POL101Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Carbon Leakage, Climate Change Mitigation, Municipal Solid Waste
Subnational Governments on Climate Change
● Climate Change as a Municipal Problem?
○ 50% of the world population lives in cities, so in a sense, the world is urban, the
global population is an urban population
○ 75% of global energy consumption takes place in cities
○ 70-80% of global GDP is urban, the world economy is essentially urbanized in
important ways. Most economic growth is in cities
○ 70-80% of global GHGs are urban, coming from economic activities in cities or
economic activities that support cities
○ Cities are highly vulnerable to global warming
■ They are densely populated and not ready for climate change impacts
that we are already seeing
● Cities acting on climate change
○ Climate action plans
■ City operations
● City buildings, municipal vehicles, etc.
■ City-wide
● How does this entire entity of Toronto, for instance, deal with
climate change?
○ Measuring GHG emissions
■ Cities decide they must measure GHGs, and what counts as that city's’
GHG measures
○ Developing targets
■ Cities attempting to measure developing targets
○ Developing policies
○ Implementing policies
■ Not so much big broad policies you would have at the national level, it’s
much more about how we make development decisions on the ground,
such as public transportation decisions, municipal waste and how that
relates to heating, structure of energy distribution, etc.
● Provinces acting on climate change
○ Provinces see climate change as their problem
○ When the Canadian federal government was essentially not doing anything on
climate change, provinces took the lead and actually put real policies in place
○ Provinces as a much larger political entity are doing more to set frameworks than
cities. They don't have as much nitty gritty details in their climate plans as cities
do. They all set a price on carbon, it's much more economy wide than what cities
are doing
○ Cap and trade
■ Emitters capped at a certain amount of carbon dioxide emissions, if they
go above their cap, it’ll be really expensive to reduce it. The other emitters
can sell its extra allowances in the carbon market and the emitter that
went above their cap has to go into the carbon market to buy allowances
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Document Summary
50% of the world population lives in cities, so in a sense, the world is urban, the global population is an urban population. 75% of global energy consumption takes place in cities. 70-80% of global gdp is urban, the world economy is essentially urbanized in important ways. 70-80% of global ghgs are urban, coming from economic activities in cities or economic activities that support cities. Cities are highly vulnerable to global warming. They are densely populated and not ready for climate change impacts that we are already seeing. How does this entire entity of toronto, for instance, deal with. Cities decide they must measure ghgs, and what counts as that city"s". Provinces see climate change as their problem. When the canadian federal government was essentially not doing anything on climate change, provinces took the lead and actually put real policies in place. Provinces as a much larger political entity are doing more to set frameworks than cities.
