On Tuesday, April 8, the Boulder city council held a study session to get up to date on the city’s progress toward meeting the goals of the Kyoto Protocol and Boulder’s climate action plan.

This was a great opportunity to see what each council member thinks of how Boulder’s doing so far on addressing climate change. I took lots of notes, and will be presenting in a series of posts what each council member had to say at this meeting.

First, here’s the big picture:

Falling far short, so far. According to presentations by Jonathan Koehn and Sarah Van Pelt of the Dept. of Environmental Affairs (backed up by the memorandum they submitted with the study session materials), as things now stand Boulder will not meet the Kyoto Protocol goals by 2012. In fact, at this pace we’ll miss it by nearly half (48%).

That explains why the council has been nudging the Climate Smart program team to get more aggressive.

Memorandum, Boulder city council study session, Apr. 8, 2008

At the current pace, Boulder will fall short of its Kyoto Protocol goal by 48%.

The good news is, DEA staff presented a catch-up plan intended to bring the city much closer to meeting the Kyoto goals, and council seemed mostly supportive…

Catch-up plan. The Boulder Dept. of Environmental Affairs (DEA) proposed several ways to get more aggressive about reducing carbon emissions. Altogether, these would increase the city’s expected CO2 emission reduction to 85% of the Kyoto goal in 2012 — a shortfall of 15%.

Memorandum, Boulder city council study session, Apr. 8, 2008

New measures proposed by city staff, which city council appears to support, would cut the city’s expected shortfall in emissions reductions to 15% — not all the way to Kyoto, but much closer.

Energy Efficiency is key. As those charts show, the vast majority of those additional emissions reductions would come mainly from increased efforts to improve energy efficiency in local buildings.

Carbon tax probably will go up soon. To make these further gains toward the Kyoto goals, the city will need more money. The city does have room to raise the carbon tax, and most council members appeared to support this move. From the Boulder DEA’s memorandum, here’s the full explanation:

“When the Boulder voters approved the Climate Action Plan (CAP) tax, they approved minimum and maximum sector rates. Minimum rates are in use at this time. The CAP tax ordinance allows council to increase the rates up to the voter-approved maximums; an ordinance is required to adjust the rates. The proposed budget for more aggressive emissions reductions is $467,956 per year (a 53% increase) and would require increases in the residential and commercial rates to the approximate mid-point of their ranges. The industrial rate increase is less than 2% with the average annual cost increasing by $100.”

Memorandum, Boulder city council study session, Apr. 8, 2008

Here’s how the proposed Boulder carbon tax increase would affect energy bills for Boulder residents and businesses.

Besides increasing the carbon tax, DEA staff proposed several other potential funding sources — especially tweaking an existing local transportation initiative to yield more carbon emission reductions.

Can Boulder really meet the Kyoto goals? On this point, the DEA memorandum was optimistic but vague:

“Additional enhancements can be made in future years to achieve 100% of the greenhouse gas (GHG) goal. … Staff will continue to evaluate on an annual basis the CAP programs, services and funding levels and will return to council over the next several years with the next steps needed to achieve the 2012 GHG goal.”

What do you think of Boulder’s progress and plan so far? What else would you like to see happen with our carbon tax dollars or other resources? Please comment below.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Follow the money, Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.