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Global Progress

Seattle just announced a pioneering plan to meet the Kyoto Climate Treaty by reducing citywide global warming pollution 7 percent by 2012. The challenge by Mayor Greg Nickels for US cities to fill in the huge gap left by the Bush administration and meet Kyoto goals has been taken up by 220 US cities with 44 million people, a population larger than 90 percent of the nations in the Kyoto Treaty. Seattle's leadership action and the response it has drawn are regarded around the world with great hope as signs that there is intelligent life in the US despite Bush.

The Seattle plan itself will be immensely challenging to implement, requiring higher parking fees, new road tolls and finding money to expand transportation alternatives such as expanded transit and bike lanes. The King County plan is also a major step, among other things making Metro one of the leading users of biofuels among US transit systems.

These are all facts Geov Parrish could have reported in his piece on the plan ("Warm Globally, Act Locally"). Instead it was framed in an air of complaint, i.e., "Where the hell have you guys been"--that all this is far short of what is needed. But for everyone involved in these efforts that's taken as a given, that these actions are only the beginning of a long journey. After all, we must eventually reach 70 percent or more pollution cuts.

One might turn around the question and ask where progressive grassroots activists have been on global warming. The answer is that the progressive left in general has not placed much of a special emphasis on climate change. Eat the State! itself has only run a few major features on the topic in the years of its existence. Of course, most progressives view global warming as real and serious, but the issue is also seen and taken up as just one more on a plateful of issues. No, it's the plate itself, and if the plate is broken pretty much everything on it will fall off no matter what else we do. Global warming is the context within which everything else rises or falls.

Dealing with this issue will take far more than a protest mentality. It requires coming forward with constructive programs and organizing strategies to implement the kind of revolutionary changes in industry, transportation and our lives for which Geov calls, and make it a central focus. This goes to points Colin Wright raised in his response to my letter taking issue with his criticisms of environmentalists working for cleaner cars. The global warming issue is so huge that any single action can seem paltry when measured against it. We'll be better off with cars that emit 30 percent less greenhouse gases. But this is far from enough. Though James Hansen, whom Wright quotes as saying we have a decade to avoid irreversible climate change, cites improved auto fuel efficiency as one of the major near-term actions we must take. We'll also benefit from using more biofuels, and of course this is only a piece in a much larger puzzle. We'll also need a far better transit system, more compact communities and greater efficiency throughout. We'll need it all. And we'll need active engaged citizens working to gain the public policies that are vital to making this all happen. That means engaging with city, country and state legislative bodies and elected leaders, coming to the table with a real program. We can't wait for the system to crumble, because we and most of the other species on the Earth will be buried in the rubble. We must act proactively, now.

Global warming will require a new politics of civic engagement and creative construction of alternatives. The groundwork has been laid by the visionary actions of city and county leaders. We know how to get to 7 percent reductions. Now lay out how to get to 70 percent, organize for it, work for it, get down to the gritty of making significant changes in our urban environment. Make a local politics that centers on the paramount moral imperative of addressing climate change. That involves way more than pointing out what's not being done--It means spelling out quite specifically what should be done and how to do it, and rallying citizens to the effort. Global warming is the biggest challenge we face. We need a response proportional to the challenge, and so far progressives have not proven particularly better than any other element of the political spectrum at giving global warming the position of central importance that is its due.

--Patrick Mazza, Research Director, Climate Solutions

But that is, so far, all they've done. Yes, people like you who work full time on global warming issues are well aware that "this is far short of what is needed," but from the celebratory, self-congratulatory politician statements and media coverage of the announcements that was sure easy to miss. If Seattle achieves its goals--and, even though we're farther along than any other major US city, we still have only six short years to make reductions that many European jurisdictions which started far earlier are struggling to meet--we will have gotten exactly one-tenth of the way there, and we will have done so by picking all the low-hanging fruit, the relatively simple steps available. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, the atmosphere evolving.

Patrick, you're probably in a far more knowledgeable position than any other regular ETS! reader to suggest changes that can be made, either individually, collectively, or as a matter of public policy. Rather than picking piecemeal at the letters and articles of others, why not do so? We'd be happy to publish anything you'd like to submit.