Vancouver city council has narrowly voted in favour of allowing natural gas for heating and hot water for new construction, a plan the city’s sustainability manager warns “will move us back” on climate goals.
On Tuesday, council voted 6 to 5 in favour of a bylaw amendment that restores the option for new home construction to use natural gas for heating and hot water.
Coun. Pete Fry posted on X that Mayor Ken Sim joined the council meeting remotely to break the tie and “roll back climate work.” Fry also said that such a significant rollback of the city’s climate policies shouldn’t have been introduced on the fly.
Two of Sim’s ABC councillors — Peter Meiszner and Lisa Dominato — voted against the amendment. They joined Green councillors Adriane Carr and Fry and OneCity Coun. Christine Boyle in opposing the plan to allow fossil fuels to be used in new construction.
Dominato, who is also chairwoman of Metro Vancouver’s climate action committee, said through her regional work she has gained a deeper insight into the climate crisis and argues the residential new build sector is the easiest sector to electrify.
“It really is the low hanging fruit,” she said, adding that B.C. Hydro is looking at ways to support electrification.
She said Vancouver has the benefit of having a moderate climate where the electrification of the residential sector and using heat pumps is manageable while it may not be the case for other areas of the province.
The amendment was proposed by ABC Coun. Brian Montague, who says the city needs a diverse range of energy sources in the event of outages and raised concerns about whether there’s enough electricity to meet the demand.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Montague said hydro power is dependent on the snowpack and the recent drought has reduced the snowpack, causing B.C. Hydro to import electricity last year. However, Montague failed to mention that B.C. also exports more energy to Alberta and California than it imports.
Brad Badelt, the city’s director of sustainability, said this plan would move the city even further away from its climate targets.
“I think that’s fairly obvious. It would set us back … potentially tens of thousands of tons of GHGs,” he said, adding this move would also create confusion in the industry and potentially roll back retrofits.
“On the climate front, it would move us backwards.”
Fry said the electrification of B.C. is expected to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by almost a million tonnes per year by 2026, and lower provincial emissions by 40 per cent by 2030.
He contends those in favour aren’t really concerned about energy shortages but rather upfront costs for developers. “The irony is that this decision not only takes us backwards in terms of meeting international climate goals, it undermines industry work and capacity to meet 2030 Clean B.C. and energy step code regulations. It’s regressive on all counts, and does nothing to ease affordability for residents,” said Fry.
Environmental groups were shocked by the news. Stand.earth said the last-minute decision by council to relax climate pollution rules for new buildings “sets Vancouver on a very different course from its longstanding approach to climate leadership, and puts it at odds with the progress being made by surrounding municipalities.”
City staff are expected to report back to council on the updated amendment by Nov. 1.
Last fall, Nanaimo joined several municipalities and banned natural gas as the primary heating source in new homes after it adopted the B.C. government’s zero-carbon step code implemented to meet 2030 emissions targets.
Saanich and Victoria are also early adopters of the step code, while Whistler, North Vancouver, West Vancouver, Squamish and Port Coquitlam have taken steps to combat emissions from new buildings.
The bans are controversial, with some saying they reduce resilience in an emergency, and others arguing they’re one of the best ways to reduce municipal emissions.
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