SEATTLE — America's mayors, responding to a growing sense of urgency over climate change, are rapidly stepping up programs to weatherize buildings, capture methane gas from landfills, switch municipal fleets to hybrids, promote mass transit and buy cleaner electricity.
But changing the carbon footprint of their cities is turning out to be harder than they thought.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday, November 07, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 64 words Type of Material: Correction
Green cities: A story in Sunday's Section A about U.S. cities' efforts to decrease carbon emissions quoted Van Jones, president of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, as saying Oakland Mayor Ron "Dellums and I can't go into West Oakwood and say . . . 'Hey we got to do something about polar bears.' " He actually gave the location as "West Oakland."
To help fund the mayors' ambitious plans, Congress has included block grants in energy legislation now under consideration -- up to $2 billion a year in a House bill -- to jump-start "green jobs" initiatives, training low-income workers to retrofit buildings and install climate-friendly energy systems.
"Green energy is going to be the oil gusher of the 21st century," New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg testified at the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Summit in Seattle on Friday. "This is going to be a huge industry."
As of last week, 728 mayors, whose cities house a quarter of the nation's population, have signed what amounts to a Kyoto Protocol for U.S. municipalities. By joining the mayors' Climate Protection Agreement, launched three years ago, they have formally pledged to slash greenhouse gas emissions by their cities to 7% below 1990 levels by 2012, which is also Kyoto's target.
And the mayors have set a goal to further cut their cities' emissions by 80% by 2050 -- the amount most scientists say is needed to avoid potentially catastrophic climate change.
The Bush administration has opposed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, saying that it would damage the U.S. economy -- a stance that drew scathing criticism at last week's summit.
"It's the failure of our federal government to step up," said Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels. "We as mayors recognize the threat of hurricanes, drought and the lack of snowpacks. It's our obligation to . . . take action."
Despite their green enthusiasm, however, many cities are hard put to calculate the actual level of their greenhouse gases back to 1990, the benchmark in their pledge.
In some cases, data is unavailable. And though several nonprofits offer technical assistance and new software is being sold to crunch the numbers, no standard model exists to assess progress.
Even Berkeley, a green pioneer with access to high-powered academics, is uncertain as to its pre-2000 emissions and how much transportation contributes, said Mayor Tom Bates, who estimates that the college town has cut total emissions by 8.9% in the last five years. Seattle's Nickels includes airport emissions when calculating his city's CO2, but he pointedly notes that New York doesn't.
