To boost their influence and advance meaningful climate change solutions, more of Canada’s cities will have to start thinking big, The Energy Mix curator Mitchell Beer argued in a guest post for GreenPAC earlier this month.

“Too many city governments are still far too timid about adopting the big-picture policies that will point the way to decarbonizing their energy use and tapping a boom in clean energy jobs that is coming soon to a solar, wind, or energy efficiency business cluster near you,” Beer writes. “They’ll highlight individual programs that are laudable in their own right. But too rarely is there any sense of how these tentative, incremental efforts will help cities break through to the essential, big-picture goal of reducing their carbon pollution by at least 80%, from a 1990 baseline, no later than 2050.”

The post encourages mayors and councillors to lobby federal candidates for green infrastructure, and “develop their own as low-carbon scenarios as a yardstick for the clean energy work they’re already doing and an urgent, public prompt to do more.”