It’s a discouraging moment for global climate policy. Temperatures are through the roof, yet instead of reducing emissions, countries around the world appear to be lowering their ambitions. Canada, a leading cheerleader of the Paris Agreement, is setting new records in oil production. The US has essentially declared war on renewables. The EU is drifting rightward toward climate indifference, and the most recent UN climate conference, COP29, in November, was a bitter disappointment, with wealthy nations refusing to commit anywhere near the amount of financing that the countries of the Global South require for their energy transition.
But these setbacks don’t tell the whole story. As nation-states scale down their climate targets, another jurisdiction is ramping up: cities. Down here, far below the realm of national policy, a new locus of climate action is taking shape.
Cities produce about 70 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, almost entirely from two sources: driving and heating or cooling buildings. This puts them in control of fossil fuel demand, handing the world’s urban residents a massive lever in the energy transition—a lever many are starting to pull. It so happens that Vancouver, where I live, recently delivered a textbook example of how this works.
Canada’s self-styled “Greenest City” has long been a climate leader. In 2020, Vancouver became the first city in the country to ban natural gas from new buildings. It did so because over half of Vancouver’s carbon pollution comes from burning gas for space and water heating; happily, it’s also cheaper and healthier to use hydroelectricity and heat pumps than fossil gas. So far so good.
In 2022, however, the global headwinds of corporate influence and misinformation blew into town when a new mayor and council swept the municipal elections and took over city hall. The new mayor, Ken Sim, has close ties to the fossil fuel industry (his senior adviser is the director of two natural gas companies). It wasn’t long before Sim’s party, ABC, tabled a council vote on overturning the city’s gas ban. “If banning [gas] would have an impact, even a minor impact that was measurable, I would change my mind,” Sim said in the subsequent debate. In fact, city staff had run the numbers and calculated that the gas ban would save up to 81,000 tonnes of carbon emissions per year by 2035.
In the months before the council voted on the matter, the city’s gas provider, FortisBC, also ran a public relations campaign depicting the issue as a matter of freedom—Vancouverites should have “energy choice,” the corporation argued. Fortis even persuaded leaders in the city’s restaurant industry to protest the gas ban out of fear of having to cook without fire, never mind that restaurants are exempted from the ban, according to Canada’s National Observer.
Sim’s ABC party held seven out of ten seats on Vancouver’s city council at the time of the vote. It should have been a slam dunk. But none of it worked. Vancouverites flooded city councillors’ emails and phone lines to demand they leave the ban in place. In the public hearings that preceded the council’s vote last November, more than a hundred people turned up to speak; citizens in favour of keeping the gas ban outnumbered those opposed by a margin of seven to one. In the face of this public fury, the council blinked. Three ABC councillors voted against their own party. Natural gas remains banned from all new buildings.
Imagine a national parliament or congress with a 70 percent majority failing to pass a high-priority bill. This episode illuminates one of the dynamics that give cities an edge in the climate wars: the feedback loop between voters and government is much tighter than it is in bigger jurisdictions. You can go to city hall and engage with your elected leaders face to face. Lies are easier to discern and push back on. Reality is harder to obscure.
It also reflects the practical nature of urban governance, which is primarily concerned with physical operations: making sure that buildings have electricity and running water, that sewage is treated and garbage is disposed of (many cities’ climate plans include harvesting heat and gas from human waste), that the bus fleet is running and the roads aren’t full of potholes. It’s down here, far below grand pronouncements of 1.5 degrees and just transitions, that climate policy turns into material action: heat pumps, electric water heaters, housing density, transit infrastructure, all matters of local implementation.
Vancouver may be unique—the birthplace of notable environmental organizations like Greenpeace and the David Suzuki Foundation—but it’s hardly the only city making climate progress in the face of stiff resistance from above. That’s happening throughout Canada and beyond.
Take Edmonton: despite being the seat of a provincial government that has practically sworn allegiance to carbon dioxide, Alberta’s progressive capital city declared a “climate emergency” in 2019. Their energy-transition plan aims to reduce municipal emissions by 35 percent below 2005 levels by 2035. This is happening through a mix of transit plans, green buildings, and one of the most aggressive housing densification programs in the country.
Or there’s Toronto: right under the nose of Ontario’s car-loving premier, Doug Ford, the biggest city in Canada is pursuing an ambitious target of net zero by 2040.
True, things move faster when federal and provincial governments come on board, especially to help with transit—a sore loser in almost every Canadian city and sadly forgotten in the push for EVs. But cities are moving ahead with or without high-level support. Halifax, Fredericton, London, Winnipeg, Regina, Montreal, and many more are actively lowering emissions. They join a global list of cities taking aggressive climate action that’s far too long to name. In Europe alone, 100 cities are taking part in a mission to be carbon neutral by 2030. More than half are on track, including many cities you’d expect, like Milan in Italy, Sønderborg in Denmark, and Stockholm in Sweden. But the list also includes many you might not expect, like Romania’s capital of Bucharest, the port city of Thessaloniki in Greece, and the Hungarian industrial city of Miskolc.
Municipal climate coalitions now span the world, forming a new layer of climate governance that transcends national politics. The European Climate Alliance is a collection of almost 2,000 municipalities and districts. C40 is a network of nearly 100 major cities on every continent, from Shanghai to Mexico City, aiming to cut their collective emissions in half by 2030. Most of these cities are, in turn, represented by the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, a network of over 12,500 mayors from 144 countries that is co-chaired by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.
None of this is to say national leadership is irrelevant or that its absence isn’t devastating. Federal funding is essential for any urban climate initiative; one of the prime goals of all these urban coalitions is to get more money. Then there’s the supply side of the climate wars: energy production and procurement fall under provincial and national jurisdiction. This is one of the biggest factors behind the disappointing performance of national policies. Canada is a prime example: then prime minister Justin Trudeau’s 2017 comment that “no country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there” remains the most concise explanation of why so many countries are dragging their feet. There’s too much money to be made. As great as wind, solar, and nuclear power may be, they generate only a tiny fraction of the profits that come from an oil well.
In fact, Trudeau’s Liberals have overseen a remarkable decarbonization of the economy in every other sector. If it weren’t for the oil patch, Canada’s emissions would be way down. But so would our revenue. Petro-politics isn’t the only reason national leaders have been wavering on their Paris commitments of late. Prime ministers and presidents are constantly dealing with non-climate emergencies that don’t come across your average mayor’s desk: national security, fiscal policy, immigration, trade wars.
Misinformation—in this case, climate denial—is also easier to fight at the local level. Vancouver is typical here; the city is still smarting from the climate violence of 2021, when a heat dome killed 619 people a few months before atmospheric rivers shredded the roads and railways connecting the city to the outside world.
This new reality is bearing down on towns and cities everywhere. And the unprecedented scale of floods, wildfires, and droughts over the past decade has done a lot to counter partisan skepticism about the threat of carbon emissions.
At COP28 in 2023, cities were formally brought into the UN’s climate negotiations for the first time. That conference produced the Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships—CHAMP— an international network designed to boost collaboration between national and subnational jurisdictions. In advance of this year’s summit, COP30, the host country, Brazil, has already highlighted the central role cities and states play in meeting national emission-reduction targets.
Cities and states are also driving American resistance to US president Donald Trump’s “drill baby drill” agenda. The US Climate Alliance is a coalition of states created in 2017, the first time Trump pulled out of the Paris accord. Comprised of twenty-four governors, whose states contain over half the American population and drive 60 percent of the US economy, this alliance has already reduced its collective emissions by 26 percent below 2005 levels. Members are now aiming to reach a 50 to 52 percent reduction by 2030.
“It’s critical for the international community to know that climate action will continue in the U.S.,” wrote the group’s co-chairs, Kathy Hochul and Michelle Lujan Grisham (the governors of New York and New Mexico), in an open letter to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that was published the day Trump returned to office. “Our states and territories continue to have broad authority . . . to protect our progress and advance the climate solutions we need.”
Of course, not all countries are rogues and not all cities are saints. These dynamics are full of caveats and contradictions; even the most progressive local jurisdictions can’t go it alone forever. Nation-states wield decisive power. The climate movement, like every other movement, can succeed only if our national politics were to return to a place of sanity.
Those who tear their gaze from national and international politics for a moment to consider their own backyard will be rewarded. It’s a place where votes carry more weight than anywhere else, where your voice carries, and your actions, no matter how small, stretch. And if worse comes to worst, you can march on city hall. The people who work there are more likely to pay attention than presidents or prime ministers.
