Zero Emission Buildings

by Alex Cameron

We are still planning to follow up on our Achieving Net Zero Buildings by 2050 submission to the Net Zero Advisory Body (NZAB2060). Hopefully, by the time you read this newsletter, or in the worst case, shortly thereafter, we will have updated our website to better reflect our plan of action. 

An interesting topic that has come up a few times is some people feel that they can’t form an opinion on this – because it is technically complicated. In fact, I disagree with that. I think many people, in fact most people, with a little bit of thought can follow the issues involved with this. Please have a look at our Achieving Net Zero Buildings by 2050 report, and let us know if we raise more questions than we answer. Would a webinar to discuss this report be a good idea?

Per the previous newsletter, as well as the report, we believe our course of action is fairly clear:

Government Advocacy

• Identify federal politicians, both in the government and in the opposition, who we want to ask to consider this report, and start sending them letters to share the report.
• Ditto for the provincial government
• Ditto for the City of Toronto
• As well as the politicians, identify the key civil servants at each of those government levels and share the report with them.

Academia, Industry and Finance Advocacy

• We believe that we need to identify the key academic and industrial bodies and send them advocacy letters as well.

Communication & Outreach

• Create a discussion forum for “Net Zero Buildings by 2050” and share this widely. Google Groups? Discord? Some other technology?
• Per above, should we set up a webinar to discuss this report?

Liaison

• Start sharing this report with other organizations working to address the climate crisis, and see if we can get them to help us share these ideas further.

What do you think of our position? That is, do you think that district energy is going to be really important? Or, should we focus on increasing electrical system capacity (generation, storage, transmission), and focus on getting everyone on CC-ASHPs (Cold Climate Air Source Heat Pumps)?

Also, we are still getting organized as far as a letter writing campaign and petitions. What do you think of the following statements?

1. Instead of petitions, we want to focus on letters being sent to politicians from constituents in their riding. We think that this is likely to have a lot more impact with the politicians. We think that as well as the letters, we need to offer the politicians access to some data tools that make it easy for them to track how many letters on this topic they have received.
2. We believe that the letters should be offering to partner with them to find solutions. That is, they should remain positive, even if we have concerns that the particular politician or their party may not be sincere about taking action on the climate – we think that by communicating in a positive way, we can drive home the message that to keep getting elected, they need to have a real plan.
3. The same goes for the letters we want to send to academia, industry, and the financial industry.

Lots of topics here to discuss. Sure hope to see some discussion in the ECA Google Group.