Early this year, while the
Pacific Northwest endured one of the driest winters on record, 141
countries ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement
to help curb global warming. The United States was not among them.
To Mayor Greg Nickels of Seattle, the national no-show
provided an opportunity for action on a smaller scale. “Local
government can be a catalyst,” he says. “In a lot of ways, we can
try things that are risky and show the private sector that it is
safe.”
In February, Nickels challenged 141 cities to join
Seattle in meeting or exceeding Kyoto Protocol guidelines, which
call for a 7 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from
1990 levels by 2012. One hundred and sixty-five cities from across
the country, including Boston, New York, Albuquerque and Las Vegas,
have now pledged their support for those goals.
And on
June 13, the U.S. Conference of Mayors passed a unanimous
resolution, sponsored by Nickels, that urges Congress to recognize
global warming as a human-induced threat and enact the Kyoto
policies. It is “inevitable” that the federal government will begin
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Nickels says. “The sooner it
happens, the better,” he says. “The danger is in waiting.”
Nickels says that recent strange weather events —
severe hurricanes in Florida, unusually destructive mudslides in
California, drought in the Pacific Northwest — have given
Americans, himself included, insight into the potential impacts of
global warming.
“On an intellectual level, I understood
that the science (of global warming) was very clear,” he says. But
“this winter, it really came home.”
To guide
Seattle’s march toward the Kyoto Protocol goals, Nickels
created a “Green Ribbon” task force in February. Denis Hayes, a
co-founder of Earth Day, and Orin Smith, the former president and
CEO of Starbucks, head the group. At the end of the year, the task
force will present a plan to the mayor that sets “attainable”
emissions goals for the entire city.
Seattle has already
reduced emissions from municipal operations by more than 60 percent
and is on track to reduce net emissions to zero by the end of this
year. Seattle City Light, the public electric utility, has made a
major shift to cleaner power sources. About 80 percent of its
energy comes from hydroelectric, which comes with its own
environmental baggage. But the utility recently dropped a contract
with a coal-fired plant in order to sign a deal with a wind farm.
Additionally, the city’s “green fleet” of municipal vehicles
now runs on biodiesel and electric power.
Seattle
received the 2005 City Livability Award at the U.S. Conference of
Mayors, and was named one of the country’s five most
sustainable cities on World Earth Day. Across the city, the
mayor’s environmental efforts receive standing ovations from
crowds. Though the press has dubbed Nickels the “green mayor of the
Emerald City,” and he and his family recently invested in a
low-flow washing machine, he says he has never considered himself
an environmentalist. Protecting the environment, he says, is just
an obvious way to safeguard the health of the city that he’s
served for over 30 years.
Although Nickels was
overwhelmed by the unanimous support for his climate control
resolution, he says actions need to follow those promises, even in
the shadow of an unsupportive national government: “We have the
opportunity to push the envelope and get people thinking, even when
it is not politically popular.”
J.M. McCord is
a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). She writes in
San Francisco.
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