[SustainableTompkins] Cities Communities Fight For The earth

[senecajean at aol.com]

NEW YORK TIMES

May 19, 2007

EDITORIAL

Can Cities Save the Earth? 

The mayors of some of the world’s biggest cities have every reason to feel especially anxious about climate change. Their populations are the biggest polluters but also among the most vulnerable to weather-related catastrophes. And they are far ahead of their national governments in giving urgency to global warming. So, for the second time since 2005, the leaders of dozens of cities, representing 400 million people, have stepped up. Meeting in New York this week, they produced a plan that should shame G-8 leaders into at least saying something about the issue at their meeting next month.

Most significantly, 15 cities, including New York, Chicago, Karachi, Toronto and Tokyo, signed on to a $5 billion program to make older buildings more energy efficient. Energy-gluttonous cities account for three-fourths of greenhouse gas emissions the world over, and buildings are responsible for 40 percent of emissions and much more in older cities. The project could reduce global carbon emissions by 10 percent.

It may be that the mayors, aware their powers end at the city limits, are more willing than holders of higher offices to take to innovation. When Mayor Clover Moore of Sydney asks residents to turn off lights for an hour, the city goes dark. Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago is distributing rooftop rain barrels, and already pipes 55 million gallons of rainwater into Lake Michigan every year. Toronto discounts electricity for citizens who conserve.

Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London and organizer of the group, bucked public opinion when he imposed a hefty fee (now about $16) to drive on London’s busiest streets. The result was increased productivity for businesses, enhanced public transportation — paid for with fee revenues — and streets that flow so freely, buses sometimes pull over lest they run too far ahead of schedule. The congestion fee proposed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York — $8 for most cars in much of Manhattan — deserves swift approval from state lawmakers.

Sadly, the mayors’ project on energy-efficient buildings would represent the single most significant government response to date on climate change. If it were enough, we would thank the mayors and ride our bicycles into the sunset, but, of course, it isn’t. The job of containing climate-changing human actions — from individual to industrial — cannot occur in a vacuum. The heavy lifting still must be done by the governments of the industrial powers and their emerging counterparts in India, China and Brazil.



 

Times Argus

 

Article published May 21, 2007

New initiatives may be lost with climate-change veto

  

MONTPELIER — If Gov. James Douglas makes good on his promise to veto a global climate change bill, more will be lost than a tax on the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.

  

New incentives to build renewable energy projects will be thrown out, as will a chance to create jobs in the emerging field of greenhouse gas emission reduction, supporters of the legislation say.

  

"For too long, Vermont has had a green image with nothing behind the mirror," said Jeff Wolfe, of Gro Solar in White River Junction, one of the nation's biggest solar energy providers. "And this bill is a tremendous start for Vermont to start addressing a problem that will radically affect all of our lives, whether we address it or not and hopefully less radically if we address it."

  

Douglas says the bill's benefits are outweighed by what he sees as an unnecessary new tax and the creation of an unproven bureaucracy. There already are efforts to accomplish the same thing without expanding Efficiency Vermont, an energy efficiency utility established in 2000 to help homeowners reduce their electric bills, he said.

  

"He said before he would have signed the House bill," said Douglas spokesman Jason Gibbs. "There was an opportunity for legislative leadership and he to reach agreement."

  

But essentially tripling a tax that replaces a statewide property tax on Vermont Yankee is farther than he was willing to go.

  

Senate Natural Resources Committee Chairwoman Virginia Lyons, D-Chittenden, is among those disappointed by the prospect of a veto that would scuttle the Efficiency Vermont expansion and the Vermont Yankee tax, both of which she supported.

  

"I don't think the funding source is so onerous and I think it's outweighed significantly by the benefits that are in the bill," she said.

  

Among the initiatives contained in the bill approved by the Legislature and awaiting Douglas' signature:

  

— a goal set in state law that 25 percent of the energy consumed in Vermont by 2025 come from renewable sources, "particularly from Vermont's farms and forests."

  

— "Smart-metering," allowing utilities to use two-way signals on meters that let consumers qualify for price breaks based on the time of day they use the electricity. It's significantly less expensive during certain periods of the day or seasons of the year.

  

— the use of expanded "net metering" to allow larger systems and to allow neighbors to cooperatively generate their own electricity on the same system. Net metering allows consumers to install solar panels, windmills or farm methane systems to generate power. If excess power is generated, it could be sent to the electrical grid to supplement what's provided by utilities.

  

— a stable tax rate on commercial wind projects, which advocates said would encourage more to be built.

  

— extension of a tax credit for businesses seeking to install solar projects and further study to determine whether it could be expanded.

    

— a study of the feasibility of building or refurbishing small hydroelectric projects. The state also would be directed to work with developers of community hydro projects of 2 megawatts or less, easing them through the permit process, so they could be used as pilot projects for other efforts.

  

Douglas supports most of those things and would have liked to see them enacted, Gibbs said. Because of that, the administration is going to try to ensure they become state policy.

  

"He is disappointed but he has asked the administration what provisions of the bill the administration can implement without legislative authorization," Gibbs said. "The governor will pursue those and other initiatives that are not in the bill. That underscores the fact that the difference of opinion in this is not on the need to address global climate change."

 

________________________________________________________________________
AOL now offers free email to everyone.  Find out more about what's free from AOL at AOL.com.