects that are increasingly supported by municipal toolkits and playbooks.
The reason local action can add up to big change isn’t just that it reduces emissions inside city limits (though it does). It’s that cities can move faster than higher levels of government, prove what works, and create templates that other cities can copy and scale. That’s why city networks like C40 exist: to accelerate the sharing of solutions and turn climate commitments into measurable, on-the-ground, and decentralized change. As I am fond of saying, despair is top-down, but hope is bottom-up.
Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!
Egg thoughts
There I am walking through the supermarket with my friend in France, and he casually gestures at this aisle and says, “imagine how much energy the US wastes refrigerating eggs.”
Face. Palm. Emoji.
This is the kind of thing that’s been random party trivia for ages — I found an article answering this question as far back as 2014 on NPR. It’s also the kind of thing I sort of vaguely knew, but had never put into climate terms, and now I’m gobsmacked, really.
The reason the US refrigerates eggs is because we wash them. We wash 93 billion eggs a year because we’re worried about salmonella, and the washing removes a veneer on the egg shells that actually keeps out bacteria, as well as water and oxygen, which could probably speed spoiling. So then we have to spray them with oil and we have to refrigerate them throughout their entire chain of transportation, sale, and storage.
In Europe, they solve this problem by vaccinating all their hens against salmonella.
I couldn’t find any studies on the climate impact of our Rube Goldberg egg system, so I asked Claude to do some back-of-the-envelope math:
Egg washing — Commercial plants spray-wash 93 billion eggs with water heated to ~110–120°F. Even with efficient spray systems using roughly half a gallon per 100 eggs (plus rinse water), you’re looking at somewhere around 500 million to 1 billion gallons of hot water per year. Heating that water takes an estimated 100–150 GWh of energy annually.
Refrigerated transport — Three states (Iowa, Ohio and Indiana) are responsible for a third of total US egg production, so these eggs are traveling enormous distances under continuous refrigeration. At roughly 330,000 truckloads per year, the reefer units alone burn an estimated 9 million gallons of diesel — just to keep eggs cold in transit. That’s roughly another 40–60 GWh equivalent and around 90,000 tonnes of CO₂.
(This piece from Fat Chance Farm is the source for the stats above, but also comes to the conclusion that for long-distance travel, eggs should still be washed and refrigerated, just for longevity.)
Commercial cold storage and retail display — Eggs need to be held at or below 45°F in processing plants, distribution warehouses, and grocery store cases. Refrigeration accounts for up to 80% of a cold storage facility’s total energy consumption. Attributing the egg-specific slice of ~130,000+ US grocery store refrigerated cases gets you roughly another 200–400 GWh.
Consumer refrigerators — Most people’s fridges run regardless, so the marginal cost of eggs is small, but with ~130 million households storing eggs, it adds maybe 65–130 GWh.
Total estimate: roughly 400–750 GWh per year — enough electricity to power 35,000 to 70,000 American homes. Plus about 90,000 tonnes of CO₂ just from the diesel for transport refrigeration. The all-in carbon footprint is probably in the range of 250,000–400,000 tonnes of CO₂ annually, using average US grid emissions.
To sum up: “So you've got a system where the US spends hundreds of millions of dollars in energy costs, burns millions of gallons of diesel, emits hundreds of thousands of tonnes of CO₂, and uses a billion gallons of heated water annually — all to solve a problem that Europe solved with a cheap vaccine and some basic farm hygiene. It's a perfect microcosm of how the US keeps choosing the most energy-intensive path because the infrastructure already exists and nobody wants to change the regulatory framework.”
I’m sure we could take this apart on various levels, including the sheer size of the US and where egg production happens, and so on. But it also sort of feels like we should … call someone about this, you know?