Community Decarbonization Planning at City Council
As I reported in a previous blog post, Louisville recently undertook another round of community decarbonization planning. In collaboration with City staff and Xcel’s Partners in Energy, a Community Decarbonization Stakeholder Group, consisting of nine people living and/or working in Louisville, developed a Community Decarbonization Plan. The Community Decarbonization Plan addresses methods for elimination of most of Louisville’s anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gas emissions as well as the implementation of such methods and a timeline for such implementation. City staff will present the Community Decarbonization Plan to City Council at its meeting on Tuesday 2 April. You can view the Community Decarbonization Plan as well as City staff’s report in the meeting packet. Instead of adopting the Community Decarbonization Plan in all of its detail, City Council will consider a resolution updating Louisville’s decarbonization goals. I further discuss this resolution below, but I first discuss certain aspects of the Community Decarbonization Plan.
The Community Decarbonization Plan provides the following vision for decarbonizing Louisville.
Louisville will take a measured, equitable approach to reducing carbon emissions from the building, energy supply, and transportation sectors.
I wish to critique this vision from end to beginning. First, the scope of the City’s collaboration with Xcel’s Partners in Energy only covers decarbonization of Louisville’s building, energy supply, and transportation sections. While these sectors are Louisville’s three largest aggregated sources of greenhouse gas emissions, they are not its only sources. Second, while carbon dioxide is the primary component of Louisville’s greenhouse gas emissions, these emissions also contain such gases as methane and nitrous oxide. Third, while I wholeheartedly agree that decarbonization should be effected equitably, I unequivocally disagree that decarbonization should proceed measuredly: the urgency of preventing further global warming warrants an equally urgent approach. I would revise the Community Decarbonization Plan’s vision as follows.
Louisville will take a commensurate and resolute, equitable and just approach to eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from its building, energy supply, and transportation sectors.
The strategy for decarbonizing a city like Louisville is well-established: replace all sources of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions—principally, all appliances and machinery that burn fossil fuels—with electric equivalents and power these electric equivalents with renewably generated electricity. For the majority of such appliances and machinery in a city like Louisville—for example, furnaces, stoves, lawn mowers, and cars—electric equivalents that function equally or superiorly already exist. The challenge in decarbonizing a city like Louisville is this strategy’s implementation: how do we replace all of these appliances and machinery used by residents of, businesses in, and visitors to Louisville in face of such issues as replacement costs, market availability, and resistant attitudes? The Community Decarbonization Plan offers some interesting ideas for meeting this challenge; I hope to write about these ideas in future blog posts.
The Community Decarbonization Plan recommends that Louisville reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by 2030 and eliminate its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 (relative to the City’s 2016 greenhouse gas emissions). The Community Decarbonization Plan characterizes these goals as ‘ambitious’ (in contrast with the State’s ‘conservative’ goal of a 50% reduction by 2030 relative to its 2005 greenhouse gas emissions and Boulder’s ‘aspirational’ goal of eliminating greenhouse gas emissions by 2035). I hope that these goals are not ambitious but realistic: these goals are essentially necessary for Louisville to deliver on the Paris Climate Accords’ commitments. As I explained in a previous blog post, achieving the Paris Climate Accords’ goal of holding global warming to well below two degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures requires that worldwide greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025, halve by 2030, and cease by midcentury. According to the City’s own data, Louisville’s greenhouse gas emissions have already peaked, and we can prevent Louisville’s further development from imperiling this accomplishment through net-zero building and sustainable land-use codes. Achieving the Community Decarbonization Plan’s goals would seal the remaining two requirements.
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, Louisville first set decarbonization goals in 2019 when City Council approved a resolution establishing the following objectives.
Meet all of Louisville’s municipal electric needs with 100% carbon-free sources by 2025.
Reduce core municipal greenhouse gas emissions annually below the 2016 baseline through 2025.
Generate 75% of Louisville’s residential and commercial/industrial electric needs from carbon-free sources by 2030.
Reduce core community greenhouse gas emissions annually below the 2016 baseline through 2030.
The City has met the first goal for the past few years by generating some renewable energy and purchasing renewably-generated electricity from Xcel, and Louisville will likely meet the third goal as Xcel’s proportion of renewably-generated electricity increases over the next several years. The City has more-or-less met the second goal, and Louisville has met the fourth goal in all but one year, primarily owing to Xcel’s increasing renewable generation of electricity. Although Louisville has largely achieved its objectives, these initial decarbonization goals were rather limited in intent and extent. Given that the Paris Climate Accords came into force towards the end of 2016, the City could have set much more commensurate goals five years ago.
Drawing on the Community Decarbonization Plan’s recommendations, City Council will consider a resolution updating Louisville’s decarbonization goals. Specifically, this resolution will amend the second and fourth goals as follows.
Reduce energy-related municipal greenhouse gas emissions 60% below the 2016 baseline by 2030 and achieve carbon-neutrality by 2050.
Reduce energy-related residential and commercial/industrial greenhouse gas emissions 60% below the 2016 baseline by 2030 and achieve carbon-neutrality by 2050.
If Louisville can achieve these updated decarbonization goals, then our community will align with the Paris Climate Accords. I urge you to express your support for updating Louisville’s decarbonization goals. You can send a supporting email to City Council at council@louisvilleco.gov by noon on Tuesday, or you can make supporting public comments at Tuesday’s City Council meeting shortly after 6:00 pm. I hope that City Council adopts the updated decarbonization goals, and I hope that you join our community’s efforts to achieve these most necessary goals.
