Local climate solutions will rise as national leaders retreat

If all politics is local, it doesn’t always feel that way. Political power manifests like an inverted pyramid, with the weightiest matters dealt with at the top. At the national and international level, leaders spar over trade and tariffs, wars and famines, and coordinated action to stave off disaster, while at the local and grassroots levels, we deal with more prosaic matters. Garbage sorting; bike lanes; zoning — the kind of things only the valiant local newspaper deigns to chronicle. 

Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work.

In recent years, we’ve seen a paring back of the roles and clout of the international community and national governments, in part because of a retrenchment of nationalism and in part because of the stickiness of the problems at hand; climate chiefly among them. It goes without saying the Trump administration will flip the table on its way out of the Paris Accord, and a similar fate likely awaits coordinated international action on plastics pollution. Canada, it should be said, isn’t acting much better these days; Canada just finished telling the U.N. International Court of Justice that it shouldn’t be held legally responsible for meeting its emission-reduction targets. 

Nationally, the next federal government — regardless of the stripe — will likely back away from carbon pricing, and if polling from last fall is correct, most people aren’t keen on big new federal action to tackle climate change.

At the provincial level, one of the country’s biggest polluters, Ontario, is fast-tracking policies and initiatives that will grow emissions and car dependency, doubling down on the sources of the problem. Alberta’s premier, meanwhile, must have winded herself in her sprint to visit Donald Trump and beg the world’s most famous climate denier to buy more oil, while British Columbia’’s LNG plans are seeking to hitch the province to several more decades of fossil fuel extraction and export. So much for the provinces.

Thankfully, local governments, First Nations, and civil society are picking up some of the slack where they can. Toronto is fighting tooth and nail to keep its bike lanes in place against a hostile Ford government. Vancouver, after a brief flip-flop, stuck to its ban against natural gas heating in new residential buildings. First Nations are developing clean energy projects across the country, getting off diesel generators to reduce risk, clean the air and avoid emissions at the same time. 

Economic tailwinds help. Those diesel generators are unbelievably costly to run, and solar is getting cheaper by the day. The economics work outside remote areas too, meaning electrification using renewables should be a no-brainer for the business community — particularly when measured against oil and gas reserves that are increasingly expensive to refine and found in more and more remote, or otherwise hard to access, places. 

That doesn’t mean everything’s smooth sailing at the local level, but there’s good news there, too. In Calgary, a hard-fought effort to allow denser housing in parts of the sprawling city is expected to reduce emissions, in part by changing how much driving is baked into everyone’s lives. Similar rezoning efforts have gone through in other cities, like Edmonton, Vancouver, Regina, Halifax and more. 

In my community of Victoria, a swimming pool replacement project has been set for a public vote by terrified city councillors because of its expected $200-per-household cost. It’s not just a pool, though: the existing pool’s old gas boilers are Victoria’s biggest single source of carbon emissions, representing about 40 per cent of city-owned buildings’ carbon output. The new building, by contrast, would use electric-powered, air-source heat pumps to heat the building and the water. 

In all of these cases, environmental, legal and other groups have emerged to push for action. Faith leaders have come out swinging against Ford’s bike lane destruction, as well as the Highway 413 plan, citing its effect on the climate. Civil society groups like the Council of Canadians rallied to stop Vancouver from caving to the fossil fuel industry. In Calgary, it wasn’t just housing advocates who wanted to see the city densify — the proposal brought together transportation and climate activists as well. 

The difference between action at the global and local level is that, in your own community, individual voices can actually count. Council meetings make space for feedback in a way that climate negotiations never could, and it’s there that anyone can advocate for the changes they want in their own community. We may not have a seat at the U.N. table, but at least we can tell our city council it’s time to get on with it.