This is the first article in a series that looks at the gap between climate rhetoric and reality in terms of what municipal governments say they are doing versus what they are actually accomplishing. The series compares and contrasts policies and outcomes in Halifax, Nova Scotia with its nearest comparable American neighbor, Portland, Maine.
This article (Part 1) places municipalities at the center of the climate crisis. In Part 2, we’ll see how culture can support or undermine credible attempts to reduce emissions.
Most CO2 emissions tie back to two key things that municipal governments do, namely deciding what and where things get built. Many municipalities profess to take “climate action,” yet continue to require development patterns that maximize emissions.
My wife and I have friends who live in Ashville, North Carolina, one of many communities devastated by Hurricane Helene in late September 2024. They considered it to be a great place to live on account of the city’s charm, the music and arts community, good restaurants, and proximity to nature.
Before Helene, they could drive thirty minutes northwest to the revitalized, creative, 600-person town of Marshall. Or they could head a bit further in the opposite direction, and be in Chimney Rock, a 150-person tourist town that’s the gateway to a beautiful state park by the same name.
The hurricane produced floodwaters that tore through Marshall’s business community and wiped away much of Chimney Rock, depositing buildings in a nearby lake. More broadly, the storm claimed hundreds of lives, destroyed thousands of homes, and upended life for millions more.1
Global warming didn’t directly cause Helene. Hurricanes, of course, happen naturally. What science is telling us, however, is that storms are getting more intense. For every degree Celsius of temperature increase, the atmosphere can carry 7% more moisture. Helene and the rainstorm right before it dumped over 40 trillion gallons of water on the southeastern United States—an amount that shocked experienced climatologists.2
Many considered Ashville to be a climate haven. People had recently moved there from California and Florida to escape the increasing intensity of wildfires and hurricanes. Looking ahead, the term “climate haven” may be obsolete.
Two months before Helene, fourteen scientists submitted an article to the journal BioScience. It begins simply by saying, “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster.” The report notes that despite years of warnings, reports, and conferences, “the world has made only very minor headway on climate change, in part because of stiff resistance from those benefiting financially from the current fossil-fuel-based system.”
Like Big Oil, municipal governments are at the core of this system. Most municipalities abide by the rule of perpetual urban sprawl, never making the changes needed to transition to human-scale-friendly development patterns. These patterns are known to lower emissions relative to both suburban and high-rise development. The urban sprawl that municipalities build—in their horizontal and vertical dimensions—maximizes CO2 emissions and puts them at the center of the climate crisis.
When working as an urban planner on land use reform with Baltimore County, Maryland, I became well-acquainted with the “stiff resistance” mentioned in the report. In Maryland municipalities are supposed to implement policies to reign in urban sprawl. Yet even in a seemingly progressive state, real, lasting change was hard to achieve.
Like most suburban municipalities across the country, the status quo prevails in Baltimore County years after my departure. And in cities, municipal councils and urban planners often do the bidding of influential developers and upzone property to incentivize climate-ravaging high-rise development.
These days, many municipalities have climate action plans that suggest they are taking steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Boston says it is moving towards “net-zero carbon” for new buildings. Phoenix is making it easier to get permits for solar panels. Houston plans to offer more regional transportation options. The reduction in emissions associated with most of these plans is questionable at best.
Relatively few climate action plans call for the systemic change required to address the fact that 61% of emissions tie back to municipal decision-making in terms of what and where things get built.
Let’s look at where this figure comes from. Per the UN and U.S. Energy Administration, building operations and construction contribute to 28% and 11% of emissions, respectively. The net is that construction and operations account for 39% of emissions globally.
Ashville averages 36 inches of rain a year. Hurricane Helene dumped 15 inches on the city in three days, Parts of the surrounding region received as much as 30 inches. Scientists at the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory have determined that climate change was responsible for as much as 50% of the rainfall.
Architecture 2030. Data: UN Environment Global Status Report 2017, EIA International Energy Outlook 2017.
Now let’s look at transportation. Data compiled by the EPA defines “sectors” of the economy a bit differently. But what’s important is that in the U.S., the transportation sector accounts for 38% of emissions. This figure is higher than the global value because Americans drive more than most other world citizens by a considerable amount.
Congressional Budget Office Data: Energy Information Administration, Monthly Energy Review (September 2022), and Environmental Protection Agency, Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990–2020
And as you see below, EPA data tells us that private vehicles produce 58% of transportation emissions. So, in the United States, private vehicles alone produce 22% of all emissions. (i.e., 58% of 38%).
Congressional Budget Office, Data: Environmental Protection Agency, Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990–2020, EPA 430-R-22-003 (April 2022)
Adding the 22% figure produced by private vehicles to the 39% produced by building construction and operations, gives us the 61% figure. Moving to human-scale development will not eliminate all these emissions. But given our unraveling climate, it seems wise to stop developing land in ways that maximize CO2 emissions.
As the status quo prevails, thirty million tons of Greenland’s ice melt every hour. This melting reduces salinity levels which, in turn, is slowing down an important current that moves heat around the Earth. This current, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC), is at risk of collapsing. If it does, as the scientific community increasingly predicts it will, life on Earth will be altered in ways that go well beyond the 2020-2021 pandemic.
Any municipality that is serious about reducing emissions would pay great attention to what and where things get built. And if your mayor flies across the globe to attend a climate summit and makes bold claims about his municipality’s steps to combat global warming, you’d do well to have a credible plan that aligns with reality.
With this in mind, I’d like to show you just how far apart climate rhetoric and reality can get by looking at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and comparing it to the closest comparable American city, Portland, Maine.
Halifax has spent considerable money and effort promoting itself as a leader among municipalities in the “fight against climate change.” However, the evidence on the ground contradicts these claims. As you will see in this series, Halifax is aggressively pursuing development practices that produce worst-case outcomes in terms of global warming. Their practices run afoul of what researchers have known for years regarding emissions reduction.
Contrasting the diverging paths that Halifax and Portland have taken over the past two decades serves two purposes. The first is to show how a municipality like Halifax can operate as a bad actor while crowing about inconsequential steps to fight climate change. The second is to highlight the potential advantages and strengths that American municipalities like Portland offer in terms of emissions reduction and producing human-scale development. In order to understand the vastly different paths Halifax and Portland have taken, we’ll need to start by looking at the cultural differences. And that’s where we’re headed next.
Next Up: In Part 2 of this series, we’ll look at how culture shapes climate rhetoric and reality, comparing Halifax, Nova Scotia with its comparable American neighbor, Portland Maine.
- Ashville averages 36 inches of rain a year. Hurricane Helene dumped 15 inches on the city in three days, Parts of the surrounding region received as much as 30 inches. Scientists at the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory have determined that climate change was responsible for as much as 50% of the rainfall. ↩︎
- Hurricane Hellene originated in the Gulf of Mexico, where water temperatures are now higher than any time in recorded history. Hurricanes feed off this heat as winds blow across the ocean surface. Wind speeds increase by 5% for every 1 degree Celius increase in the water. And for every 1 degree centigrade increase in temperature, the air can hold 7% more water. ↩︎
