The Vancouver City Council on Dec. 5 approved its Climate Action Plan, a 90-component program exceeding the Paris climate accord in the city’s goal to reduce 73 percent of community and municipal emissions by 2030. It was amended to remove NW Natural gas as a partner in the plan, over the objections of gas industry representatives.
Such a confrontational move aimed at our local gas distributor may have unintended consequences, signaling to potential new businesses to take their economic development to less authoritarian cities such as Camas, Ridgefield or Battle Ground, where similar plans are not in the works. And it will likely signal to NW Natural, founded in 1859 and granted an exclusive franchise in exchange for reliable service and reasonable rates, to tamp back on investments here, including for pragmatic decarbonization solutions such as biofuels.
For national context, many liberal-voting cities are directly limiting future use of fossil fuels, including Eugene and Salem, Ore., Boulder, Colo., San Francisco and Oakland, Calif. Their rules and ordinances variously ban new natural gas hookups, prohibit new natural gas appliances or ban new gasoline stations. Eugene enacted its rules despite a study showing they would only reduce residential emissions by one-tenth of 1 percent by 2037, and total emissions by less than 2 percent.
In November, Washington’s Building Code Council adopted rules “effectively banning natural gas or propane use in the home,” according to a lawsuit from building industry groups. The lawsuit contends the Legislature should have been consulted, and that the rule “interferes with commercial and consumer energy choice, unnecessarily increasing the cost of homebuilding.” Furthermore, these statewide rules add to the new state carbon dioxide cap and trade system that took effect this year already incentivizing decarbonization.
