How
American Cities Have
Bypassed Bush On Kyoto
By Andrew Gumbel
01 September 2006
The
Independent
It is not just the state of California
that is bypassing the authority of the US government to take action
on global warming.
The mayors of more than 300
cities across the country have signed a Climate Protection Agreement
in which they have pledged to meet the emissions-cutting timetable laid
down by the Kyoto Protocol - regardless of what the Bush administration
decides.
Some of those cities, such
as Seattle, which took the lead on drafting and lobbying for the agreement,
are bastions of liberal politics and environmentalism, acting out their
ideological convictions. Others, though, such as the exclusive Colorado
ski resorts Vail and Aspen, are also motivated by a powerful self-interest.
If global warming continues unabated, the Rocky Mountain snowpack will
melt and there will be no skiing in Vail, Aspen or anywhere else by
the end of this century.
Seattle's Mayor, Greg Nickels,
proposed the mayors' agreement whenKyoto came into effect at the start
of last year. By June 2005, he had 140 signatories, and the number has
more than doubled since.
The goal is to "meet
or exceed" the Kyoto target of cutting global warming pollution
to 7 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012.
The agreement also contains
a 12-point action plan, urging signatory cities to discourage sprawl,
promote public transport, car-pooling and bicycle lanes, turn to alternative
energy sources including alternative fuels for the municipal vehicle
and bus fleet, plant lots of trees and introduce environmental education
programmes in schools and community colleges.
Seattle, in the Pacific Northwest,
is the perfect poster-child for many of these initiatives, since it
sits between two heavily forested mountain ranges and is surrounded
by water. Despite a long history of environmentalism and commitment
to public transport, it has been struggling with smog problems in recent
years because of heavy car commuter traffic from the ever-expanding
suburbs.
The Colorado ski resorts,
meanwhile, have taken robust action to convert to renewable energy to
power their ski lifts, shops, hotels and administrative buildings.
Vail just signed a deal to
buy more than 150,000 megawatt-hours of wind power per year - the greenhouse
gas-saving equivalent of taking 18,000 cars off the roads. Aspen, meanwhile,
commissioned a study in April that revealed the severe damage done to
the environment by private jets landing at its airport. It is now working
to curtail air traffic.
Aspen's top city lawyer,
John Worcester, described the city earlier this year as the global-warming
equivalent of "the canary in the miner's cage". "It is
incumbent on all of us," he said, "to face the potential threat
upon our economy and way of life as we would any other potential threat".
© 2006 Independent News
and Media Limited