City can lead on climate — and it has

Surprisingly, Toronto showed foresight back in 1991 by creating a municipal climate agency

Toronto is up for an award at the COP 21 climate summit beginning in Paris next week: “In 1991, Toronto City Council had the foresight to become the first city in the world to establish a municipal climate agency funded by a dedicated endowment,” the text of the nomination in the Finance and Economic Development category of the C40 City Climate Leadership Awards reads.

That may sound strange to those who’ve only recently started paying attention: Toronto showing “foresight”; Toronto establishing itself as the “first in the world” at something; Toronto giving so much as a freckled fig to the question of “climate change.”

But indeed, that is our history. Ongoing history, in the case of the nominated Toronto Atmospheric Fund, established way back in 1991 with a $23-million endowment from land sales. It has never cost the city a penny beyond that, and indeed has returned fairly substantial savings to the city budget through energy savings. In the meantime, it has invested in dozens of innovative projects, many of which scaled up to be real businesses that contribute to fighting climate change in a meaningful way: the world’s largest deep-water cooling system; the rideshare service Autoshare; an energy-efficiency retrofit company for privately owned buildings.

The city and the nominators credit the fund with helping Toronto achieve a 25-per-cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions since 1990.

Yet if you heard about the Toronto Atmospheric Fund around here in recent years, it was probably when former mayor Rob Ford threatened to eliminate it in 2011, suggesting its endowment was a pile of money the city could use to keep taxes down.

Back then, he asked on television, “Should we be in that business?”

If the business in question is fighting climate change, the answer is emphatically yes, and the Paris climate summit where the fund will get its moment of recognition offers a perfect opportunity for Toronto to re-establish itself as a world leader. The mayor’s office tells me the details of Toronto’s delegation to the conference are still being finalized and will be announced this week. But Toronto should have a strong presence there and should have a strong voice. For moral reasons and for practical ones.

Global climate change is an existential threat to the human race. As often as that’s been said, and seems to be fairly widely understood, the world has yet to rally an appropriately Churchillian response. It seems possible — though not certain — that this could change in Paris.

By macabre circumstance, that city is also a focal point of the other existential issue confronting the world at the moment: terror and security, war and peace. That President François Hollande did not cancel the summit in the wake of the recent terrorist attacks is perhaps a sign that he really believes it when he says of this meeting that “if it is not done in Paris, it will be too late for the world,” that this is the place and time when we decide “is mankind — are we — capable of taking the decision to preserve life on the planet?”

If that’s the question, I think we want our city government to show up with an answer.

Does that all seem a little above the pay grade of mere city councils who deal day-to-day with speed-bump applications and skating-rink hours of service? It is not. Cities are where most of the world’s population lives. Cities are where the most carbon emissions are produced. Cities — specifically because they deal directly with the often mundane, humanscale details of life — are where we will meet the challenge of climate change — or fail to meet it.

“Climate change may be the first global problem where success will depend on how municipal services such as energy, water and transportation are delivered to citizens,” former New York mayor, business tycoon and UN envoy for cities and climate change Michael Bloomberg recently wrote in Foreign Affairs in an essay outlining why cities are “the key to fighting climate change.”

As Bloomberg writes, for cities, the imperative to act is not just moral: “reducing carbon pollution is not an economic cost; it is a competitive necessity,” he writes. Moreover, the kinds of things that are most likely to reduce emissions in a meaningful way in cities are exactly the kinds of things Toronto desperately needs for other reasons: infrastructure, especially transit.

The new federal Liberal government has nailed its colours to the mast, indicating (not least with a premiers conference on the eve of the Paris summit) that it plans to make fighting global warming a priority. That government rode to office promising massive investments in infrastructure. By taking the lead on climate change, the biggest city in Canada could lay legitimate claim to a big chunk of that investment . . . or, as they say in politics, “find a partner in Ottawa to achieving its goals.”

We heard a lot of talk about this in Toronto when David Miller was mayor, especially when he served as chair of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group back around 2008, helping lead the world’s municipalities on the most urgent and important issue of our time. Rob Ford may have temporarily obscured it, but the award nomination for an organization established way back when Art Eggleton was mayor reminds us Toronto’s history of leadership on environmental issues goes back far further. There’s an opportunity now, as the world turns its attention to climate issues in Paris, to firmly re-establish that tradition. Mayor John Tory and the government he leads should seize it.

For the world’s sake, and for our own. Edward Keenan writes on city issues. Email ekeenan@thestar.ca.