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WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Climate Alliance today released its annual report, No Turning Back: America’s Governors Confronting the Climate Crisis & Building a Brighter Future, detailing how a surge of investment, collaboration, and action from its 24 member states and territories – alongside the Biden-Harris administration – is eliminating harmful climate pollution, growing the economy, and transforming communities across America.
“The U.S. Climate Alliance is built to lead in challenging and uncertain times,” said the Alliance’s co-chairs New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul in their Annual Report message. “Together, no matter the obstacles, we’ll confront the climate crisis and build a brighter future. There’s no turning back.”
This report highlights the Alliance’s recent progress and provides dozens of examples of how the coalition’s member states and territories – which together represent approximately 60 percent of the U.S. economy and 55 percent of the U.S. population – are raising ambition, while advancing, sharing, and scaling the most impactful climate solutions.
Notably, the report finds that between 2005 and 2022, Alliance members reduced collective net greenhouse gas emissions by 19%, continuing the coalition’s trend of lowering emissions over 15 years, while increasing gross domestic product by 30%.
Meanwhile, compared to the rest of the country, Alliance members:
The report also chronicles how over the past 3 ½ years, robust support from the federal government has supercharged Alliance members’ work. This includes a dramatic increase in public and private investments in the manufacture, deployment, and purchase of clean technologies across energy, transportation, buildings, and industrial sectors driven by enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act.
In fact, clean energy and clean technology investments across the Alliance more than doubled between the same periods of 2021 and 2024. Investments in clean technology manufacturing capacity have also skyrocketed nearly five-fold in Alliance states since 2021, increasing the coalition’s capacity to produce more zero-emission vehicles, wind and solar technologies, electrolyzers, and critical minerals. At the same time, federal investment has helped propel adoption of utility-scale solar across the Alliance and accelerated offshore wind deployment, with cumulative investment in offshore wind technologies growing to more than $1.6 billion by mid-2024.
The full Annual Report and Executive Summary can be read here.
Launched on June 1, 2017 by the governors of Washington, New York, and California to help fill the void left by the previous administration’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the Alliance has grown to include 24 governors from across the U.S. representing approximately 60% of the U.S. economy and 55% of the U.S. population. Governors in the Alliance have pledged to collectively reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 26-28% by 2025, 50-52% by 2030, and 61-66% by 2035, all below 2005 levels, and collectively achieve overall net-zero greenhouse gas emissions as soon as practicable, and no later than 2050.
The Alliance’s states and territories continue to demonstrate that climate action goes hand-in-hand with economic growth, job creation, and better public health. The Alliance reduced its collective net greenhouse gas emissions by 19% between 2005 and 2022, while increasing collective GDP by 30%, and is on track to meet its near-term climate goal by reducing collective GHG emissions 26% below 2005 levels by 2025. The coalition’s states and territories are employing more workers in the clean energy sector, achieving lower levels of dangerous air pollutants, and preparing more effectively for climate impacts and executing more pre-disaster planning than the rest of the country.
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