With municipal elections just around the corner, claims of success in reaching green goals are blossoming everywhere.
Corporate Knights magazine just named B.C. Canada's greenest jurisdiction, fourth in North America (after California, Massachusetts and New York).
There are always big questions about the methodology behind these rankings. For example, Corporate Knights gave equal weight to the percentage of protected land in a province/state and the density of electric vehicle charging stations. Are they really comparable? B.C.'s groundbreaking carbon tax, described last year as “as near as we have to a textbook case” by Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Secretary General Angel Gurr'a, got a mere one point on a 100-point scale.
In Corporate Knights' survey of North American sustainable cities, a city could get bonus points for “a best effort to complete our survey.” (Vancouver ranked fourth on that list, behind San Francisco, Washington and Ottawa, dragged down by our abysmal “economic quality” rating).
“That lack of standardized and consistent data on city performance is one of the biggest barriers to creating sustainable cities,” World Bank urban issues adviser Daniel Hoornweg told Corporate Knights.
A new Global City Indicators Facility at the University of Toronto is working on an ISO-standard measure for city data, but it's been hard to get cities to agree and co-operate.
Maybe that's because they don't want to have to back off their faux claims. A recent report on the growth of “green jobs” in Vancouver showed the count had climbed to 20,000 in 2013 from 16,700 in 2010. But the highest job growth was in the local food sector. According to last week's BIV: “The rationale for putting local food under the green economy umbrella is that food produced close to home has a lower carbon footprint, said Juvarya Veltkamp, manager of green economy initiatives at the Vancouver Economic Commission.”
Unfortunately it's not that simple. Most of food's carbon footprint is in its production, not transportation. So local food produced in a carbon-intensive way can be less “green” than imported food grown more organically. And then one long drive to the farmer's market in an SUV can wipe out any transportation carbon footprint gains from buying local rather than bulk-shipped imported food.
Even more contentious are several issues raised by intrepid researcher Jon Petrie. He says the City of Vancouver's much-lauded Greenest City 2020 Action Plan's annual reports vastly underestimate per-capita carbon emissions. Unlike many other cities, Vancouver doesn't count marine, rail or aviation emissions, including flights taken by Metro Vancouver residents; it ignores embodied carbon in goods imported into the city (like cement produced in Delta); and it claims huge gains from potent landfill gas (methane) recovery at the landfill, even though the city's own data shows decreasing rates of landfill gas recovery. No surprise, then, that our emissions are about 4.8 tonnes per capita while Seattle's are 12.5. Well done, everyone!
Petrie has a quote from former University of British Columbia professor and “eco-footprint” originator Bill Rees agreeing with his criticisms: “The way Vancouver presents itself is misleading,” Rees acknowledges.
The “grossest distortion of green data” award still goes to Grouse Mountain's Eye of the Wind turbine. It was narrowly approved in 2008 by District of North Vancouver council on the promise that it had partnered with BC Hydro to be a “beacon of sustainability” and to produce enough electricity to power 400 homes. When it was turned on in 2010, B.C.'s minister of energy, Bill Bennett, called it “Vancouver's first commercially viable wind turbine.” He's right. Its viewing station brings in around $750,000 a year. But it actually produces power for about 12 homes because the wind rarely blows hard enough to turn the giant turbines. Grouse Mountain refuses to release actual data. According to Petrie, it will be lucky to produce enough electricity in 25 years to make up for the energy embodied in its manufacture and installation.
Like many other sustainability success stories we're being asked to believe, it's a hoax. •
