Analysis supporting Canmore’s Climate Emergency Action Plan

Bow Valley Climate Action Society (BVCA) supports Canmore’s proposed Climate Emergency Action Plan (CEAP). The CEAP clearly lays out the magnitude of the challenge facing us in working to address climate change. The CEAP shows us where and how our community is polluting, and it breaks down the risks and consequences coming our way. Most importantly, the CEAP guides us through how we can move to a future of more responsible environmental stewardship. 

Summary of BVCA position :

• Climate change is real. It has profound negative impacts on people, the environment, and the economy.

• Climate change is caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution.

• Our community and society would be horrified by the unrestricted dumping of other sorts of pollution into the environment, like raw sewage into the river. But that is exactly what we do with GHG pollution.

• To stop climate change, we must stop dumping GHG pollution into the atmosphere.

• The CEAP outlines Canmore’s sectoral sources of GHG pollution.

• The CEAP outlines pathways to curtail local GHG pollution and general actions to advance those pathways.

• The CEAP enables, but also relies upon, future actions by both the Town and the community. On its own, the CEAP is just a plan for future action.

• As a community, we do not demand immediate cost/savings payback when managing other sorts of pollution, like sewage and garbage. It is fantastic that the CEAP has identified an economically beneficial pathway to ending GHG pollution. But we should acknowledge that net-positive monetary returns from pollution management is a test we only demand for GHGs.

• BVCA would prefer faster and bolder action, but we recognise that the CEAP must strike a balance with other community concerns. We are satisfied that the final product is reasonable and measured.

• BVCA would prefer more specific and detailed action commitments, but we recognise that the CEAP must allow for future flexibility and economise its demands on Town staff’s workload capacity. We are hopeful that specificity and detail will follow in future policy implementation.

We know that considerable time and effort has gone into this Plan. We appreciate the hard work that Town of Canmore staff have put into this plan, and we appreciate the support that Canmore Town Council has shown. We are especially grateful for the Town’s engagement with the community during the development of this Plan. 

We should remember why we’re doing this

Please bear with us as we briefly review why any of this is necessary at all. When considering policy plans, it’s very helpful to have a shared understanding the issue being addressed.

1. GHG pollution

Climate change is the most profound and extensive crisis of our era. It is caused by greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution in the atmosphere. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution two centuries ago, humanity has dumped staggering quantities of GHGs into the atmosphere. Our collective and cumulative GHG pollution has radically changed the composition of the atmosphere. 

Today’s CO2 concentration is far higher than at any point in the last several million years (Figure 1). CO2 is primarily a waste product of combustion. The emergence of industrial-scale combustion of fossil fuels is clear in these records of historical CO2 concentrations.

Figure 1. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the last 800,000 years as reconstructed from ice core measurements. Data: NOAA. Figure: NASA

Atmospheric concentrations of methane (CH4) have undergone a similar sudden spike. Methane concentrations are now far higher than at any point in the last million years (Figure 2). Methane is a waste product of decomposition (landfills, wastewater), mining, agriculture, and leaks from the oil & gas sector. Together, CO2 and methane pollution are responsible for the majority of climate change.

Figure 2. Atmospheric methane concentrations over the last 800,000 years as reconstructed from ice core measurements. Source: NASA 

When looking at these graphs of GHG concentrations over the last 800,000 years, we should remember that homo sapiens, as a species, dates back only about 300,000 years. This means that modern GHG pollution has produced an atmosphere which is literally unprecedented in the entire existence of our species.

2. Trapping heat energy

These radical changes in atmospheric composition are causing a build-up of heat energy and acidifying the oceans. Normally, energy from the sun arrives at the Earth as light and is eventually dissipated into space as infrared radiation. GHGs absorb infrared radiation, trapping some of that energy on Earth. Over time, more and more and more excess energy builds up on Earth. Between 1971 and 2020 alone, the Earth has accumulated 381 zettajoules of excess heat energy. This is more than 4 billion times the energy release of a nuclear bomb. 

Excess heat energy leads to many of the effects of climate change that we are encountering: higher temperatures, disrupted weather patterns, more powerful storms. Temperatures are the easiest to measure, and just like with atmospheric GHG concentrations, the changes are stark and unprecedented (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Changes in global surface temperatures over the last 2000 years. Source: IPCC, 2021. AR6, WG1, Figure SPM.1.

3. Impacts lag pollution

Changes to the climate are already having profound impacts on humanity and the biosphere. But because excess heat energy builds up over time, the impacts of GHG pollution take some time to fully manifest and will linger until atmospheric compositions are normalised. That means that we are currently experiencing the impacts of GHG pollution built up over decades. And we are locked-in to decades of impacts from GHG pollution we’ve already released into the atmosphere. An analysis, published this year in Nature, concluded “that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years” from the locked-in effects of already-released GHG pollution. 

But the first step to getting yourself out of a hole is to stop digging. The only way to avoid forcing even worse consequences on future generations is to stop polluting. For climate change, that means ending CO2 and methane pollution.

4. Cumulative and collective

As we see, one of the greatest challenges of GHG pollution is that it is cumulative and collective. That is, climate change is the result of the total GHG pollution released over time and across the world. Fortunately, 193 countries around the world have agreed to end GHG pollution.

As Canadians, we have a considerable moral obligation to act: because of our history as one of the first industrial nations and our location in a cold climate, we have been releasing a lot of GHG pollution for a particularly long time. On a cumulative per-capita basis, Canada has the second highest emissions of any country.

Canada, of course, has made global, federal, and provincial commitments to end GHG pollution. Canmore, in its declaration of a state of climate emergency and its original Climate Action Plan, has made similar commitments. The new CEAP is a continuation of those efforts, and it provides the community with a guide for making good on those commitments.

5. GHG pollution is pollution. 

Finally, it is worth stating clearly that GHG pollution is pollution. Much like other forms of pollution, it has consequences for people and the environment. With just a little pollution, those consequences are mild. But with more and more pollution, the consequences escalate.

What society thinks of pollution and pollution management

This raises obvious parallels between GHG pollution and other sorts of pollution. Let’s consider sewage as an example. Sewage is also a waste product of human activities. Uncontrolled dumping of sewage results in negative consequences for people, the environment, and the economy - which get worse as the scale of the pollution grows. And so, as a community and society, we make great efforts to reduce, collect, control, and treat sewage. Such pollution management has become an ingrained norm. Our community would be outraged if the wastewater treatment plant were suddenly shut down and raw sewage simply dumped into the river. Yet that is what we do with GHG pollution: dump it into the atmosphere.

For much of human history, dumping sewage was normal and accepted. But accepted norms have gradually shifted, and diligent pollution management is now expected, for many forms of pollution. We are currently experiencing a shift in those norms and expectations for GHG pollution. The CEAP seeks to chart decades of pollution management goals. In that time, community and societal expectations around GHG pollution will become far more demanding.

The CEAP is a guide.

The CEAP is clearly a high-level, strategic planning document. BVCA recognises the role of high-level, long-term planning and sets our expectations accordingly. We do note that Canmore had a 2018 Climate Action Plan, which was also a high-level, strategic plan. Nevertheless, the CEAP is a significantly more comprehensive, detailed plan. Now that it is before us, we welcome and support it.

The CEAP catalogues and quantifies where Canmore’s GHG pollution is coming from. It assesses and demonstrates the risks and hazards of climate change that Canmore will face. These are valuable analyses and important information for the community.

The CEAP uses that pollution and risk information to lay out a plan for action on climate change, tailored to Canmore’s unique situation. The plan addresses the management of GHG pollution - a broad outline of how to bring GHG emissions down to net-zero, where GHG emissions to the atmosphere are equal to GHG removals from the atmosphere. The CEAP also plots out the community’s adaptation to a future of escalating climate change impacts. These pathways laid out by the CEAP involve whole-of-community efforts: the Town, residents, businesses, and visitors alike. Mobilizing, motivating, and sustaining such a broad and ongoing effort will be the greatest challenge in implementing the CEAP. But it is essential, if we hope to meaningfully tackle climate change.

The many particular actions proposed in the CEAP are described in broad terms, and the CEAP does not, itself, implement any of them. Implementation of the CEAP is dependent upon future work to develop and adopt specific and detailed policy, as well as future coordination involving community stakeholders, the Town, and adjacent and higher level governments. That is, the CEAP is only a guide. It does not accomplish anything on its own, though we hope it enables that future work.

BVCA would have liked to have seen more specific and detailed action commitments, but we recognise that such commitments may have been outside the scope of a high-level plan. We also understand that the CEAP must allow for future flexibility and economise its demands on Town staff’s workload capacity. We are hopeful that specificity and detail will follow in future policy implementation. We look forward to supporting future climate action from the Town and the community.

Speaking of costs and savings

A great deal of the discussion around the CEAP has been framed in terms of costs and savings. Indeed, we are fortunate that the CEAP has identified actions and paths to end GHG pollution which generate far more in eventual savings than they demand in upfront costs. We congratulate the Town for finding a largely win-win solution.

But we also find it striking that we speak of costs and savings for GHG pollution control in a way that we would find callous and irresponsible when considering other forms of pollution. Just as for other forms of pollution, we have gotten ourselves into trouble with GHGs because it’s cheaper to pollute. Returning to the sewage example: Properly minimizing, containing, collecting, and treating sewage is a difficult and expensive undertaking. It would be far cheaper for ratepayers to simply dump our raw sewage into the river. But to do so would be unconscionable and illegal.

As a community and society, we accept that it is worth paying the costs of sewage treatment and garbage collection and organic diversion. We understand that those pollution controls are the right thing to do environmentally, socially, and economically. GHG pollution should be no different. Moreover, GHG pollution ultimately incurs significant costs as the effects of climate change yield damage and disruption. Fulsome discussions of costs and savings need to include the costs of climate change impacts.

To be clear, BVCA believes that we should minimise the costs of curtailing GHG pollution. And we should prioritize specific emission reduction measures with the lowest cost/greatest savings per unit of GHG pollution avoided. But we recognise that some climate actions will come at a net cost but will nevertheless be worth doing.

We appreciate the CEAP for managing this balance admirably. 

The CEAP’s contents are neither surprising, nor extreme

The information and actions presented in the CEAP are not surprising to anyone who’s been paying attention to climate change issues. The CEAP aligns with consensus best-practices for the mitigation of climate change. Similarly, it applies adaptation best-practices to Canmore’s unique situation.

We would be ecstatic to see faster and bolder action. But we recognise that the actions proposed by the CEAP reflect the general policy consensus on climate actions needed to meet stated pollution-reduction targets while minimising disruptions to communities and economies. We also recognise the Town’s need to balance risks and the input of community members with less enthusiasm for action on climate change. BVCA respects this difficult task.

We choose to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good: We support the balanced and measured approach outlined in the CEAP as presented.

We are impressed by the leadership actions proposed for the Town in the CEAP. We support and congratulate the Town for setting a positive example for the community. We particularly look forward to the adoption and implementation of carbon budget tracking as a tool to guide and monitor progress on GHG pollution reduction.

Ending GHG pollution and adapting to a changed world needs all of us

We once again recognise that the CEAP is a guide. It provides the community with the information needed for action on climate change. But as much as the CEAP lays out the facts and suggests what we can do, it is ultimately up to us all to act – not only the Town corporate. The success or failure of the CEAP - and the sort of world we give to our children – will be determined by what we all do with the knowledge and ideas presented here.

BVCA is eager to support the Town and the community in bringing the CEAP to reality.