For Vancouver to be a truly green city, it would have to go back to being what it used to be – a small village of hunter-gatherers. Of course, those villagers would still be killing animals and fish and other sea creatures to eat, burning wood for heat and cooking, and chopping down trees to build houses and boats and other necessary things.

Delusion 3: Vancouver Does Not Need Commercial Transportation

The City of Vancouver boasts about its transition to a green economy. “Green businesses are more competitive, efficient, and prepared for the future,” its website declares. “Green jobs are growing in Vancouver. Developing our green economy is essential to a healthy and sustainable future.” Vancouver and the surrounding communities of Delta, Port Moody, Richmond, White Rock and West Vancouver already claim to be carbon-neutral in their civic operations.

But even if Vancouver could do without its vast, multi-modal transportation sector to provide jobs and its main reason to exist, it would need transportation for its own needs. Every day, a host of goods must be transported into Vancouver: food, clothes, furniture, building materials, cell phones, electric cars, natural gas, fuel oil and much, much more. Being the green city that it is (having pushed most of its manufacturing out into the Fraser Valley), Vancouver produces nearly none of what it needs to survive. It must import almost everything.

Vancouver may congratulate itself for its energy efficiency and low per-capita carbon dioxide emissions, but such accounting ignores where it acquires its resources. Vancouver has no steel smelters, but it uses vast amounts of steel in its high-rise buildings and bridges. It manufactures no vehicles, but it imports tens of thousands of them. It has no forestry industry (although log booms still move up and down the Fraser River), but it imports wood for building materials and wooden furniture. It can ban single-use plastic bags, but it imports truckloads of plastic in the form of cell phones and computers and innumerable other products and their packaging.

Furthermore, nearly all of that green electric energy that Vancouver is counting on is generated elsewhere and transmitted into the city, often from hundreds of kilometres away. The utopian dream of a fleet comprised entirely of electric cars, trucks, and buses will put an enormous strain on the grid. The result could be flickering lights (or worse) in adjacent areas. In fact, B.C. right now is building another gigantic reservoir to generate hydroelectric power – the $9 billion Site C dam, now under construction far in the province’s northeast. Most of the facility’s output will be gobbled up by the Lower Mainland. Will that be counted as green power, and is it consistent with a “green” city?

John D. Day, Professor Emeritus at Louisiana State University, argues in America’s Most Sustainable Cities and Regions: Surviving the 21st Century Megatrends that no combination of renewables, energy efficiency and energy conservation can support the continuation of current lifestyles and levels of prosperity in cities post-fossil fuels.

Of course, Vancouver is not the only city that suffers from delusional thinking about green policies. Similar things are happening across Canada. Montréal, for example, spent $34 million to subsidize a 2017 electric car race, the so-called “Formula E”. Vancouver may merely be the farthest advanced in its delusions, and the most determined to commit economic suicide while strangling its hinterland and inland provinces.

In reality, of course, nothing comes without a price, and B.C.’s politicians need to articulate policies with acceptable costs. To paraphrase John Donne, “No city is an island entire of itself; every city is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

James R. Coggins (www.coggins.ca) is a writer, editor, and historian in Abbotsford, B.C.