County views energy action plan

“It won’t work if you impose it”

If the county wants to make a substantial reduction in the amount of greenhouse gases it is responsible for emitting, improving the efficiency of buildings and transportation is a necessary first step, according to a draft of the Gunnison County Energy and Climate Action Plan. 

 
In an update for the Board of County Commissioners last month, the volunteers responsible for producing the plan explained that making major reductions in those two areas, as well as from waste, might be the only way to reach the commissioners’ goal of reducing overall emissions 20 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.
In 2005, according to the plan, the buildings of the unincorporated areas of the county and of the county government were responsible for 155,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Transportation in those areas produced 180,000 tons of CO2, the most prevalent greenhouse gas.
The county’s plan lists all of the major sources of carbon dioxide, like buildings, and then breaks down each source into its components, such as commercial, residential and government buildings.
For each source of emissions, the plan has an suggestion for meeting the reduction goal, the estimated greenhouse gas reductions and the cost of implementation. It also assigns the responsibility of making sure the plan is being followed.
But the draft doesn’t detail a plan that requires strict governmental oversight and regulation, or even ask that the implementation of the plan be forced.
“This will be a lot of work as a top-down initiative. It is going to have to be a bottom-up effort from the people who are actually invested and receive the benefit. But it won’t work if you impose it and force a top-down approach,” volunteer and county planning commissioner Richard Karas warned.
The Office for Resource Efficiency (ORE), which is partnering with the county to produce the document, suggests an ongoing campaign to convince businesspeople and residents that reducing carbon emissions makes sense, and then to find people who are willing to teach their neighbors how to implement the strategies they’ve learned.
“The funding and investment will be a significant challenge. But the most important first step for us is going to be public education,” Karas said.
The only direct action the plan currently suggests for the county is to tighten the rules that are already in place, like building codes, to ensure increased efficiency in the future.
“When we talk about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and energy needs of buildings, it is generally pretty easy to do because they pay for themselves in a reasonable amount of time and they actually allow people to maintain their lifestyles,” said Karas.
He added, “But when we talk about the greenhouse gas emissions associated with transportation, it becomes much, much harder.”
Although the plan didn’t include any final recommendations on ways to reduce the emission from transportation, Karas explained how viewing the transportation problem in pieces could lead to more fitting solutions.
“If you think about transportation, there are several segments to it. The one everyone focuses on was just the up-down valley traffic on 135. That is very vulnerable to solution,” he said, citing services like the RTA buses that already exist.
Commercial trucking that travels throughout the county delivering food, fuel and other goods would be more difficult, he said, but not impossible to solve.
The last segment of transportation that needs to be addressed is the recreational traffic that sometimes “puts a single person in a single car headed to a single destination that is sometimes geographically remote,” Karas said.
Without addressing the amount of emissions produced by transportation, the plan shows that meeting the reduction goals that the county has set would be very difficult.
Along with the goals the commissioners set for the county, other jurisdictions like Crested Butte, Mt. Crested Butte and the city of Gunnison have also made emissions reduction a stated priority and are working on energy action plans of their own.
ORE is hoping to have each of the plans and a separate multi-jurisdictional plan, for cooperative service like the RTA, approved and adopted by June.