The City of Duncan will buy 217 carbon credits, worth about $6,500, to compensate for its carbon emissions in 2024, council decided at its meeting on June 23.
But Coun. Garry Bruce said he is against the purchase of the carbon credits, stating that he thinks the carbon strategy is not accomplishing anything, and that the money would be better spent elsewhere.
While giving her report on the city’s climate action plan in 2024, finance director Bernice Crossman said Duncan is a signatory to the climate action charter, meaning that it has promised to be carbon neutral every year.
She said that all through 2024, as in previous years, the municipality tracks its emissions by how much fuel it purchases and puts through its machinery, as well as how much fuel the city’s contractors purchase.
“How we do that is we calculate how many emissions we have put out and then we purchase carbon offsets in order to make it neutral,” she said. “In 2023, we purchased 151 carbon offsets from the Ostrom Climate for the Great Bear Forest Carbon Project. The city always tries to purchase carbon credits from as local a source as we can get, and this one is located on the central coast of B.C.”
The Great Bear Rainforest, the largest intact coastal temperate rainforest in the world, is protected through the Great Bear Forest Carbon Project in which local governments and other groups can invest in a conservation economy through the purchase of carbon offsets.
Crossman said the cost of the 217 carbon credits in 2024 can be funded through the city’s local government climate action program.
“Those are reserve funds that we have for these types of things, so it won’t take any tax dollars,” she said. “[The carbon credits for 2024] are similar to previous years, but our emissions are up a bit because we did do some pretty big projects in 2024.”
Bruce said he knows he’s going to go against what the rest of council thinks, but he’s not in favour of purchasing the carbon credits, as he is skeptical about the climate science.
"I would like to hang on to that money in the climate action reserve for some future endeavour.”
Council voted to purchase the carbon credits, with Bruce opposed.
