A Detroit-area city has approved its first-ever Climate Action Plan to help it reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

To achieve this goal, officials in the city of Sterling Heights plan to take a multi-pronged approach, ranging from increasing the efficiency of buildings to installing more electric vehicle charging stations to promoting composting, The Detroit News reported.

“If you’re not planning for climate change and the impact of climate change, you’re not taking into account the future well-being of your citizens,” The Detroit News quoted Alexis Richards, a planner for the city of Sterling Heights.

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According to city officials, Sterling Heights was among the first communities to establish a sustainability commission five years ago, resulting in its first-ever sustainability plan. Under the plan, the city took several steps that officials said should help, including adopting a tree preservation ordinance, an impervious ordinance restriction, an EV fleet pilot program, grants, a strategic plan for charging infrastructure, universal curbside recycling and a land bank to preserve open space.

However, officials said that wasn’t enough, prompting them to advance the new plan, which purportedly aligns with the state’s MI Healthy Climate Plan, an effort to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

Officials used government and communitywide emissions from 2022 as the baseline for the plan. According to a transcript of the council meeting, city officials said they primarily plan to focus on reducing their emissions for the first five years as they have more control over municipal actions.

They contend it should serve as an example for the entire community.

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A city planner said the plan has four “intended outcomes,” including reducing communitywide and municipal greenhouse gas emissions and building community resilience to the impacts of climate change. It should also make Sterling Heights a better place to live and work and identify priority actions, estimated impacts, and needed resources for the plan’s first five years.

Last month, city officials unveiled the police department’s new EV police pursuit vehicle, which they touted as one of the first, if not the first, EV police pursuit vehicle to be placed in service in Michigan.

While the push for carbon neutrality sounds good as a virtue signal and looks good on paper, it will likely increase costs for Michiganders.

A report from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy found that a clean fuel standard in Michigan would increase gas costs by roughly $350 per year for a typical household in the Wolverine State.

In July 2024, Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor of Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and William Happer, an emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University, said net-zero policies will have a trivial effect on temperature and disastrous effects on people globally.

“In short, more carbon dioxide cannot cause catastrophic global warming or more extreme weather,” they said in a statement published by the CO2 Coalition. “Neither can greenhouse gases of methane or nitrous oxide, the levels of which are so small that they are irrelevant to climate.”

In addition to saying that net zero efforts and policies will have a trivial effect on temperatures and be disastrous for people worldwide, more carbon dioxide means more food.

“Contrary to common reporting, more carbon dioxide increases the amount of food available to people worldwide, and is particularly helpful in drought-stricken areas,” they said in the statement. “Doubling carbon dioxide to 800 ppm, for example. will increase global food supplies by approximately 60%.

“Thus, carbon dioxide emissions should not be reduced, but increased to provide more food worldwide,” they added. “Moreover, there is no risk of catastrophic global warming or extreme weather because carbon dioxide is now a weak greenhouse gas. Reducing carbon dioxide emissions will reduce the amount of food available to people worldwide and produce no benefit to the climate.”

They also said the use of fossil fuels to generate energy should not be eliminated.