Consumption of energy is an unequal game. North America, Asia, and Europe are disproportionately energy hogs. They consume most of the fossil fuels burned which is the cause of anthropogenic climate change. Our North American and European homes need to be heated in the winter and chilled in the summer. And then there are the technological gadgets that fill our homes and have us consuming more energy than all of Africa, South America, and Oceania combined.
That’s why energy conservation leading to reduced consumption and lower emissions is an important weapon in our arsenal to combat climate change. This means we need to look at the contributing factors to our energy-hog lifestyle. It means changing our behaviour.
Making lifestyle changes is easier if one can see the goal ahead. The problem with climate change is we likely cannot or will not see the results of our behavioural changes during our lifetimes. As a result, we walk slowly towards the change we need to make rather than run to embrace it.
Here in Canada as well as in the United States and Europe, most of us live in cities. Canadian and American cities are relatively young. European ones are older. The buildings in the Americas are largely 20th-century constructs. The buildings in Europe are a mix of old and new. Whether dealing with structures dating back to the Middle Ages, or those more contemporary, very few of the legacy buildings that dominate our cities have been designed with energy conservation in mind.
That’s why cities need to come up with smart policies and programs backed by funding both public and private to address energy conservation. Correcting the energy inefficiency in legacy buildings needs to be a high priority. Doing it will help cities to get to net-zero emissions faster than almost any other policy or program they initiate. It is, however, easier to have aspirations to achieve this, than it is to accomplish it.
For example, my home city, Toronto, has more than 450,000 legacy buildings in its inventory with the vast majority built pre-1970. These include:
The vast majority of these buildings have not been designed to conserve energy. And so far, the city, other than looking at its own inventory of 500 buildings or so, hasn’t created policies and funded programs focused on energy conservation. The city’s website refers only to federal grants for homeowners to do energy audits and retrofits.
Why should Toronto act on energy conservation for its legacy buildings? Below is a picture of the City of Vancouver taken using an infrared thermal imaging scanner. The yellow appearing in the image indicates where heat is leaking from surface areas. The biggest contributors are windows and doors, with roofs and walls coming in second. For Vancouver as in Toronto, the vast majority of buildings predate 1970 when building codes didn’t consider specifications focused on energy conservation.
Today in Canada, most energy consumed by residential and commercial properties gets used to heat spaces. And based on what we can see from infrared thermal images like the one above, a significant percentage of that energy for heating goes right out the windows, doors, roofs and walls.
Cities as environmental stewards and as the place where most of us live can do far more to mitigate climate change if they would focus on energy conservation to support residential and commercial property retrofits. That means putting in place programs to replace legacy windows and doors with energy-efficient ones. It means programs that subsidize insulating walls and ceilings.
The City of Denver and its Office of Climate Action, Sustainability and Resiliency has a five-year plan featuring a Climate Protection Fund. The money is to help improve the energy efficiency of homes, offices and industrial sites. Public seed capital of $40 million established the program which has since attracted private contributions to help increase its capacity to achieve the goal of zero emissions in all legacy buildings by 2040.
The Canadian federal government’s 2030 Climate Emissions Plan has put aside $1 billion for a green buildings strategy that includes energy retrofits. This is the money that Toronto describes on its website covering energy-efficient upgrades for new windows, doors, and insulation up to $5,000 per homeowner. There is no money for multi-residential units or condominiums. And the city isn’t adding any more funds or trying to attract money from private contributions to make the program more effective.
In the face of climate change, this lack of smart urban policy needs to change. Addressing energy conservation in legacy buildings can do more for reducing energy demand which means less burning of fossil fuels, and help in mitigating climate change. This is needed now for the sake of future generations for the overall health of the planet and the people on it.
]]>In 2020, 56.5% of humanity lived in cities. And by 2050 that number will grow to 68%. Where most of us live is then a strong determining factor in how climate change will progress throughout this century and beyond. Addressing it through cities, therefore, makes sense.
A global organization of cities known as C40 is leading the way. C40’s aim is to meet the objectives of the Paris Climate Agreement and pursue limiting atmospheric temperature rise to 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit). It commits members to implement climate action plans to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, including adaptation to climate change in every city decision, and ensuring urban populations can ride out the century and beyond without too much disruption.
At a Copenhagen, Denmark, climate summit in 2019, the C40 group, currently representing 97 cities, and more than 700 million people and 25% of the global economy committed to cutting GHG emissions by 50% as of 2030. At the conference, one city mayor noted that world leaders continue to fail to agree to actions necessary to stop rising atmospheric temperatures, and called them out noting their ineptitude as a direct threat to all citizens of the planet including those living in urban spaces.
Of the 18 C40 city members in North America, Denver is not listed. Yet the city has a climate office and plan that includes hiring a Decarbonization Incentives Manager (DIM). This is an interesting new position, one with no similar title currently appears among C40 urban governments.
So what is the DIM’s responsibility?
In Denver, almost 66% of the city’s GHGs come from buildings and homes. The city’s Office of Climate Action, Sustainability and Resiliency (CASR) kept updating building codes for new construction but didn’t have much of an answer for existing built inventory.
The DIM will report to CASR. The funding expected to generate $40 million annually from a 0.25% sales and use tax, will help buildings and homeowners to move to electric heat pumps and away from natural gas. In addition, the money will allow homes and buildings to increase the energy efficiency of structures and improve indoor air quality while investing in green jobs workforce training. It is expected that the DIM will develop demonstration and pilot projects within commercial and multi-residential buildings. Based on their success, the city will then be able to expand these programs to cover existing built inventory prioritizing lower-income and under-resourced areas to begin.
I would think one of the first acts of the new DIM would be to have the city of Denver join C40 where a repository of knowledge on climate change adaptation and action strategies is already being implemented by urban centres around the planet. And C40 wouldn’t mind learning from the Denver experience and spreading the knowledge from its successes to other cities around the world.
After all, as I stated in the title and at the beginning of this article, it’s cities where it’s at when it comes to combatting global warming and reducing GHGs. And as cities succeed in solving this existential challenge, it is to them that citizens of the world will look to address other challenges. The future of humanity lies in our cities.
Many futurists I talk with have been arguing that it will be cities that survive the disruption of climate change and cause all of humanity to reorganize itself into smaller, more-citizen-centric political entities. From the trends I’m tracking, this would be no surprise to me.
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