Moscow City Council discussed the Climate Action Plan that has been in the works for over a year this Monday.
Last week, at the Youth Rally for Climate Change, Kelli Cooper discussed the draft of the Climate Action Plan, and asked for community members to come and read the draft.
“It’s meant to be a guiding document in addition to our comprehensive plan,” Cooper said. “We’ll use this in planning how we spend our money going forward as part of the strategic planning process every year. We’ll put climate as part of our considerations on projects and what we want to accomplish as a city.”
Mayor Art Bettge, during the meeting, discussed how this plan will not impact those living in Moscow.
“This is not an ordinance. It’s not even a resolution,” Bettge said. “This is for how the city runs its operations and does not extend into requiring anybody out in the community to do similar.”
Bettge said that there have been comments of concern regarding misunderstanding of the plan.
“Comments about taking away natural gas water heaters and things like that and causing people to turn their homes completely electric, that is not the case,” Bettge said. “This plan is conceived and internal use, but it does contain a lot of suggestions and options for people who do wish to come along and work on minimizing their impact on the climate.”
Tyler Palmer, deputy city supervisor, introduced the plan to the council, summarizing a year of work and the goals of the plans.
“One of the things that we really tried to emphasize throughout this process is that this is intended to be a living document,” Palmer said. “Technology is changing quickly; strategies will change quickly and so this is really a roadmap for the city that we have in place to help us and guide us as we make decisions about city operations and then we bring them to council and present to the council.”
In the plan, the city would be joining the International Council for local environmental Initiates’ race to zero campaign. This campaign will establish a goal for both the city and community to be net zero emissions by 2050.
One of the plans that Palmer discussed was a study on replacing hybrid police cars and the change that will bring in.
“We’ve got good data on this. We had a 60% reduction in fuel use, which equates to about 360 gallons per year per vehicle, 3.16 metric tons of co2 that we save,” Palmer said. “The vehicle costs an extra $3,800 to procure the hybrid vehicle versus the standard internal combustion engine.”
Palmer said that the return on investment from this change would only take 19 months.
“This is just one example of many that are in the plan, but as you start to extrapolate that out, you can see how this really not only helps us from a carbon emission standpoint but just from a fiscal standpoint,” Palmer said. “It makes sense even if there was no impact on the city’s carbon footprint at all.”
Bettge pointed out during the meeting that the city’s current contribution to greenhouse gases and contribution was only 2.4%.
“This document is out there as a guide, helpful document to those who’d like to follow along and help with the other 97.6% of the impact Moscow has on the climate,” Bettge said. “(I) encourage citizens to read it and use it as sort of a reference in their own lives and the way they run their own households.”
Daniel V. Ramirez can be reached at [email protected] or Twitter @DVR_Tweets