Climate Ottawa

In 2004 the City adopted a climate change plan that’s out of date and failed at its objectives. Concerned Ottawans were told to wait for a new plan coming out of something called Choosing our Future.

On February 22nd 2012 City Council quietly received the Choosing our Future plans. During the same meeting Council heard that the City was abolishing its Sustainability Department; the group who prepared the plans. The Choosing our Future website was quickly taken down. The outcome doesn’t seem to match Council priorities so evidently we have no plan.

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It didn’t take long for the Choosing our Future website to be taken down once City Hall decided to disband the Community Sustainability Department. At this time the YouTube and Facebook links are still active though.

More evidence of the City’s lack of commitment to the Choosing Our Future plans.

Issued shortly after Wednesday’s Council meeting the City issued a news release which included the following:

“With the recent launch of ServiceOttawa, the inclusion of sustainability practices into all corporate initiatives and the completion of the Choosing our Future initiative, we have met our objectives.” Continue reading →

As expected Environment Committee of the City of Ottawa “received” the outcome documents of Choosing Our Future yesterday. Hence full City Council will “receive” them today and they’ll become official city documents.

The meeting seemed to me simultaneously important and meaningless.

It was important because Continue reading →

On Tuesday February 21 the City of Ottawa Environment Committee will consider almost 300 pages of documents coming out of the Choosing Our Future process begun in 2008.

Highlights:

• The City of Ottawa does not appear with these documents to be adopting any GHG reduction targets at all.
• GHG reductions the documents say “could be achieved” fall far short of comparable provincial and international targets.
• The documents themselves give lowest marks to climate change in answering the question “how sustainable are we now?”

Links to Documents:

• Energy and Emissions Plan (78 pages – most important document)
• Sustainability and Resilience Plan (120 pages – parent document)
• Risk Prevention and Mitigation Plan (50 pages)
• 2011 Sustainability Baseline (31 pages)
• Agenda item: Choosing Our Future – Long Term Plans (city website – summary)
• Choosing our Future End-State Goals (1 page graphic)

More info to come

Last week there were several media stories about an electric car owner who was having trouble convincing his condo corporation to let him charge his car – even though he was willing to pay.

Today CBC did a piece on another electric car owner in Ottawa who mentioned a local organization of electric car enthusiasts. It’s called the Electric Vehicle Council of Ottawa and I’ve added a link.

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Just the other day I told someone “If you bring the media into it they’ll do what they want with it. You can’t control what they say.”

In the National Post Rex Murphy wrote in support of Natural Resources Minister Joe Continue reading →

The Ottawa River Action Plan is a collection of projects being undertaken by the City of Ottawa and expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The biggest portion of the cost will be installing enormous holding tanks under the city, so that sudden downpours don’t flood into sanitary sewers and wash raw sewage into the river (as keeps happening now).

Lots of smart people are thinking about how to get this right, but there’s one big problem. Continue reading →