Greenhouse gases (GHGs) are essential to life on Earth, and having the natural amount helps regulate the Earth's temperature. Human activities, like how we get around and the buildings we live and work in, have increased the level of GHGs in our atmosphere and have led to disruptions in the Earth's climate. The increase in GHGs leads to an increase in the number and the intensity of extreme weather events, the degradation of our air quality, and a decrease in amount of available drinking water in Texas. Power plants are Bexar County's biggest source of emissions. Bexar County's largest source of pollution is CPS Energy's J.K. Spruce Coal Plant, which also makes up nearly a quarter of CPS Energy's power generation. In December 2022, CPS Energy's Rate Advisory Committee voted, among other things, to eliminate coal from CPS Energy's generation portfolio by 2028, and in January 2023, CPS Energy's Board voted to close the J.K. Spruce Plant by 2028.
Reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by 41% (6,914,177 by 2030)
Year | Value | Margin of Error |
---|---|---|
2019 | 11,680,761 | |
2020 | 10,337,133 | |
2021 | 12,645,178 | |
2022 | 12,066,234 |
Units of metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent from all direct emitters
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Bexar County
Greenhouse gases are essential to life on Earth and having the natural amount helps regulate the Earth’s temperature. Human activities, like how we get around and the buildings we live and work in, have increased the level of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in our atmosphere and have led to disruptions in the Earth’s climate. The increase in GHGs in the atmosphere leads to an increase in the number and the intensity of extreme weather events, the degradation of our air quality, and limits the amount of available drinking water in Texas. This data set does not reflect total U.S. GHG emissions. The data was reported to EPA by facilities as of 08/12/2022. EPA continues to quality assure data and plans to release updated data periodically. The GHGRP generally requires facilities that emit above 25,000 metric tons CO2e of GHGs to report their emissions. Therefore this data set does not reflect total U.S. emissions or total emissions from individual states. Roughly 50% of total U.S. emissions are reported by large emitting facilities subject to the GHGRP. Additional GHGs are reported by suppliers of fossil fuels and industrial gases. The total number of reporters shown may be less than the sum of the number of reporters in the selected source categories because some facilities fall within more than one source category.
After 12 years of driving progress toward a shared community vision, SA2020, the nonprofit organization, is dissolving. We believe this is the most visionary thing we can do. We made this decision with the greatest care for our organizational values of leadership, community, and accountability, and we hope you’ll read more about it on our blog.
Our website is live with our final data release, showing where San Antonio stands on reaching the shared community vision. The data release is accompanied by our final call to action—a policy agenda for City government based on our unique bird’s-eye view of San Antonio.
While SA2020’s operations ended March 28, these resources, along with the last twelve years of our research and stories, will be available to download from our website through September 2024.
– Team SA2020