Cities Could Be Big Players When It Comes to Cutting Carbon Emissions

Cities in the U.S. can’t set fuel-economy standards for private cars.  They don’t get to decide whether to extract fossil fuels from the prairies and mountains where deposits generally are found.  And most don’t get to determine whether their electricity comes from coal or clean sources.  And yet there is a lot they can do to combat climate change.  A pair of reports released this week illustrate that even if national governments aren’t making big enough commitments to avert catastrophic climate change, cities can make a significant contribution to the cause.

Local governments regulate the two biggest sources of carbon emissions: buildings and transportation.  Local building codes and incentive programs can greatly affect the energy efficiency of new and retrofitted buildings, and they can govern everything from windows to lighting fixtures.  By reducing demand for heat, air-conditioning, and electricity, cities can hugely reduce emissions from burning coal and gas for electricity and oil and gas for heat. And while cities can’t control what kinds of cars their citizens own, they have a lot of power over how many miles those cars get driven.  Adopting zoning codes that encourage dense, mixed-use neighborhoods with walkable, bikeable streets, and investing in mass transit and transit-oriented development, can dramatically reduce driving.  So can changing parking regulations. For decades, cities have required new developments to build parking, which subsidizes and incentivizes driving, when we should be doing the opposite.

In 2005, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group was founded so that cities could collaborate on best practices for reducing emissions.  On Thursday, C40 released a new report, written by the Stockholm Environment Institute, which finds that if cities adopt the right policies over the next five years, it could save about one-third of the world’s remaining carbon budget.  If we want to stay below 2 degrees Celsius of warming, 80 percent of the carbon that we can get away with burning has either already been burned or been “locked in” by an infrastructure investment such as a recently built coal-fired power plant, so we’re left with only 200 gigatons of carbon emissions to play with.  An amount equal to about one-third of that remaining emissions budget could be prevented if cities everywhere take all the right steps.  As anyone who has followed the often dysfunctional local politics of cities knows, that’s unlikely.  But in general, cities are more progressive and less invested in the fossil fuel economy than rural areas and national governments.  So there’s hope that at least some of the major cities will make some of the right decisions.

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