From Emissions Inventories to Cost Accounting: Making Business as Usual Visible for Climate Action Planning

Greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories are widely considered a first step toward climate mitigation and adaptation planning, but progress completing inventories at the local level is often slow. Local governments may lack motivation to carry out inventories when staffing and funding are tight. Articulating the current costs of energy consumption could motivate cash-limited local governments and help justify investments in alternatives. Calculating financial savings of alternatives could further motivate planning. Here we demonstrate an approach to calculate operating costs (and potential savings) for a town in southern New York, using measures of heat consumption and eGallons to calculate expenditures. We find that business-as-usual community energy cost amount to $50–$60 million per year in funds exported from the community, or $10,000–$12,000 per household. By replacing gasoline vehicles with electric vehicles and oil-burning furnaces with heat pumps, the community could save around $20–$33 million per year, or $4400–$7000 per household. Local government operations costs could decline by over $70,000 per year. For a small government, such reductions could have a substantial financial impact. Adding a cost assessment to a standard GHG inventory appears reasonably straightforward, and if implemented broadly, it could increase the speed and effectiveness of GHG inventories and climate action planning.