Issued shortly after Wednesday’s Council meeting the City issued a news release which included the following:

“With the recent launch of ServiceOttawa, the inclusion of sustainability practices into all corporate initiatives and the completion of the Choosing our Future initiative, we have met our objectives.”

and

“The Community Sustainability Department is being discontinued and its staff is being integrated into the Planning and Growth Management Department and the Environmental Services Department.”

It was the Community Sustainability Department, according to the background material in the agenda item going to Environment Committee, who were going to (a) develop a sustainability lens, and (b) report on progress and monitor achievement against the plans.

The meeting seemed to me simultaneously important and meaningless.

It was important because it brought forward these planning documents which at the moment appear to be our best (perhaps only) path forward to reducing climate change contributions in Ottawa.

It was important in that it brought forward a number of stellar interveners who spoke passionately in support of the plans:

• Dr. John Stone, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate for his role as a Lead Author on the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (his comments reproduced below)
• Chris Henderson, founder of Lumos Energy and the Delphi Group plus numerous other roles including advisor to Canada’s Commissioner for the Environment.
• Bill Pugsley, former DG Meteorology and Oceanography at DND and former Director of Scientific Program Development at Environment Canada’s Canadian Climate Centre plus member of the City’s Environmental Advisory Committee. (his comments below)
• Graham Saul, Chair of Ecology Ottawa and former Director of Climate Action Network Canada. (his comments below)

It seemed meaningless because, in the words of several people I’ve talked to, “Council has no appetite” for dealing with climate change. This was evident at yesterday’s meeting in several respects beyond the rush-it-through concerns I expressed in yesterday’s post.

• Both the Committee Chair Councillor Maria McRae and Deputy City Manager Nancy Schepers repeatedly (very repeatedly) noted that these documents were only a framework and that they didn’t commit the city to actually do anything; they aren’t plans. (Though the word plan appears on their covers and on the agenda item for this meeting)
• Councillor Allan Hubley seemed to feel that Choosing Our Future had been a waste of a million bucks and sought assurances that no more money was going to be spent on it. Somehow, everything the City is supposed to be doing along these lines, it is already doing.
• Committee members were hardly glued to their seats for this critically important initiative. The meeting risked losing quorum at any moment as Councillors wandered around the room talking to other people and sometimes left for a few moments or for the day.

At least Councillor Diane Holmes and David Chernushenko spoke up to support the plans. Perhaps others who remained silent also felt the initiative important, but no one contradicted me when I closed my own presentation to Committee by saying I had the feeling that the City didn’t have much interest in having allies to progress the efforts on climate change.

So…

Once again, I urge you to tell your Councillor and tell the Mayor that you see these plans as important and want to see them put into action.

Tell the Mayor too.

There are a few things wrong with the suite of planning documents that have been produced for the City and the Region but there are dozens and dozens of things right with the plans.

One of the things wrong is that there are telltale signs that the City of Ottawa may not enthusiastically pursue the implementation of the plans. So it’s important that your elected officials know you think these are important documents.

Made available online last Wednesday (Feb 15, 2012) the information runs to almost 300 pages. The overall focus is making the Ottawa/Gatineau region sustainable in every way. Because climate change is such an important issue as relates to sustainability, initiatives that address climate change appear many many times in the plans.

One example of a priority action proposed by the Sustainability &Resilience Plan is a “sustainability lens.” It should be no surprise that I like this proposal since I blogged about it months ago.

The reason that climate change initiatives appear repeatedly throughout the planning documents is the same reason that a sustainability lens would be so valuable. There is so much in what we do every day with greenhouse gas implications that bringing a tool to City decision-making that would highlight these connections is sure to aid in making more climate-responsible decisions.

There are lots of other great suggestions in the plans such as catalyst projects with communities. Much of the discussion on greening buildings, limiting urban sprawl, densification and infill is in line with directions the City is already taking.

In part the release of these documents justifies the existence of Climate Ottawa. The 2011 Sustainability Baseline (31 pages) looks at 16 sustainability indicators, one of which is climate change. Of the 16 indicators only 3 are graded as most needing improvement, one of these being climate change. The reason I set up Climate Ottawa was because I felt this issue wasn’t getting enough attention at City Hall.

The plans themselves say they need “the widespread support of individuals and organizations in the community” in order to work. Give the plans some of your time and see what you think. If you agree then let your Councillor know.

Here are the plans:

• Sustainability and Resilience Plan (120 pages – parent document)
• Energy and Emissions Plan (78 pages)
• Risk Prevention and Mitigation Plan (50 pages)

My disappointment remains in the fact that the plans do not include a renewed greenhouse gas emission reduction target. Why not? The plans do recommend targetting 80% garbage diversion into recycling and compost.

As to the telltale signs that the City isn’t overly enthusiastic about these plans consider that on the same day the plans are going to Environment Committee the Mayor is promoting a splashy opening of Invest Ottawa which was mentioned both in the 2012 Budget speech and the January “state of the city” speech.

The Choosing Our Future plans however appeared unheralded several tiers down in a committee meeting agenda 3 days before a long weekend. If you didn’t know they were coming some time this spring you’d have missed them. The Friday before they appeared I’d actually asked when they were coming and been told hopefully in the next few months. The schedule for their being “received” by Environment Committee and then by full City Council stretches over all of 24 hours and starts the first day after the long weekend.

It’s almost as if the intent was to sweep these plans through the necessary process as quickly and quietly as possible.

Highlights:

• The City of Ottawa does not appear with these documents to be adopting any GHG reduction targets at all.
• GHG reductions the documents say “could be achieved” fall far short of comparable provincial and international targets.
• The documents themselves give lowest marks to climate change in answering the question “how sustainable are we now?”

Links to Documents:

• Energy and Emissions Plan (78 pages – most important document)
• Sustainability and Resilience Plan (120 pages – parent document)
• Risk Prevention and Mitigation Plan (50 pages)
• 2011 Sustainability Baseline (31 pages)
• Agenda item: Choosing Our Future – Long Term Plans (city website – summary)
• Choosing our Future End-State Goals (1 page graphic)

More info to come

Today CBC did a piece on another electric car owner in Ottawa who mentioned a local organization of electric car enthusiasts. It’s called the Electric Vehicle Council of Ottawa and I’ve added a link.

You can hear Hallie Cotnam interviewing Blair Powell by going here and looking for “Electrical Vehicle Guy.”

The NCC is currently running several public consolations, including one on their Green Transportation Plan for Gatineau Park.* Among other points made in the background documentation transportation is said to be a “Marginale [sic] contribution to regional greenhouse gas emissions.”

While this is true, it can be said of any activity that any of us undertake. However, the Plan leaves it at that, proposing no actions that would reduce GHG emissions.

The issue of climate change is infinitely more important than the parking challenges and joyride noise to which the Plan does address itself. If we can’t take such a serious issue seriously in preparing a Plan for green transportation in Canada’s conservation park how can we expect anyone to take it seriously anywhere?

All of the NCC officials noted below can be reached by postal mail at the following address:

National Capital Commission
40 Elgin Street
Ottawa ON  K1P 1C7

• Michelle Comeau is Senior Vice-President, Environment, Capital Lands and Parks for the NCC. Her email is Michelle.Comeau@ncc-ccn.ca
• Marie Lemay is CEO of the NCC. Her email is Marie.Lemay@ncc-ccn.ca
• Marie Boulet is Director or the Gatineau Park & Greenbelt. Her email is Marie.Boulet@ncc-ccn.ca

Click here for a pre-addressed email to all three.

The general inquiry phone number is 613-239-5000

You’re encouraged also to give input on the public consultations at the NCC website (deadline Feb 19).

*For reasons known only to the NCC, this and other plans appear to change their names slightly over time. This plan is evidently now called the Sustainable Transportation Plan; what had previously been the Recreation Management Plan has become the Outdoor Activity Plan.

In the National Post Rex Murphy wrote in support of Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver’s earlier calling environmentalists radicals. In response I sent a letter to the editor. I think their edits took some of the punch out of my prose. What do you think?

As Submitted

Rex Murphy sure can string words together. However his support for Resource Minister Joe Oliver is misplaced in asking big environment to present its bona fides. Mr. Murphy trivializes objections to Alberta’s oil sands development by equating them with objections to the seal hunt. He calls for scrutiny of environmental motivation.

For bona fides of those concerned about the oil sands I give you the IPCC. For more than twenty years thousands of fact-seeking scientists have produced, and endlessly chewed-over, tens of thousands of studies to come to agreement on wording that cannot be refuted by known scientific facts. The “I” in IPCC is particularly important because it stands for “Intergovernmental” Panel on Climate Change. Once the scientists have had their say on the reports, communications specialists from more than 190 governments get their chance to edit. This includes governments like Saudi Arabia whose entire economies depend on fossil fuels. They too have agreed that IPCC conclusions can’t be refuted.

In the entire history of human existence there has been no mechanism and no endeavour that has given anything more scrutiny than the IPCC has given climate change.

And what does the IPCC conclude? It concludes that we are already in trouble; that were in trouble mainly because were burning fossil fuels; and that if we keep digging up and burning resources like the oil sands well be in even bigger trouble.

Why do I send my kids to school and feed them healthy meals? I say it’s because I’m concerned about their future. Do I need to present my bona fides on that?

As Published

Rex Murphy sure can string words together. However his support for Resource Minister Joe Oliver — who is asking environmental organizations to present their bona fides — is misplaced.

For bona fides of those concerned about the oil sands, I give you the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For more than 20 years, scientists have examined tens of thousands of studies. Drawing on their work, the IPCC has concluded that we are already in trouble because of fossil fuels; if we keep digging up and burning resources like the oil sands, we will be in even bigger trouble. And in the entire history of human existence there has been no mechanism and no endeavour that has given anything more scrutiny than the IPCC has given climate change.

Why do I send my kids to school and feed them healthy meals? It’s because I’m concerned about their future. Do I need to present my bona fides on that, also?

Lots of smart people are thinking about how to get this right, but there’s one big problem. Climate change means that calculations of how big a big rainstorm might be are all wet. This means it’s almost impossible to plan how big the holding tanks should be; too small and we spend all that money and still flush sewage into the river, too big and we spend more money than we needed to (and we don’t even have the money – see below).

So you’d think that the city might see this as a reason to take climate change seriously.

Here’s the scoop.

The holding tanks planned for under downtown are referred to as the “combined sewer overflow tunnel” and add up to six kilometers in length.

The Ottawa Citizen reports that 2007 calculations assumed once-in-a-century storms could dump 88mm of rain in a day based on historical data. With climate change this figure has been revised upward to 107mm in a day. The article points out that in fact, in 2009 in Kanata a big storm actually dumped 122mm.

In September 2011 city staff updated Environment Committee on the status of the Ottawa River Action Plan. Here’s Dixon Weir (General Manager of the Environmental Services Department) telling Committee the design would achieve the “level of service” approved by Council which is “zero overflows in an average year.”

Looking back to February of 2010 we find that it was actually zero overflows during the swimming season and that the “average year” of record had been designated as 1980. The footnotes of the Committee minutes tell us:

The Ontario Ministry of the Environment has accepted 1980 as having “average year” wet weather patterns for engineering design purposes. Overflows will continue to occur in years with more severe wet weather than what occurred in 1980. For example, in recent years, a system designed to the proposed service level would have experienced on average one (1) overflow per year. The existing system averages over thirty (30) overflows/year.

So, what they’re saying there is that even with the proposed solution we’ll still have spills most years without even taking into account the fact that in future years precipitation extremes are expected to get even worse.

Again; doesn’t this seem reasonable grounds for an increased emphasis on our own local contributions to climate change?

About that money: The project is estimated at $237 million. Even before this big downtown holding tank project is factored in, the City of Ottawa website informs us that we’ve already spent $750 million on preventing spills from “combined sewer overflows.” The money needed for the upcoming work was thought to be coming from three sources: the City of Ottawa, the Province of Ontario and the federal government. But hey-hey, here’s John Baird telling us the feds don’t have the money right now. Yet here he is just over a year ago saying fixing the problem is a “morality issue.” In the meantime his colleagues, Environment Minister Peter Kent downplays climate change at the federal level by pulling out of Kyoto and Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver labels those concerned with the environment as radicals “who don’t take into account the facts but are driven by an ideological imperative.”

Of course wine production in this region would be impossible without climate change and what Councillor Moffatt sees as our gain is someone else’s loss.

I tweeted back pointing out that places like California, which are beginning to struggle with how climate change will effect their wine industries, also represent the source agricultural areas where much of our food is grown. Not such a happy story as agricultural stresses of climate change make for higher food prices.

On October 12, 2011 a motion was carried by Ottawa City Council to include a section called “Accessibility Impacts” in staff reports. The idea is that city staff be sure to consider how actions affect people with disabilities and seniors.

This so called “Accessibility Lens” joins statements in staff reports that show consideration of financial, risk management, rural, technology, and legal implications etc.

I had mused that if such an approach makes sense for people with disabilities wouldn’t it equally make sense for climate change implications? The idea was picked up by a journalist at OpenFile Ottawa who in turn got endorsement by Councillor David Chernushenko.

I have since learned that the forthcoming plans out of the Choosing Our Future process will include a recommendation for a “Sustainability Lens” (likely the Sustainability & Resilience Plan; there will also be a Regional Energy & Emissions Plan and a Risk Prevention & Mitigation Plan).

Evidently the view is that a “climate lens” would not be politically viable, being seen as too narrow a focus. Some (including me) might disagree, believing that it is the very broad nature of the climate change problem that means it touches on almost everything the City does. But let’s set that aside for the moment.

The reality is that a Sustainability Lens will be coming before Environment Committee, possibly in January.  Your City Councillor should not only support it but should work to ensure that it is meaningful and explicitly includes emphasis on climate change.

The City of Ottawa recognizes four dimensions of sustainability – economic, cultural, social and environmental. Limiting the Sustainability Lens to these dimensions may possibly mean that climate change gets minimal consideration in future staff reports. Economic, cultural and social sustainability are impossible in the face of “irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change,” which is what the unquestionably business-oriented International Energy Agency believes we are on course for.

So, tell your councillor that you support a Sustainability Lens, but that it needs to explicitly include a climate change aspect.

For illustrative purposes, here I’ve edited the Accessibility Lens motion that carried in October into a climate-inclusive Sustainability Lens motion.

1.   That staff be directed to immediately include a section called “Accessibility Impacts” “Sustainability Impacts” in all reports to Committee and Council that would describe all actions taken to ensure that staff review proposed projects, prior to Council approval, for any potential positive or negative impact on People with Disabilities and seniors Ottawa’s economic, cultural, social and environmental sustainability including considerations of climate change.

2.   That by the end of 2011, Accessibility Office July of 2012 Community Sustainability Department staff work with the Accessibility Environmental Advisory Committee to develop an “Accessibility a “Sustainability Impacts Checklist” to assist staff when writing committee reports to determine the impact of their work on People with Disabilities Sustainability.  This is to be accomplished within existing budgets.