How Will We Meet Our Climate Goals?

Tackling the climate crisis is essential for our safety, health, well-being, equity, and economic stability. With over 80% of the U.S. population living in urban areas, it is mission critical that our cities lead the charge by setting and meeting ambitious climate goals. Seattle has commendable climate goals that aim to halve 2008 emission levels by 2030, and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. However, we are nowhere near being on track to meeting these targets. Nor does this seem to be getting much attention—particularly with the current City Council.

It is dangerously irresponsible for city leaders to ignore this shortfall and just slide into 2030 and 2050 with a careless “whoops!” But at this point, that’s what we’re on track to do.

Here’s a proposal for what the city should accomplish in the remainder of this year to get on track to meet our climate goals. Use this as a benchmark to evaluate, come election time, whether our leaders are merely talking or are taking meaningful and sufficient steps.

Transportation: As the top contributor to greenhouse gasses in Seattle, transportation is crucial to meeting climate goals. Despite a dip due to COVID, transportation emissions have remained relatively flat since 2008, mainly because we keep kicking the can down the road. The city often celebrates per capita emissions reductions, but because our population continues to grow, our emissions as a city stay flat. To meet our climate goal, we must reduce transportation emissions by 77% by 2030—so in just six years. A recent report estimated that Seattle will need over $3 billion to build the low-carbon transportation system we desperately need. 

Seattle’s recently passed $1.55 billion Transportation Levy would need to be dedicated entirely to funding the capital investments required for electrification and mode shift (from cars to biking, walking, rolling, and irresistibly good public transit) by 2030. We are so far behind on this primary source of emissions that, without that level of dedication, we will not achieve our climate goals.

Comprehensive Plan: Our Comprehensive Plan has continually underestimated our housing needs. Our leaders must plan realistically for regional growth. The Plan to be adopted later this year should increase urban density to allow more people to live closer to services and amenities, add resilience against climate disasters such as excessive heat, wildfire smoke, and flooding, and provide more affordable housing within urban areas to reduce the high carbon cost of living in the suburbs. By law, Seattle must adopt a new Comprehensive Plan this year; let’s make sure our leaders clearly outline how it will enable us to meet our climate goals.

Building Emissions: Buildings are the second largest contributor to greenhouse gasses, and similar to transportation, building emissions have remained relatively flat since 2008. Commercial, governmental, institutional and residential buildings must quickly convert to clean energy if we hope to make our climate goals. Seattle passed Building Emissions Performance Standards (BEPS) legislation last year establishing a timeline and requirements for decarbonizing buildings over 20,000 SF before 2050.

While this is a significant achievement, success will hinge on effective rulemaking to clarify things like how building owners will calculate emissions, apply for exceptions, and report their progress, and the process should have active oversight from Seattle’s Green New Deal Oversight Board (GNDOB). The rule-making process is scheduled to begin in June 2024 so that the standards can be enforced when they take effect in 2027. As Chair of the Council committee overseeing the Office of Sustainability, CM Woo can play a pivotal role in mobilizing stakeholders, ensuring transparency in the participation process, and closely monitoring the rule-making progress.

Transparency and Accountability. We need a dashboard for the public, the Council, and all city leaders to easily track the status of each of our climate goals. For each climate goal, the dashboard should include:

• Milestones we need to hit toward each target date (2030 and 2050) if we expect to meet that goal.

• The gap between our current progress and where we need to be.

• Challenges preventing us from being on track.

• Specific plans and tough choices we’ll need to make to close the gap, including timelines, milestones, challenges, equity assessments, deliverables, responsible parties, and necessary funding.

• How we’ll center Black, Indigenous, communities of color, and historically underinvested communities who disproportionately experience climate impacts. 

There’s a lot to accomplish in less than a year. Both the Transportation Levy and Comprehensive Plan—critical pieces of legislation with major climate impacts—are already underway, so now is the time to ensure we are setting our city up for success. Of course this won’t be easy, but the longer we delay, the harder and more expensive it will be—and we will pay not just with money but with people’s lives and our children’s future. As the saying goes, with the climate crisis, winning slowly is the same as losing.

On the flip side, meeting our climate goals will bring astounding benefits, such as:

• Increased Public Safety: The climate crisis is a looming public safety crisis. Death by homicide in the US has decreased over 35% since 1990, whereas heat-related deaths have increased 500% in that same timeframe. Almost half as many Washingtonians died in just a few days from the 2021 heat dome as those who died from homicide in the whole year. Data consistently shows that hotter temperatures lead to increased rates of crime, particularly violent crime. When we provide safe, climate resilient places for people to go in extreme weather events, and equitable access to shade and tree canopy, we will all be happier and safer.

• Increased Street Safety: Improvements to enable more people to safely walk, roll, and bike will improve health and reduce traffic injuries and fatalities. 

• Cleaner Air: Reducing air pollution could decrease disease and increase life expectancy, and improvements could pay for themselves with health care savings. 

• City revival: Thousands of jobs will be created for an equitable transition away from fossil fuels. Let’s bring those jobs to Seattle.

• More affordable housing: Increasing density and housing supply will reduce the cost of housing, slow the dramatic rise in homelessness, and help us become a more welcoming and diverse community.

We all want a safer, happier, more livable, equitable, and resilient city. And simply put, that won’t be possible if we don’t meet our climate goals. We all need to care about climate. And we should expect our leaders to do more than just talk about it. We should expect them to act on it—decisively and urgently—so that in just 6 years, when our 2030 targets come due, Seattle is ready.