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Today, readers are responding to news that Vancouver is looking at blocking gas-powered cars from certain parts of the city in a new effort to tackle what it’s calling a climate-change emergency. City planners and engineers have recommended this and dozens of other measures as possible ways of meeting an aggressive effort to drastically cut Vancouver’s greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030.

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Vancouver is one of several cities in North America and Europe, including London, England, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Victoria, Richmond, B.C., Hamilton and Montreal, to have declared a climate-change emergency.Kathryn Hatashita-Lee/iStockPhoto / Getty Images

B.S.H.:

Finally some Politicians showing true leadership! Leadership means showing people the way forward; what must be done. Contrast that with the regressive positions of the Trumps, Fords, and Scheers!

Bigsteve:

So, I travel to Vancouver with my family in my gas powered car and want to visit someone/something in the gas free zone. How do I transport the family and items I may need like baby stroller from a go zone to the no go zone?

Thunderbaybee in response:

Taxi. No wonder humanity (so far) has doomed the natural world to precipitous decline. Lack of imagination.

C. Parsons:

Vancouver Greenism is a variant of Beverly Hills asceticism. The Greens epitomize urban parochialism: Tidy streets in factory-free cities so the civil servants can live blissfully as they manage the enforced misery of those not working for government.

Proquoquid:

These ideas may need some tweaking, but this is the way to affect climate change -- with significant, difference-making actions. Not with carbon taxes/offsets.

TrueNorth065:

How about concentrating on collecting the garbage and enforcing the bylaws. These are two things the City is terrible at. Vancouver has been so ill-served by successive environmental crusaders is it any wonder nobody answers the phone at City Hall.

wrb7:

Vancouver city council understands that if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem. Don't let the naysayers, (experts on everything) deter you, they are part of the problem.

9401doug:

What next? Banning cruise ships from docking at the harbour? What is the carbon footprint of one of those?

Bob Fournier:

So let me get this straight. The city with North America's largest COAL exporting terminal wants to ban internal combustion engines.

Snowaway:

Vancouver "has moved only slowly toward its goals, with the most recent report showing only a 7-per-cent reduction in emissions since 2007," the article reads. If this is what climate change leadership looks like, if this is what a decade of an innovate carbon tax can do, how can we expect to arrest global warming? Is there no initiative from Vancouver to cancel shipments of American thermal coal through the port? If not then these minor tweaks in Vancouver are mere window dressing.

Mark Shore in response:

Vancouver's population also grew by 20% over that period, and halting exports of thermal coal from the Roberts Bank coal terminal at Tsawwassen is outside of the city's powers and jurisdiction.

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