Lethbridge City Hall. (Lethbridge News Now)

By David Opinko

City sets “ambitious” goal of reducing carbon emissions by 40% by 2030

Mar 9, 2020 | 5:00 PM

LETHBRIDGE, AB – The City of Lethbridge’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emission target is twice as high as what was suggested to council last week.

At the March 2 Community Issues Committee meeting, Environmental Sustainability Analyst Evan Comeau said the city should set a goal of reducing emissions by a total of 35 per cent under 2018’s levels by 2030. 20 per cent would come from the local government’s already-planned projects, while the other 15 per cent assumes the federal and provincial governments fully implement a coal power phase-out in Alberta.

More details here.

Instead, City Councillor Jeffrey Coffman asked that council forget about what the other levels of government are doing as they have no control over that.

He introduced an amendment to set the goal at 40 per cent under 2018’s levels by 2030, which would come entirely from the municipality.

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“The reality in my mind is that we are responsible for our own organization, we are responsible for our own community, and so, we need to lead this change, we need to lead the reductions, we need to lead the incentive to actually achieve environmental targets in our community.”

Since the city’s portion of the original target purely relied on future projects that are already on the books, Coffman did not believe that it gave them any incentives to take action and look into more initiatives.

He says achieving this target does not necessarily mean that they have to invest in “big-ticket, multi-billion-dollar ideas,” but rather, through a series of smaller, coordinated efforts.

Councillor Jeff Carlson, however, said Coffman’s revised goal would double what they need to do “without any contemplation or means of how to get there.”

Mayor Chris Spearman also introduced an amendment to the motion at Monday’s city council meeting.

He wanted to see a report come back to council no later than December 31, 2022, with updates on their progress for reducing GHG emissions. It would also suggest additional projects that would help to further reduce emissions.

Both amendments, and the full motion, passed.

In 2018, city-owned infrastructure resulted in 165,708 tonnes of carbon dioxide being emitted. Assuming the current trends of population growth and if no actions were taken to lower the city’s environmental footprint, CO2 emissions would rise by approximately 25 per cent by 2023.