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Many cities find Kyoto promises hard to keep |
Warren Cornwall
Seattle Times
October 31, 2007
As Seattle city leaders congratulate themselves
this week for shrinking the city's contribution
to climate change, their peers in Vancouver,
Wash., have a much more basic challenge: figuring
out how much greenhouse gas their city makes.
Vancouver is just one of at least 28 other
Washington cities that recently signed onto a
much-touted pledge to match the international
Kyoto global-warming treaty. But some of the
state's biggest cities face long odds of actually
achieving the promise of cutting their emissions
to 7 percent below 1990's levels by 2012.
Many of the cities are still only in the earliest
stages, with a deadline less than five years
away. Several have effectively reneged on their
pledges and have set more modest goals instead.
Even cities that have worked on the issue for
years are finding it challenging to retool
communities built for cars and powered by fossil fuels.
"I don't think people really grasp what it's
going to take," said Mike Piper, Vancouver's
recently hired sustainability coordinator.
"It's huge. Particularly with the growth. If we
were static it would be one thing. But this region has been growing a lot."
This week, more than 110 mayors from cities
around the United States are gathering in Seattle
to discuss climate change. As a kickoff of sorts,
Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels announced Monday that
Seattle is meeting the Kyoto goals.
But when the mayors arrive, this reality remains:
Many of the more than 650 cities that signed the
Kyoto pledge championed by Nickels last year have much further to go.
Washington cities offer a glimpse of the
challenges of living up to the promise.
Like Vancouver, the cities of Everett, Bremerton
and Spokane haven't yet measured their citywide
emission levels, current or past. That's an
important first step because it shows how big the
cuts must be and what parts might be ripe for reductions.
Other cities, including Bellevue and Tacoma, have
done those measurements. But they don't have
comprehensive plans for tackling the problem.
"It's going to be difficult for us," said Bill
Baarsma, the mayor of Tacoma, which has a
commission working on a plan. "We realize it's
going to be a tremendous challenge and it's going
to require a lot of cooperation,"
Bellingham is one city that does have a plan. But
it doesn't plan to meet the Kyoto target until 2020.
Political statement
While there's no comprehensive list of how all
the cities are doing, many are still in the very
early stages, said Kim Lundgren, a regional
director for ICLEI — Local Governments for
Sustainability, a nonprofit based in Oakland,
Calif., that works with cities on environmental issues.
Nickels' Kyoto pledge always has been part a real
target, part political theater. Proponents say
the number of cities that have signed on
pressures state and federal politicians to take climate change more seriously.
Even so, Nickels says, the cities that signed on
should actually try to hit the goal.
"I think it's important as a political
statement," he said this week. "Any of us who
don't make it, obviously, will be criticized in
the community for not doing enough."
But it may be too late for most of them. To make
the deadline, most cities would already need to
have the same emissions levels today as they did
in 1990, said John Bailey of the Institute for
Local Self Reliance, a Minnesota-based nonprofit
that has studied the progress of 10 cities
leading the pledge. The conclusion: Most probably won't make their goals.
One reason is that the changes needed to reach
the goals — increased energy conservation, less
car travel — require major shifts in
infrastructure, such as transit systems and
roads, Bailey said. And a lot of those decisions
are not up to local governments. Meanwhile,
emissions in most of the 10 cities the group studied have been climbing.
Hydro power
Seattle has several advantages that helped it
claim in a city-authored report that greenhouse
gases produced by the city had fallen 8 percent
below 1990's levels as of 2005. That's one tick
past the 7 percent drop by 2012 promised in the Kyoto pledge.
Seattle controls the city's electric utility,
which uses enough hydro power that it doesn't
have to rely on polluting power sources. It also
benefited from a temporary drop in cement
production in 2005, which shrank emissions for the year.
But Seattle will have to try harder to meet the
2012 promise because the population keeps growing
and traffic keeps piling up, city officials say.
The city of Portland can testify to how hard it
is. The city has been working since 1993 to
shrink its greenhouse-gas emissions, hoping to
reach 10 percent below 1990's levels by 2010.
Though levels have dropped, the city has been
stalled at around 1990's levels for the past few
years, said Michael Armstrong, of Portland's Office of Sustainable Development.
"It's not like you put two policies in place and presto," Armstrong said.
Despite it all, few think it's a lost cause.
Lundgren, of ICLEI said it should be considered a
major achievement that so many cities are even trying.
"I think the fact that people are setting targets
and are striving to achieve reductions is more
important than how quickly they get there," she said. |
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