By Marisa McNatt
Almost 10 years have passed since Boulder City Council set a goal of reducing citywide greenhouse gas emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. Based on last year’s figures, the city fell short of meeting the goal by about 25 percent, or 298,331 metric tons of carbon dioxide. This is equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of about 58,500 passenger vehicles.
“The question for us is: What does that mean? Does that mean as a community we’ve failed, or as a community we need to make better inroads?” asks Kara Mertz, manager of the city of Boulder’s Local Environmental Action Division.
Not only has Boulder failed to reach the 2012 goal, citywide emissions were up slightly in 2010 compared to 2009. The primary reason for Boulder’s failure to reach the 2012 goal and slight increase in emissions is that there was initially no plan for how to get there, Mertz explains.
The city established its emissions reduction goal in 2002, based on the 1997 Kyoto Protocol — an international agreement for industrialized countries to reduce emissions by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The U.S. chose not to sign the protocol and, in response, municipalities across the country, including Boulder, chose to create their own emissions reduction target goals.
It wasn’t until 2007 that City Council implemented a formal plan and strategies — called the Climate Action Plan, or the CAP — for reducing local emissions. However, since the CAP strategies were novel upon implementation, there was no way of knowing if the approaches would actually result in significant greenhouse gas reductions, Mertz says.
“What we find is when we are creating services and goals it’s a lot harder to get to that goal that was essentially pulled out of the sky,” says Mertz. “We can’t really take 100,000 cars off the road every day.”
Since energy use in buildings accounts for the largest portion of Boulder’s greenhouse gas emissions — almost 80 percent — approaches that significantly reduce emissions from the commercial and residential sectors are particularly important. Other sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the city include landfill gas and vehicle fuel, which comprise 2.5 and 21.3 percent of the city’s total emissions respectively.