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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When Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson set the goal of making his city the world’s greenest, he meant it.

A year after starting his first term in 2008, Robertson began implementing his “Greenest City 2020 Action Plan,” with the goal of becoming an environmental world leader by 2020. The award-winning plan tackles everything from energy efficiency to building standards to waste reduction to encouraging residents to grow their own food.

And it’s working.

According to the latest Greenest City report, Vancouver water consumption is down by 18 per cent, 23,400 new trees have been planted, 3,200 green and local food jobs have been created — all contributing to a reduction of community CO2 emissions by 6 per cent from 2007 levels and keeping the city atop global rankings for livability and health.

And, in Wednesday’s unanimous council decision, Vancouver City Council decided to go even further: recommitting to a long-term goal of deriving 100 per cent of its energy from renewable sources.

Canada’s First 100% Renewable City

In adopting this resolution the City of Vancouver becomes only the fourth city in North America — and the first in Canada — pledging to decarbonize. San Jose, San Diego and San Francisco have all pledged to get off fossil fuels, starting in 2022, 2035 and 2020 respectively.

When Vancouver would go 100 per cent renewable is still to be determined. Now that the motion has passed representatives from City Hall will work with specialists and experts over the next six months to figure out how soon Vancouver could phase out its use of fossil fuels. They’ll report back to Council in the Fall, after which implementation will begin in earnest.

Fortunately, As other cities pursuing a low carbon future have learned, going green has huge potential for local value creation.

For example: After committing to 100 per cent renewables by 2050, the city of Frankfurt reduced its emissions by 15 per cent and grew its economy by 50 per cent.

Where Cities Lead, Will Nations Follow?

Getting to a complete elimination of fossil fuels powering Vancouver’s transportation, heating and cooling is a huge step — particularly when both Canada’s federal government and the B.C. provincial government seem reluctant to implement the kind of bold policy needed for transformative climate action.

Despite pressure from the UN to put forward an aggressive emission reduction pledge in advance of December’s Paris climate summit, carbon reductions from Canada’s Conservative government remain among the lowest in the developed world. Environment Canada recently revealed that Canada is likely to exceed its own 2020 emission reduction targets by at least 20 per cent.

Even though British Columbia is home to one of the most progressive carbon taxes in the world, Premier Christy Clark pledged to freeze the tax for five years as part of her 2013 re-election campaign. Instead, her administration is focused on building infrastructure to ship BC LNG to Asian markets.

In the absence of other leadership, it makes sense why Vancouver City Council is compelled to act. As Mayor Robertson said to council before the historic vote:.

“Cities, as the most direct level of government, need to take action. The world can’t wait for national governments to finish their negotiations. It’s time we get on the path of figuring out how to eliminate fossil fuels in as aggressive of a timeline as is realistic.”

Councillor Andrea Reimer echoed his urgency: “We have a moral imperative to act.”

NB: It is worth noting that should the Kinder Morgan pipeline and tanker expansion proposal be approved, Vancouver’s energy and emission savings through the Greenest City program would be wiped out by one day of operation.

Full disclosure: The author worked for Vision Vancouver during the Fall 2014 municipal election.

Image Credit: Juan Alberto Garcia Rivera via Flickr

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This is the first installment of a three-part series. Read Part 2, Is the German Energy Transition Everything It’s Cracked Up to Be? and Part 3, Building a Popular Front Against Climate Change.

Last Sunday, German voters handed Chancellor Merkel a comfortable mandate for a third term in office in elections billed as “the most boring federal elections ever.” 

The victory of Merkel’s ruling Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) was nearly a foregone conclusion. With Merkel’s hardline policies on the Euro safeguarding the German economy in the midst of a Europe wracked by crisis, and her main rivals the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) failing to offer any serious alternative, German voters saw no reason to try any new experiments.   

But behind the bland façade of German prosperity major changes are afoot. What the predictable election results don’t show is the ongoing long-term transformation of the German energy sector, referred to as the Energiewende or energy transition. Building on the support of an unlikely coalition ranging from radical environmentalists to conservative CDU/CSU voters, the Energiewende aims at the kind of progress on energy and climate that most western governments argue is both politically and economically unfeasible.

The headline figures on the energy transition thus far are fairly impressive: renewable energy in Germany now accounts for 25% of total electricity production. 65% of the electricity generated by renewables comes from a decentralized network of small-scale producers, ranging from individuals to cooperatives to small communities. The official government target is 80% renewable electricity by 2050, with some expecting that number to be closer to 100%.[view:in_this_series=block_1]

According to German climate justice activist and Rosa Luxemburg Foundation energy researcher Tadzio Müller, these numbers are an important strategic indicator for the global environmental movement. “What the Energiewende shows is that ecologically and socially relevant transformative effects can be achieved at something much smaller than the global scale,” says Müller.

For Müller, the 2009 COP15 conference in Copenhagen was a watershed moment for activists fighting to stop climate change. Despite intense pressure from tens of thousands of activists on the streets and close media scrutiny from around the world, the conference ended in failure. Understanding that failure means rethinking the framing of climate change as an issue that activists can effectively tackle at the international scale.

“Projecting energy issues at the global level, as environmental organizations have done since the Rio Summit in 1992, has turned out to be a dead end,” argues Müller. “We simply won’t get an international climate agreement because economic growth is so strongly tied to fossil fuels. More economic growth means more emissions.”

In spite of his critique of the global framework for climate politics, Müller insists on the importance of a global perspective. Müller is a veteran activist of the anti-globalization movement, more accurately described by its French name, altermondialisme, or the movement for a different globalization: one created in the interests of people rather than profit.

Anti-globalization protests coalesced around international summits such as G8/G20 meetings and WTO negotiations. Müller argues that these summits functioned as global flashpoints where something was truly at stake, such as whether developing countries would be subject to punitive terms in so-called free trade agreements. Choosing these summits as a target for protest meant choosing a frame in which activists could potentially exert real influence on the direction of international development.

By contrast, international climate summits such as this year’s upcoming COP19 in Warsaw, Poland do little more than stage the appearance of meaningful negotiations. With rising emissions hard-wired into the ever-expanding global economy, national representatives have little room for manoeuver at the international level without altering the global economic paradigm of endless growth.

Müller’s point is not that we should accept defeat and resign ourselves to the inevitability of climate change. Instead, he argues that climate activists can be more effective by focusing their efforts where they have the greatest strategic leverage. For now, that means the local, regional and national level.

Germany is a case in point. For years, members of the German environmental movement engaged in local struggles over issues like nuclear waste storage and public control of utilities. While they may not have looked like much on their own, taken together these struggles transformed the broader social consensus on energy issues. As a result, climate denialism is essentially non-existent in Germany, and the massive expansion of renewable energy enjoys the support of all major political parties.

As we will see in the following installments in this series, the Energiewende is no magic bullet for the climate. Victories at the local level are important, but the challenge of scaling up to create a global movement for climate justice remains. As a step in that direction, we can see the energy transition as part of an ongoing process that is changing not only the way Germany produces electricity, but also how social power is distributed across German society.

“The Energiewende can reduce emissions and change the social playing field because it can generate more community power vis-à-vis corporate power,” says Müller. The more utilities are brought under public control and the more electricity is generated by small-scale producers, the less power large corporations will have over the energy sector. Beyond the transition to green energy, it’s this social transformation that should make Canadian climate activists stand up and take notice.

Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3 in this series.

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