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In the aftermath of last week\u2019s heady and inspiring climate marches, everyone who\u2019s concerned about global warming should be asking themselves: what next?<\/p>\n
Greta Thunberg threw down a giant gauntlet. Now we need to pick it up.<\/p>\n
Less clear is whether we\u2019re going to meet that challenge in any meaningful way. Going in to the federal election, many Canadians told pollsters that climate change was a top-of-mind concern, and that feature of public opinion hasn\u2019t really shifted since the writ dropped. Some environmentalists even hoped we\u2019d see an election that actually focused on policy measures that meaningfully cut emissions.<\/p>\n
While Justin Trudeau, uh, burnished himself on Friday by appearing with Greta Thunberg (who straight up told him Canada wasn\u2019t doing enough), the federal Liberals are still running a campaign geared at middle-class pocket-book issues. Have you heard them mount a vigorous case for not only the national carbon tax, but more climate measures? Besides Friday\u2019s tree planting pledge<\/a>, not really.<\/p>\n The Conservatives under Andrew Scheer, meanwhile, are actively playing footsie with the denial crowd, who are also Maxime Bernier’s target audience. The NDP and the Greens are both focusing on climate issues, to their credit, but there\u2019s no way we can (yet) say this is a climate election, and this despite the IPCC\u2019s bracing warning<\/a> about what\u2019s coming in 12 short years.<\/p>\n As for the provincial governments, things haven’t looked positive for well over a year, and there’s little evidence of any change. Several climbed on board the stagey and seemingly futile fight to overturn the Liberals carbon tax in the courts. Here in Ontario, Doug Ford’s Conservatives sought to position the measure as a recession trigger until the party’s screw-ups temporarily silenced the premier<\/p>\n So let\u2019s look at the City of Toronto. Joining with a growing number of municipalities, Toronto council will declare a climate emergency at its meeting this week. Mayor John Tory and Councillor Mike Layton are co-sponsoring a motion<\/a> asking staff to figure out how to accelerate the 2017 TransformTO<\/a> emissions reduction strategy (reaching net zero by 2040 instead of 2050), using a suite of measures ranging from boosting energy retrofits to divesting fossil fuel stocks held in the City\u2019s investment portfolio.<\/p>\n As I\u2019ve written previously in this space<\/a>, TransformTO\u2019s emissions reduction goal depends heavily on the mass adoption of electric vehicles, which is a goal the city has little power to influence. If batteries get cheaper, ranges increase and recharging infrastructure expands, we may get there. While the planning department can push developers to include charging stations or plug-ins in the garages of new condos, this part of the `plan\u2019 is largely out of the city\u2019s control.<\/p>\n Cuts to building-related emissions, however, are projected to account for 44% of the proposed reductions by 2050, and this is a domain where the city does have plenty of levers to pull. The big and as yet unanswered question is whether council will actually move beyond symbolic motions starring mid-to-long term goal-setting and dedicate real resources to achieving these changes.<\/p>\n Judge a government not by what it says, but how it spends its (our) money.<\/p>\n The city last year approved an ambitious new green building code<\/a>, with developers offered the option to design their projects based on a tiered system of increasingly demanding performance standards. With the higher tiers, builders can qualify for reduced development charges<\/a> as an incentive to invest in features related to the building envelop, energy use and HVAC systems.<\/p>\n Because the standard, based on Vancouver\u2019s model<\/a>, is so new, we don\u2019t really know how the carrot-and-stick incentives will work. But it seems clear that if council is serious about its 2050 target, and actually dedicated to accelerating the achieving of said target, those incentives, especially early on, better be attractive, and that means the city is going to have to find ways to make up for lost development charge revenue, upon which it evidently depends. (The cumulative 2017-2020 operating budget for TransformTO is just $15 million<\/a>, mostly for new staff and pilot projects, so it\u2019s clear there\u2019s been no take up on this element of the plan so far, and at best modest progress generally, as this progress report<\/a> implies.)<\/p>\n What could council do to make those green building enticements too good to pass up? There are lots of options \u2014 tax hikes, a toll or cordon charge, the revenues of which fund green building improvements or energy retrofits, etc. But all of these turn on whether council and the mayor are prepared to actually act like we\u2019re in an emergency, as opposed to merely declaring it to be so.<\/p>\n They should also be thinking hard about opportunity costs. Exhibit A, of course, is the reconstruction of the Gardiner\u2019s eastern elbow (Jarvis to the Don Valley Parkway), which will cost $2.3 billion between now and 2026 \u2014 a sum that is way higher than what council initially approved when it signed off on the rehabilitation of this notoriously under-used piece of infrastructure (staff initially indicated the feds would pony up almost a billion, which never came to pass).<\/p>\n The outlay is enormous \u2014 this project alone accounts for 5% of the city\u2019s entire $40.7 billion ten-year capital budget, and, in terms of program, materials, use and impact, directly contradicts the contention that council views warming as a \u201ccrisis.\u201d<\/p>\n While creating a roadway at grade to replace that segment of the Gardiner isn\u2019t free, a decision now to abandon the reconstruction of the Gardiner would free up hundreds of millions of capital dollars that could, for example, fund the basically orphaned Queen\u2019s Quay East LRT. (The latest business case<\/a> for the entire waterfront transit \u201cre-set,\u201d<\/a> from Long Branch to the Portlands, indicates the most complex part \u2014 linking Union Station to Queen\u2019s Quay \u2014 would cost about $620 million.)<\/p>\n Or those re-allocated dollars could help underwrite energy retrofits across the city\u2019s entire portfolio of buildings, including Toronto Community Housing complexes. What\u2019s more, the operational savings \u2014 it costs way more, in the long-run, to maintain an elevated highway than a wide city street \u2014 could offset development charge reductions for projects that significantly cut emissions (e.g., passive house structures, net zero buildings, etc.).<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the point, which I hope survives as the buzz of last week\u2019s climate strike dissipates: if we\u2019re in a crisis, then let\u2019s act like we\u2019re in a crisis, which means beginning the long, difficult process of reallocating resources in ways that reflect this realization.<\/p>\n photo by\u00a0Francis Mariani<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"