Portland city commissioners unanimously approved an ambitious work plan Wednesday identifying 43 actions the city can take to meet its goals of curbing greenhouse gas emissions to stem the impacts of climate change.
Mayor Ted Wheeler set the goals in an emergency declaration in 2020 calling for a halving carbon emissions from 1990 levels by 2030 and getting to net zero emissions by mid-century, bringing Portland in line with international goals in the Paris Climate Accords.
The resolution, dubbed the Climate Emergency Workplan, does not come with any mandates or exact costs, but is a roadmap for commissioners to reference as each of the projects identified in the plan comes to the City Council with funding requests, city officials said.
Andria Jacob, climate policy and program manager for the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, said cutting the city’s emissions will not come cheap, with funding gaps for some of the more ambitious initiatives needing hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding.
“There are costs to this transition and we understand they are politically complicated, but the cost of doing nothing is far greater and only saddles our youth and future generations with existential burdens not of their making,” Jacob told the council. Jacob also emphasized that the type of cuts needed would necessitate work across the city’s bureaus.
Among the highest priorities on the list is implementation of the state’s clean energy program, which calls for utilities to completely decarbonize electricity production by 2040, moving away from fossil fuels and toward greener sources like wind, solar and hydropower. That transition will take place on a statewide basis, but the city has a role to play, proponents of the work plan said. The transition at the city scale was one of the costlier items on the list, with a funding gap exceeding half a million dollars, according to the plan.
A full list of the initiatives and programs can be found here.
Several of the other initiatives on the priority list -- including switching home heating and cooling from natural gas and oil to electrical sources and transitioning to electric vehicles -- hinge on moving from fossil fuel-based electricity production to wind, solar and hydropower.
While many of the items on the list focus on reducing the city’s carbon emissions, the plan also includes items that would increase resilience among Portland’s most vulnerable residents, often people of color and those living in low-income communities, who have shouldered some of the worst climate impacts in recent years. Some items call for increases in tree canopy in low-income neighborhoods, while others call for installing electric heat pumps, which also act as air conditioners, and efficiency upgrades in affordable housing developments.
The list also includes other action items in the housing, transportation and industry sectors that, taken together, would succeed in hitting the goals laid out in the emergency declaration.
Some progress has already been made through programs now in place, with the city rolling out an initiative to provide heat pumps to low-income residents, though at a slower pace than some had hoped. The Portland Bureau of Transportation has created transit corridors and made improvements to some high-traffic bicycle routes to encourage greener modes of transportation.
Proponents of the plan, though, said much more is needed and on a much faster schedule.
“It’s now or never for the climate, please choose now,” Jacob told the council.
The resolution was mostly met with praise from community members, including representatives from environmental advocacy groups like Verde, the Coalition of Communities of Color, Sunrise PDX and others, who all spoke in favor of the measure.
Some environmental advocates criticized city leaders for dragging their feet in bringing meaningful climate action and that the scale of action necessary has been known for years.
Despite some questions on the costs of some of the measures from Commissioners Jo Ann Hardesty, Mingus Mapps and Dan Ryan, all council members voted in favor of the resolution.
The 5-0 vote was not the only environmental decision before the council Wednesday. Shortly after the vote on the work plan, commissioners voted unanimously to approve $120 million in grant funding for projects to be completed as part of the Portland Clean Energy Fund.
– Kale Williams; kwilliams@oregonian.com; 503-294-4048; @sfkale