Everybody wants to go to heaven, but
nobody wants to die. That saying has been around a long time and had
been used to mean a lot of different things.
In today's Canada, it means that while
we might generally support the goal of reducing our total carbon
footprint to prevent a looming climate disaster, nobody wants to
sacrifice lifestyle — or even pay the full price for our lifestyle.
That's the hurdle the federal
government needs to overcome if we are even come close to meeting the
climate change goals we applauded at the global climate conference in
Paris last December. Our commitment to that is to reduce our
greenhouse gas emissions until they're 30 per cent of what they were
in 2005 — and do it by 2035.
That's everybody's job. Miss the local
goal, miss the global goal, reap the storm of runaway climate change.
That's easy to grasp, but it's been
harder to get consensus on what actually needs to be done to get
there. This week, prime minister Justin Trudeau met with the
provincial and territorial premiers to talk about solutions to
climate change.
Four provinces representing more than
80 per cent of Canadians are already on board with the idea of
pricing carbon emissions as a means to discourage wasteful energy use
and/or to fund development of cleaner technologies. But a national
agreement seems out of reach.
Why? Because it's such a hard sell,
politically.
Right now, the city of Red Deer is in
the process of developing its own plan to reduce greenhouse
emissions. A consultant is leading a broadly-based group of people through a
process that must eventually lead to city council adopting standards
that will affect our future development. Due disclosure: I am a
volunteer in that process.
What have we learned so far? That the
way forward is possible, but not for free.
Currently, every person in Red Deer is
responsible for more than 17.5 tonnes of carbon emissions per year.
If our population grows as planned — to 157,000 by 2035, final goal
year of the Paris agreement we signed — our total emissions will be
in the order of 2.88 megatonnes per year.
That's the business-as-usual chart
curve. Canada's goal, represented by us, is to slice that by nearly
half.
The majority of those emissions do not
come from our gas-guzzling trucks and cars (which we each drive about
7,000 km a year on our commutes). As much as our community
discussions liked to chat about neat electric cars, and transit that
very few of us use regularly, or the prospect of developing walkable,
bikeable communities, these alone will not get us there.
The largest portion of Red Deer's
carbon footprint comes from operating our buildings; heating them by
burning natural gas and lighting them with coal-fired electricity.
All these things have been easy to
acknowledge. Where the barriers spring up is when our individual
lifestyles are challenged by change.
Who's in favour of solar panels on our
homes? Anybody? Anybody? A representative of the local home builders
association told us they have a show home in Red Deer equipped with
solar panels that they can source in bulk cheaper than you our I
could on our own. It's the toughest sell on the new home market.
Other representatives quite frankly
admitted that climate change or no, they're not giving up their
extra-large homes or their motorized vacation vehicles. So don't ask.
Even though Alberta already has a
carbon tax on the books, the talk I heard around the room during our
discussions is that people resent paying for the right to pollute and
resent the thought that the cost of a carbon tax might impinge on
their lifestyle.
And this is a well-educated group that
has already accepted the message about how important it is that we
keep Planet Earth from heating up by more than 2 degrees in the next
20 years.
It's just too easy to justify that “my”
contribution must be small, and that someone else's contributions
must be large.
Trudeau was correct in saying Canada's
resource-based economy needs to thrive, but it needs to happen in a
way that pollutes vastly less. The sacrifices required for that must
become personal as well as structural.
Red Deer is still some distance away
from adopting a greenhouse gas plan, against which future development
will, by law, need to be measured. Other Alberta cities have already
done this, and only the future will show if any of this was helpful.
Setting goals is as easy as repeating a
platitude. Achieving consensus to get there, that's the tough part.
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