GLOBAL WARMING: ACT LOCALLY

GLOBAL WARMING: ACT LOCALLY
Sierra Club's Cool Cities Campaign
By Henry Robertson

It started when Seattle Mayor Greg Nickles decided that if the federal government wouldn't sign up to the Kyoto Protocol, he would. He issued a challenge to other US mayors to pledge that their cities would meet the Kyoto goal to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions: a modest scaling back to 7% below 1990 levels by 2012.

Ideas for Your City's Climate Action Plan
Saving money and reduce Green House Gase

Energy

LED traffic lights. NYC is saving $6 million a year in energy and maintenance; Chicago estimates it would save $4.4 million a year.
Street lights. Somerville, MA says one high-pressure sodium lamp saves 265 watts per lamp.
Encourage Energy Star products and compact flourescent lights in city buildings and public housing. An Energy Star window can save $80 in energy costs and 1400 pounds of CO2 per year, according to Burlington, VT.
Water pumping. Burlington, VT estimates high-efficiency pumps can save it $66,800 per year. Also, methane from water treatment can be harnessed for power generation.
Burlington, VT estimates that lighting and motor efficiency upgrades are saving it $307,000 a year.
Try to reduce emissions from two-stroke engines.
Use Life-cycle energy cost analysis for buildings and appliances
Chicago and its suburbs told energy companies they want 20% renewable energy (120 MW). Chicago is also building a 2.5 MW solar generation plant and a landfill gas plant on a brownfield site.

Transportation

Anti-idling ordinances for school buses.
Investment in public transit.
Bike policies: bike paths and lanes, racks and locking rings.
Pedestrian policies: Walk to School programs, walking school buses (a few parents walk the route to school, collecting and chaperoning the children).
Free or discounted transit passes.
Carpool park & ride lots and shuttles.
Traffic signal coordination to reduce time spent idling at red lights.
Trip reduction programs for employees
Hybrid vehicles and right-sized fleets.

Green buildings

Adopt LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green building rating system.
Adopt green and energy efficient building codes including special programs for existing buildings.
Programmable thermostats can save $60 in energy costs and 1170 pounds of CO2 emissions/yr, according to Burlington, VA.
Chicago is building green demonstration homes, Energy Star homes and solar homes.
White roofs on flat-topped buildings.
Waste reduction: Recycling; Environmentally Preferred Purchasing focuses procurement on recycled products.
Education, outreach, incentives
Encourage electric utilities to offer Demand Side Management programs (demand reduction and energy efficiency). NSTAR, the Boston utility, has commercial building retrofit programs.
Green Sanctuary programs enlist churches to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and encourage congregants to do the same at home.
Offer energy audits and help with financing for retrofits.

Tulsa recently became the 500th city to adopt the US Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement. Now, despite federal inaction, most of the US population is covered by the Kyoto goal. The challenge now is to translate mere words into action.

The Sierra Club took on the mayors' agreement and developed the Cool Cities Campaign to help Sierra Club members engage their own mayors. (Information, materials, and fact sheets can be found at www.coolcities.us.)

The Club's website lists nine Missouri cities as being signed on: Kansas City, Columbia, St. Louis, and the St. Louis suburbs of Clayton, Florissant, Kirkwood, Maplewood, Sunset Hills and University City. You can register on the website to participate, either to enlist your mayor or, if your city is already on board, to help it carry out the agreement.

Start your own
Cool Cities Campaign.

Information
and registration
available at
www.coolcities.us

There are plenty of cities left to recruit; St. Louis County has more than 85 municipalities in addition to the six that have signed. The most important thing for the Chapter to do right now is to foster communication and coordination across the state so that the job gets done without reinventing the wheel too often.

Alan Journet and the Trail of Tears Group are rallying support for action in Cape Girardeau as part of the Southeast Missouri Climate Protection Initiative. See their impressive website http://cstl.semo.edu/SEMOCPI.

It isn't strictly necessary to get the mayor's signature on the official agreement. Cape Girardeau's mayor has not endorsed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement but has signed a Proclamation endorsing the group (SEMOCPI) and its goals. On the other hand, just because a mayor has signed doesn't mean anything's happening. Most of the cities are floundering. They lack direction and they lack a sense of urgency.

Kansas City is miles ahead of the pack. The city Council set up a process headed by a Steering Committee under which are four working groups hammered out the details of a climate action plan, consulting the various stakeholders in the community.

Kansas City's plan was given a huge boost in March 2007 when Sierra Club and Kansas City Power and Light (KCPL) reached an agreement that ended litigation surrounding opposition to KCPL's new coal-burning power plant. In addition to reduction in pollution levels for four power plants, the agreement included the offset of 100% of the global warming gas (CO2) emitted by the new power plant (6,000,000 tons annually) through the addition of 400MW of wind, 300MW of efficiency, and additional measures yet to be determined. These offsets will largely be implemented by 2010 and fully implemented by 2012. The CEO of Great Plains Energy, KCPL's parent company based in Kansas City, also pledged to work to reduce KCPL's total CO2 emissions 20% by 2020.

Things are very different at the other end of billboard-fenced I-70. St. Louis has no full-time environmental manager like Kansas City. For a while a climate task force met behind closed doors, but nothing came of its deliberations; you could say it died from lack of Sunshine. Now a special assistant to Mayor Francis Slay, working in her spare time with no budget and with only a part-time intern, is in charge. In a meeting with Missouri Chapter representatives, she asked us to assemble a new task force of community leaders to get the city moving.

The most enthusiastic mayor is Robert Lowery of Florissant. He eagerly accepted the prompting of our own Gloria Broderick and former staff person Jill Miller and held a reception for the Sierra Club at which he invited us to stock a revived Environmental Quality Commission with Club members. Peggy Moody is our point person on global warming.

Clayton also had an existing volunteer environmental committee; Janet Jump is our liaison. In Maplewood, where Mayor Mark Langston was the first in the St, Louis area to sign on, City Councilman Barry Greenberg is sponsoring a resolution to set up a citizen's advisory group. U City United, an independent citizens group in which EMG members like Leslie Lihou and Caroline Pufalt are involved, is prodding University City's government.

This is a volunteer effort. It is by no means a Sierra Club monopoly. In the St. Louis region, for example, the local chapter of the US Green Building Council is a strong supporter of the mayors' agreement, and the EMG Energy Committee is teaming up with the environmental committee of Women's Voices Raised for Social Justice.

We're all learning as we go along. A citizen's advisory group needs more than just energy-saving ideas; it needs a plan.

A recommended first step is to do a baseline Global Warming Gas (GHG) emissions inventory. The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) was doing these long before Seattle's Nickles came up with the Mayor's Climate Protection Agreement. An inventory identifies the sources of a town's GHGs so that cuts can be targeted. ICLEI charges a fee according to the size of the town, however, and even a small fee deters some mayors. For small towns it may not even be all that useful.

Google the words “climate action plan” and you'll find dozens of written plans from cities of all sizes, from Chicago and LA to Fort Collins, Colorado and Keene, New Hampshire to the suburbs ringing Boston. You can soon come up with a list of measures that are universal or nearly so. Some can reduce GHG emissions while saving the city money immediately. Others require some capital outlay up front.

Lighting is usually the low-hanging fruit. LED (light-emitting diode) traffic lights, more efficient fluorescent tube lighting, and high-pressure sodium street lights all save electricity and money. Surprising savings can be made by changing exit signs from incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) because these signs are on all the time.

City governments can cut emissions by buying energy-efficient appliances and recycled products; giving their employees incentives to use public transit, bicycle and walk; doing more recycling; and including green building features in city facilities.

It can't end with city government, however. In Kansas City, municipal government accounts for only 4% of the city's GHG emissions. Public education and outreach are essential. Cities, and the U.S. itself, should follow the example of Australia and phase out incandescent light bulbs completely in favor of CFLs or even more efficient lights that are in development.

City councils can enact energy-efficient building codes for new construction and retrofits. Where possible, access to public transit should be improved and sprawling land development should be restrained. Flat roofs could be painted white to reflect heat, “green roofs covered with plants insulate buildings winter and summer, reduce the heat island effect and absorb water.” City ordinances should prevent vehicles, especially school buses, from idling. These are just a few ideas that occur to me as I write.

There's opportunity here for every Sierra Club member to make a difference by getting involved in their own community. Climate scientists say that if we're going to stabilize the climate, global GHG emissions need to be cut by 60-80% by 2050. The Cool Cities campaign is just the beginning.

Sierra Club's Cool Cities Campaign:
http://www.coolcities.us.

Be part of the “2% Solution”:
http://www.sierraclub.org/twopercent

The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives: www.iclei.org

For assistance and encouragement for starting your own local Cool Cities Campaign contact Henry Robertson, Missouri Sierra Club Energy Chair at (314) 647-5603 or hrbtsn@aol.com.