Vancouver city council’s unanimous decision to commit to running on 100 per cent renewable energy is the kind of political leadership the world desperately needs says Jørgen Randers, professor of climate strategy at the Norwegian Business School in Oslo, Norway.

“Despite the looming catastrophe of climate change the market will choose to do nothing,” Randers said in the keynote speech at the ICLEI World Congress 2015, the triennial sustainability summit of local governments in Seoul, South Korea.

Nor will voluntary actions on climate be enough. Strong legislation, intelligent policy and collective action are the only ways to keep humanity from a nightmare future, said the former business executive who still sits on boards of major corporations.

“It is totally obvious what we should do. And it is only a little more costly.”

However capitalism is exactly the wrong system to deal with a long-term risk like climate change, Randers explained. Capitalism is designed to allocate capital to the most profitable projects and climate action is an additional cost.

Of course, failure to act will be an economic disaster as regions and countries are forced to devote more and more of their capital and labour to coping with climate impacts. Flooding, heat waves, water and food shortages and building defences to buffer those impacts will be very costly, he said.

Randers is a co-author of the landmark 1972 book Limits to Growth, which was updated in 2004. His latest book is 2052 A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years. Based on the latest scientific, economic and other data, 2052 is a real-world look into the next 40 years. It says global CO2 emissions will not begin to decline until 2030 producing a very hot planet 3 to 4 C hotter than today by 2080.

“The climate will just get worse and worse…it will be very unpleasant especially for the poor,” he said.

“There is a strong moral imperative to act on climate,” Andrea Reimer, Vancouver’s deputy mayor, told DeSmog Canada in Seoul.

“There’s also a fantastic economic case. So why shouldn’t Vancouver be a leader on this?” Reimer said.

Andrea Reimer addresses crowd at ICLEI World Congress 2015. Photo: Stephen Leahy

A new study substantiates this. It found that world’s biggest economies could save $520 billion a year if they go 100 per cent renewable. Such a shift would generate three million new jobs.

On March 25, Vancouver voted to make such a shift. More than 90 per cent of the city’s electricity already comes from hydro and shifting to 100 per cent will only take a few years.

Converting all of the cities’ heating and cooling systems will likely take until 2030 or 2035, she said. City staff are working out the details and timelines. Transport will be tougher still, perhaps taking until 2050.

“This could happen sooner with national and provincial government support,” Reimer said. Cities and local governments only get about eight per cent of total taxes paid by Canadians.

Vancouver is one of about 50 cities pioneering the path to a low-carbon future. Others include San Diego and San Francisco in California, Sydney, Australia, and Copenhagen which plans to be carbon neutral by 2025. Nearby Malmo, Sweden, will be 100 per cent renewable for all three sectors — electricity, heating/cooling and transport — by 2030.

Tackling all three sectors at same time works far better than just doing one said Anna Leidreiter, coordinator of the Global 100 per cent RE Alliance — an international alliance of organizations pushing for a shift away from fossil fuels. It is much easier to cope with renewable energy fluctuations and stabilize the grid when heating/cooling and transport are integrated, Leidreiter told DeSmog Canada.

That’s Germany’s approach where more than 80 regions are already 100 per cent renewable and 60 more regions are on their way.

Even Seoul is moving on this. The rapidly growing megacity of 11 million plans to generate 20 per cent of its electricity from renewables by 2020 by covering all of its public structures — water treatment plants, subway stations, schools etc. with solar panels.

Another essential policy for effective climate action is a carbon tax that rises to $100 a tonne, Randers said. “Carbon markets will not do it,” he said.

Even Ontario’s recently announced cap and trade market has been criticized by the likes of Canadian economist Jeff Rubin for being too weak to be effective. Cap and trade schemes operating in the European Union’s have also been found to be too complex, costly and ineffective by most analysis. However, even critics will agree a price on carbon is essential for meeting our global emission reductions goals.

British Columbia’s carbon tax shift is widely considered a smart policy and the best of its kind in North America. A 2013 study DeSmog reported on showed the carbon tax has allowed B.C. residents to enjoy the lowest income tax in the country (not Albertans), use the least amount of fuel per person and have arguably the healthiest economy. However, the tax needs improvement. For starters, the rate has been frozen at $30 a tonne since 2012 and there are backwards exemptions for the oil and gas sector.

Ultimately, people and businesses want to live and work in clean and green urban areas. And whoever develops expertise in shifting to 100 per cent renewable energy will own the 21st century, Reimer said.

Image Credit: Bart Speelman via Flickr

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While federal and provincial politicians continually fail to reach international and national agreements to fight climate change, some civic governments are already beginning to deal with the biggest challenge facing humankind.

Pushed by a seemingly unstoppable trend to increased urbanization, cities are the new battle zone dealing with the consequences of our warming planet.

Vancouver, which wants to become the greenest city in the world by 2020, is already finding surprising successes in mitigating and adapting to climate change.

City Councillor Andrea Reimer, who heads Vancouver’s planning, transportation and environment committee, said it is important that cities take an even greater role in fighting climate change.

“Cities are at the front line of climate change, both in terms of being a source of emissions and by being most severely impacted by extreme weather events caused by climate change,” Reimer told DeSmog Canada via e-mail.

“When floods, fires and sea levels rise, it’s generally municipal infrastructure and urban residents taking the largest hits. On the adaptation side, cities have a big role to play through policy and regulation of transportation, built form (both individual buildings and community planning) and waste, which are the holy trinity of climate-changing emission producers.”

Reimer said Vancouver, which has more than 600,000 residents, has already seen positive results since city council adopted its Greenest City Action Plan 2.5 years ago.

“We’ve reduced waste by 40 per cent, increased active transportation by 10 per cent and emissions are 4 per cent below 1991 levels even as population and jobs continue to grow at a strong pace,” she said.

“Our emissions profile is less than half the national average and 60 per cent below other major Canadian cities showing that cities can get a lot done even without a supportive federal framework.”

Vancouver isn’t the only Canadian community leading in the fight against climate change. A DeSmog Canada report earlier this year shone a spotlight on five communities taking action that you rarely see in the headlines.

According to UN-Habitat, urbanization and climate change are converging in dangerous ways.

“Cities are major contributors to climate change: although they cover less than 2 per cent of the Earth’s surface, cities consume 78 per cent of the world’s energy and produce more than 60 per cent of all carbon dioxide,” the UN-Habitat website says.

“At the same time, cities and towns are heavily vulnerable to climate change. Hundreds of millions of people in urban areas across the world will be affected by rising sea levels, increased precipitation, inland floods, more frequent and stronger cyclones and storms, and periods of more extreme heat and cold. In fact, many major coastal cities with populations of more than 10 million people are already under threat.”

UN-Habitat also says that despite climate-change-related threats, many cities have not significantly addressed global warming. Reasons include a lack of action plans, regulations that have not adapted to climate change realities and slow responses to climate disasters due to a lack of resources.

However, cities can be places of innovation and efficiency, UN-Habitat notes.

“Together with their local authorities, they have the potential to diminish the causes of climate change (mitigation) and effectively protect themselves from its impacts (adaptation).”

The United Nations Population Fund has noted that more than half of the world’s population in 2008 was, for the first time in history, estimated to be living in towns and cities.

Reimer says Vancouver is doing well so far with its Greenest City Action Plan. She added, however, that cities still need provincial and federal governments to get moving on policies that enable further GHG reductions.

Ultimately though, Reimer thinks cities like Vancouver will inspire provincial and federal governments to take up the struggle.

“I believe yes but it will take time, results and determination,” she said.

Photo: "Rush Hour on the Dunsmuir Separated Bike Lane" by Paul Krueger

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In early January, Vancouver’s Mayor Gregor Robertson announced that a part of the city’s iconic seawall would be closed for major repairs following damage from winter storms over the previous month. Mayor Robertson, in no uncertain terms, attributed the unusually serious damage to rising sea levels and climate change. “Seawall damage = cost of climate change + sea level rise,” he posted to his more than 30,000 Twitter followers, along with Vancouver resident John Woakes’ startling December 17 video of violent waves crashing past the beach and demolishing a walkway.    Woakes, who has lived in the city since 1995, took the video during his morning commute to work. “I was amazed by the height of the sea,” he told DeSmog. “It was higher than I've ever seen it. There were places under water that I've never seen under water before. … I was actually cycling through seawater at one point – it was five or six inches deep and I couldn't see where I was cycling. I knew I had to get out.”    “It was the most incredible thing I've ever seen on that route.”  

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