Mayors, Looking to Cities’ Future, Are Told It Must Be Colored Green

NY Times
November 3, 2007

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

SEATTLE, Nov. 2 — The mayor of Fayetteville, Ark., gushed through a slide show about how his city was in the midst of great change. Bleak roads and bland shopping strips were being redrawn to a more human scale. Downtown condominiums were going for a million dollars. Streets once silent at night now bustled.

Besides being great for the local economy, the mayor, Dan Coody, told his counterparts from other cities gathered here, the redevelopment is also helping Fayetteville go green.

“I’m so excited to be here and talk about this I can’t stand it,” Mr. Coody said at the end of his presentation on Thursday. “Let’s all go save the world!”

They settled for lunch, at least for the moment, but the 100 or so mayors who attended the two-day Climate Protection Summit, convened by the United States Conference of Mayors, heard a clear message: Cities that are “walkable,” workable and livable add up to the “s” word: sustainable. Cities that are centered on people and public transit, not cars, and built to higher standards of energy efficiency will save money, hum with new development and create jobs to suit a greener way of life.

Al Gore said as much in a speech he gave to the mayors via satellite. So did former President Bill Clinton, in an address here on Thursday, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, who spoke Friday.

But many mayors spoke of the struggle of convincing voters that investing in green is good for them. John Robert Smith, the mayor of Meridian, Miss., said he had been criticized for supporting a plan to restore streetcar service in his city decades after autos made it seem obsolete.

“This is one of those things you do in your last term in office,” Mr. Smith said, “because they’ll be sure you’ve lost your mind.”

Part pep rally, part policy discussion, the conference presented two main themes: the federal government must do more than the Bush administration has done to fight global warming; and in the meantime, cities must take up the slack.

Spurred by Mayor Greg Nickels of Seattle, more than 700 mayors have signed a pledge to reduce their cities’ emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases to levels laid out in the Kyoto Protocol. That treaty, signed by the United States but never ratified by the Senate, called for reducing such emissions 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

Mr. Nickels issued a report this week showing that Seattle had already exceeded that goal. On Friday, he listed city initiatives like promoting locally produced foods, distributing 300,000 high-efficiency shower heads and encouraging residents to trade in their gasoline-powered mowers for electric or nonmotorized versions. But it helps that Seattle gets its power from hydroelectric dams, not coal or natural gas.

Many mayors here said they had yet to measure how much pollution their cities were causing, much less win political support for reducing it. “You just can’t say we need to reduce global warming because there will be floods and polar bears will be gone,” said Mayor Douglas H. Palmer of Trenton, president of the Conference of Mayors. “They’ll run me out of town.”

Mr. Palmer said he talked about the issue at home in a way residents could relate to. Pollution is bad for your child’s asthma. Leaky buildings and dependency on foreign energy sources can drive up monthly heating bills. Instead of working in a fast-food restaurant, young people could be trained in “green collar jobs,” like retrofitting older buildings to be more efficient and installing solar panels.

Capitalism and consumerism were at the core of the meetings. Mr. Clinton announced that he had negotiated with private companies to help 1,100 cities buy energy-efficient products at volume discounts. Sessions had names like “Blueprints for Building a Green City” and “Engaging Your Business Community.”

Mayors from big and small cities, from Anchorage to Miami, talked about their conversions to green thinking and discussed how to decipher “green building codes” and force developers to abide by them. Some said they had found developers unwilling. Others urged them just to apply more pressure.

The conference had a decidedly Democratic tilt, but there were Republicans here, too, and the frustration with Washington on the issue of climate change was apparent across political lines. Mr. Bloomberg, who was elected mayor twice as a Republican but who switched his affiliation to independent in June, announced his support for the controversial idea of a federal tax on carbon pollution.

“As long as greenhouse-gas pollution is free, it will be abundant,” he said. “If we want to reduce it, there has to be a cost for producing it.”