Climate Chapter

Climate
• Seek to make the City carbon neutral through, first, City as a governmental body, and eventually the City as a whole.
• Make all City vehicles electric. Make all City buildings generate their own solar power to the extent possible. Plant (native) trees everywhere possible.

We can’t identify the strategies you are considering for how you propose to reduce and eliminate local GHG emissions and per capita vehicle miles traveled. Your November 2024 Climate Chapter Update appears to reference the 2018 Update to the Climate Protection Action Plan. A review of that update fails to identify any measure to reduce vehicle miles traveled, nor any meaningful measures to increase residential densities through infill and changes to existing low-density zoning designations. We would encourage that these climate change issues become front and center to your growth strategy and take precedence over expansion of the UGA.

Extreme heat effects, flooding and pollution all should be considered essential when we plan for our tree canopy retention. We can not stop climate change with our urban forest, but we can avoid adding to it and we can protect citizens living with these extreme effects. There are no other answers -- huge shade structures? Water parks everywhere? Stormwater ponds on every block? There just isn't anything as capable as a large cedar tree, what our indigenous neighbors have been telling us forever.

There is no need for this chapter, the relevant issues are covered under Environment.
There should be no action to reduce CO2 emissions as not only can the city's emissions affect the climate, but it's a very minor factory while there are dozens of other factors that have much greater effect on climate and Man has no control over those in the least. Before any action intended to affect the climate is considered, the climate must be looked at in the context of the last 2.5 million years the planet has been in an Ice Age that has had glaciation periods becoming much longer and colder and any action must take the science into account.

The "Justice & Equity Climate work", should be just changed to Equality of opportunity for best qualified and most economical contracting that meets the specifications.

What does, "Protect Ecosystems" for a city that is growing and encroaching on the surrounding environment? Certainly things can be done to protect the environment, but protecting a predator territory while building a Day Car center, Elementary school and housing for young families, doesn't make sense.

Preparing for "extreme" weather, wildfire, changes in sea level, is a basic function of government. Using the most reliable science and not models that are wrong is a good policy. The city should have a geologic study performed for the city's waterfront to see if the local tectonic action is creating a sea level rise or retreat and prepare accordingly. Do not rely on faulty models or "experts" that claim the global sea level is doing this or that, it's local sea level that matters.

Use and generate renewable energy. It's not the city's business to generate energy, but it could maintain the Nooksack Middle Fork diversion tunnel running to allow for the hydro project on it to run economically and as a bonus, return to flushing lake Whatcom quicker. The city needs to use the most economic power, weather it's from so-called "renewable" sources, Natural Gas plants, hydro, nuclear, etc. The city must be good stewards of tax payer money and not spend more unnecessarily than required.

Focus the majority of future population growth into the City and UGA Reserves. This will reduce the carbon footprint and help us meet our climate action goals. Planning policies over the past 10 years have over- allocated population growth to rural areas. One result of the past policies is that 19% of all new population growth in Whatcom County over the past 10 years has occurred in the rural - resource lands. This is a failure. Bellingham is currently proposing to accept 44.8% of new population but 60% of new employment lands. This is a recipe for sprawl. We need to change the policies and Bellingham needs to plan to take the majority of new growth, near to the jobs.

Emissions for 2015 were lower than baseline, but rising, and too much of the decrease was through purchase of renewable energy credits. The 2019 update is fantastic, detailed, and aggressive, but when was the last inventory and what programs are completed, in progress, in planning, rejected? Resilience/adaptation are critical but mitigation is mandatory. If we can't achieve these goals here, then where?

Climate change is worrisome, but Bellingham is too small to focus on solving climate change--that will involve costs such as increased housing unaffordability while leading to no measurable impact on climate change. Attempts to solve can have results only through measures adopted at higher levels such as national and global. The often-stated goal of providing an example to other cities and regions is unrealistic--Bellingham has too low a profile for anyone outside the city to notice. Increasing homelessness (by making housing more expensive through carbon sequester land use rules and climate change-focused building regulations, for example) is not worth the zero impact on climate change that comes from attempting solutions at the Bellingham city level. (Adapting to the effects of climate change--for example, potential sea rise impact on local harbors and beaches--is a reasonable local strategy)