Carbon Neutrality as Opportunity

As you may have gathered, the idea of city-wide carbon neutrality by 2030 has gained a lot of steam here in Worldchanging’s home base of Seattle. Our City Council has embraced it as a goal (though it’s wrestling with the timeline) and some of our smartest people are wrestling with what carbon neutrality might mean and how it might be accomplished.

Eric de Place offered one set of concerns here last week, exploring the example of Copenhagen — which at this point has the world’s most ambitious urban climate goal of carbon neutrality by 2025 — and asking some tough questions about Seattle’s plans.

Copenhagen, he notes correctly, does not have a plan to achieve zero emissions — as far as I know, no city has a plan for that. What Copenhagen has a plan for is to achieve zero net emissions, meaning that when you balance everything its people do, you come out with carbon neutrality. To do this, Copenhagen relies on offsetting actions, or offsets, to balance out the greenhouse gasses that Copenhageners will still be emitting in 15 years.

Copenhagen uses offsets, to my understanding, to balance things that fall in one of two categories: the last emissions from big, slow systems they’re not sure they can completely change in just 15 years (for example, even in a city which has declared independence from the car, some cars will still be in use, and some of those cars will still be driven by internal combustion engines in 15 years), and emissions over which they have no direct control (for example, offshored emissions coming from consumr goods manufactured in other nations). To balance those emissions, they’re adopting best practices in offsetting. This is a sign not of hypocrisy, but honesty: Copenhagen is attempting to take responsibility for all of its emissions, and making up for those that are beyond its control to change in 15 years. The end result is the same.

Eric rightly points out that if Seattle were to slash its emissions in half in the by 2030, we’d still emit something like three times as many greenhouse gasses as Copenhagen will in 2025, and offseting those emissions could come with a high price tag (he estimates $60 million a year for Seattle if we purchased those offsets on the open market for roughly $20/ ton). “That’s a lot of money,” he says. “And it’s an open question, at least to my mind, whether achieving ‘carbon neutrality’ for a specific city for a specific point in time would really the best use of that money.”

And here’s where Eric and I differ in several ways. I see carbon neutrality as a necessary goal in and of itself. Many people, including Bill Gates, think we need the entire developed world to be carbon neutral by 2050 in order to reach a worldwide reduction in emissions of 80% by that time. I think that 80% reduction is an insufficient goal, but leaving that argument aside, if we want carbon neutrality in the developed world by 2050, then we need leading cities to hit that goal decades earlier to create the innovation paths others can follow.

Just as importantly, however, I see carbon neutrality as a huge opportunity. Urban climate action offers us a fabulous tool chest, presenting solutions to all sorts of other problems we want to solve as well, from a flagging economy to energy vulnerability to mounting health care costs. Overall, I think Eric’s missed a few key points:

1. I’m not at all sure that a 50% reduction of our emissions footprint is the best we can do (or frankly, even something we ought to think is “worth shouting from the green rooftops” as Eric says). It is certainly technically possible for us to do much, much better. We already have the technology and design capacity to get 80-90% improvements in many fields, especially in green building. And technology is improving extremely rapidly. Twenty years ago, most of us didn’t have the Internet or cell phones (to note a commonplace example of technological change); we ought to anticipate improved ability to solve some problems we don’t now know how to address.

2. Because we run our city on hydroelectricity and live in a mild climate, Seattle’s biggest problem is cars. Cars and trucks are the largest source of our greenhouse gas emissions. Our city’s auto-dependence is often treated as a fact of nature by older commentators, and when they acknowledge the problem of auto emissions at all, they tend to claim electric cars will fix the problem. Unfortunately, electric cars won’t solve auto emissions, and (as we’ve explored on this site scores of times) won’t even come close to solving the massive non-tailpipe auto-related emissions that come from road building and other auto infrastructure, air- and water-pollution, increased health care costs and so on.

No, the solution to the problem of cars is to build a better city. We could use the new growth that we know is coming our way, and use it to make all our neighborhoods compact, deeply walkable, and sustainable (for one home-grown vision of sustainability, check out New Energy Hubs) This is entirely within our power. The idea that Seattle can’t do this is silly; the idea that Seattleites refuse to do this is 20 years out of date. We can, and should, remake our city to promote urban quality of life, sustainable systems and freedom from the car. Given how rapidly our region is changing, I think two decades, wisely used, could mean a city that’s unrecognizably better.

3. This isn’t charity. Though of course we want to do the right thing, the reasons for achieving carbon neutrality are as practical as they are ethical:

* Many of the kinds of things we need to do to reduce our carbon footprint will also make us more resilient in the face of the energy shocks and rapid climate change we know are headed our way. Many of the changes we want to see in our urban fabric and infrastructure can also be thought of as insurance against a chaotic future.

* The U.S. will likely see massive economic benefits from a national climate strategy, but whether or not American conservatives agree, climate action isn’t really a choice, economically: the world is moving quickly towards a low-carbon economy. As a city heavily linked to international trade and competing in global technology and design markets, if Seattle wants to stay economically strong, we must stay at the forefront of sustainable design, clean technology and green urbanism (no matter what else the rest of the country does). When you add the direct economic development benefits of moving to a bright green economy, climate neutrality is smart economic policy.

* There’s a huge brand advantage for our metropolitan region in carbon neutrality. This is completely non-trivial. This region spends millions every year promoting itself as a place to do business, to visit on vacation, to pick for hosting conventions, and so on. Our economic future depends in part on how many bright young people decide to move here and/or stay. In an era of super-liquid capital, our ability to launch successful start-ups, to market export goods, even to secure funding for large projects depends on others seeing us as an innovative place (lest we fall into a branding version of the Ninja Gap). A big portion of our regional economy depends on people thinking highly of us: leadership in carbon neutrality (and all the innovation it will spur) will accelerate a region brand of green, smart and beautiful.

* Many of the things we want to do to go climate neutral, when done right, offer huge benefits in other areas: a climate-neutral Seattle would have cleaner air, longer-lived citizens, healthier kids (who suffer less from obesity and asthma), better diets, lower health-care costs, less isolated seniors, more affordable housing and transportation choices, stronger communities and so on. A whole fleet of studies has been done on the non-environmental benefits of climate action: all of those benefits would apply here, too. If we are carbon neutral, we will be a better place to live.

4. We almost certainly won’t be able to eliminate all emissions, and will end up wanting to offset our remaining climate footprint: again, this is not a sign of hypocrisy, but of honest accounting. But here’s the thing: only a fool would just buy those offsets on the open market, when so many things we want to do for other reasons (but don’t think we can currently afford) present themselves as offset investments in our immediate surroundings.

Take just one category of offsets: securing carbon sinks. There are a whole bunch of things we want to do for other reasons that could help us draw down large amounts of carbon over time, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t count these investments as offsets. Think of improving our city’s watershed on the Cedar River, and improving the habitat around it; think of securing our city’s foodshed and preserving regional agricultural land that not only grows local food but practices climate-friendly farming (including projects that return carbon to farm soils and improve the carbon uptake of rangelands; think of practicing sustainable forestry throughout Western Washington (perhaps even on a community-supported model; think of preparing for climate change and rising sea levels by practicing climate-adaptive wetland restoration now, and increasing the area of estuaries and riparian habitats. The list goes on and on, and these are just offsets dealing with carbon sinks and land use. Using offset money to fund these actions would, of course, yield other benefits as well, from preserving ecosystem services to recreating viable rural economies.

It’s not that Eric’s cautions are wrong: Eric’s one of Seattle’s smartest sustainability thinkers; I pay close attention to everything he says, and he makes important points here. Is critical, however, that in thinking of solutions to our problems, we don’t fall into the habits of mind that caused those problems. If we try to solve our sustainability problems one at a time, and measure the benefits of the solutions only narrowly and directly, we will fail: if we seek to act boldly, based on the best, most comprehensive understanding of the costs and benefits we can find, then we have a shot at changing the world. Think big, think connected, think ahead and climate action becomes a landscape of opportunity.

(For more background on how Seattle can go carbon-neutral, see the Seattle Talks I gave in November.)
(Photo credit.)

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 11:54 AM)

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