Portland, Oregon Releases Aggressive Municipal Climate Plan

The City of Portland and Multnomah County have released Climate Action Plan 2009, which builds on the Portland area’s commitment to reduce local GHG emissions eighty percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and sets interim objectives for achieving half the reduction by 2030. The proposed levels are significantly more aggressive than existing state or proposed national emission targets. The Plan complements the Portland Economic Development Strategy of 2009, with the shared goal of creating “the most sustainable economy in the world” by supporting Portland’s burgeoning clean energy and green development sectors, maximizing efficiencies in energy use and production, and implementing a suite of urban planning initiatives designed to curb GHG emissions.

Portland’s Climate Action Plan 2009 follows on the heels of climate and energy legislation passed by the Oregon legislature earlier this year.[1] That legislation established new and more stringent emission performance standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants, expanded greenhouse gas reporting requirements for Oregon businesses, mandated a feed-in tariff program and expanded renewable portfolio requirements for solar photovoltaic power, and established new requirements and incentives for energy efficiency in residential and commercial buildings.

Background

In 1993, Portland was the first U.S. city to adopt a climate change plan – the Global Warming Reduction Strategy. At the time, Portland had committed to GHG emissions reduction to 20 percent below 1988 levels by 2010. By comparison, the Kyoto Protocol would have committed the United States to a seven percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2012 (a less stringent goal). Despite its stated intentions, the initial plan failed to meet its goals. The Portland Energy Office reported in 2000 that despite headway on the strategy’s energy efficiency, renewable energy, recycling and transportation initiatives, GHG emissions had increased seven percent in the area between 1993 and 2000.[2]

The city resolved in 2000 to change the reduction goal to ten percent below 1990 levels by 2010. In 2001, Portland (with Multnomah County) updated the strategy in the Local Action Plan on Global Warming, providing 150 recommendations for achieving the new goal.

In the following eight years, Portland’s efforts appear to have had some effect, although it appears unlikely that even the revised reduction goals will be met. The nation’s GHG emissions are currently about 13 percent over 1990 levels. In 2008, Multnomah County’s were about one percent below 1990 levels, despite a steadily rising population.[3] Portland therefore has shifted its perspective to the long term. In 2007, Portland and Multnomah County set a goal of reducing local GHG emissions “by 80 percent by 2050,” understood locally to mean 80 percent of 1990 levels.[4] The new Climate Action Plan is intended to provide a roadmap for achieving the first half of this goal: a forty percent reduction by 2030.[5]

The Plan: Good for Business?

Readers will be familiar with the debate, currently playing out at the federal level, with respect to the potential economic costs of GHG emissions limits, and the potential economic benefits of developing industries that will grow out of them. The Portland Plan stands firmly on the latter side.

The Plan is based on the premise that support of sustainable industry is a “tremendous opportunity” for local economic growth, and that local emissions reductions goals are part of that support. Citing particularly Portland’s strong and growing green building and clean energy industries,[6] the Plan echoes the goal of the Portland Economic Development Strategy (2009) to create “the most sustainable economy in the world” in Portland. The role of the Plan in part is to drive demand for these industries, which when combined with economic development incentives, proponents argue will lead to significant local economic growth.[7]

Maybe So: Buildings and Energy

The Plan’s goals for promoting local business are most clearly discernable in its provisions on buildings and energy. According to the Plan, buildings (including homes) account for 40 percent of GHG emissions in Multnomah County.[8] To achieve the proposed reductions goals, the Plan calls for programs to retrofit existing buildings to reduce their energy use by twenty-five percent by 2030. For new buildings, the Plan contemplates Oregon’s adoption of the performance targets of Architecture 2030 to achieve zero net GHG emissions in all buildings built after 2030. The Plan also calls for the development of on-site, neighborhood- and district-scale energy systems, including 10 MW of on-site renewable projects and the establishment of at least one new district heating and cooling system, by 2030.[9]

Each of these initiatives is expected to bolster the local economy by providing local construction jobs and utilizing regional design and manufacturing resources. To subsidize the cost of these improvements, the Plan also calls for “an investment fund of at least $50 million in public and private capital to provide easy access to low-cost financing to resident and business for energy performance improvements,” including on-site renewable projects.[10] This funding program would appear to build on Portland’s Clean Energy Works, a pilot program providing energy efficiency upgrades funded in part with federal stimulus money.[11]

Hard to Tell: Agriculture

An unusual component of the Plan is its focus on food, with the “long-term vision of a city and county that can grow a significant portion of its food.”[12] Fully ten percent of the Plan’s intended GHG emissions reductions are attributed to reduction in consumption of “carbon-intensive foods” and increased consumption of local foods (reducing transportation emissions). The Plan points to decreased consumption of red meat as a particular goal – it requires significantly more energy to produce a pound of beef than a pound of grain or vegetables, and cattle produce large quantities of methane – but the objectives in this area are not yet well defined. For example, the Plan’s primary near-term proposals are community outreach to promote healthy diets and home-grown food. Certain objectives – such as the development of “quantitative metrics for consumption of regionally sourced food” before 2012 – nonetheless indicate that more detailed programs are on the horizon.

Maybe Not: Consumption and Solid Waste

The Plan’s solid waste goals are straightforward: reduce total solid waste generated by 25 percent, increase recycling to 90 percent (Portland has already achieved a 64 percent recycling rate), and overhaul the waste collection system to minimize GHG emissions through efforts such as use of low-carbon fuels, retrofit or phase-out of older vehicles and altered pickup schedules.[13] The GHG impact of reduced waste and recycling is measured as a reduction in methane emissions from landfills.[14]

The Plan’s solid waste goals do not appear to be proposed with business in mind, but it bears noting that local businesses, such as paper and biodiesel manufacturers, increasingly rely on waste stream inputs, and that changes in Portland’s recycling policies have had unintended consequences in the past.[15] Since the Plan does not explain specifically how the waste reduction and recycling goals will be achieved, it is not yet possible to guess what impact they might have, beyond the reduction in methane emissions.

The Plan: Good for the Community? Transportation and Land Use

The Plan casts its objectives not only in terms of GHG reduction and economic development, but as community initiatives intended to improve the quality of life in the city. Food and architecture initiatives are proposed to address climate change, for example, but the Plan also describes the projected “health dividend” of increased local food consumption and “living and working in spaces with natural daylight and fresh air.”[16] The Plan’s initiatives regarding transportation particularly highlight this goal.[17]

Over the last two decades, Portland has pursued transportation policies that have resulted in near-steady GHG emissions in the transportation sector since 1990.[18] Expansions in regional light-rail and improved bicycle access in the city have induced more people to use public or human-powered transportation. These changes, particularly increased bicycle use, have not been without controversy.[19] Nonetheless, the Plan proposes to build on these initiatives with goals to reduce per capita daily vehicle miles traveled by 30 percent from 2008 levels, increase fuel efficiency of passenger vehicles to 40 mpg, reduce GHGs attributable to transportation fuels by 20 percent, and initiate civic planning efforts to promote “20 minute neighborhoods,” with bicycle and foot access to non-work needs and public transit no more than 20 minutes away.[20]

The Plan, then, steps far beyond the goals of GHG reduction, integrating urban planning and design concepts that are emerging throughout Portland’s urban planning processes.[21] In the Plan’s words, it calls for “nothing short of the transformation of both our economy and our community.”[22] The people of Portland, ultimately, will determine whether these transformations are to their liking.

Conclusion: “Back to the Future?”[23]

To long-time Portland residents, some of the Plan’s initiatives might look familiar. In the 1970s, Portland finished tearing up the rails for what had once been world’s third largest interurban streetcar system, in use since 1872 and electrified in 1893 (only 11 years after Edison opened the Pearl Street station in New York).[24] In the early 1980s, Portland abandoned a centralized steam-heating district operated by Pacific Power and Light Company that had heated many of the vintage Portland downtown buildings for decades. These decisions, and others, are now being revisited and reexamined in Portland’s efforts to curb its GHG emissions and plan for the future.

What will Portland look like in 2030, or 2050? The Plan provides one possible answer. More fundamentally, Portland’s experiences and objectives for GHG reduction present, in microcosm, the issues of urban planning and industrial and economic development currently under debate across the country, and indeed throughout the world.

For more information on the Portland Climate Action Plan or climate change issues generally, please contact Adam Orford, Dustin Till, Michael Dotten, or any member of Marten Law Group’s climate change practice.