Cross posted from MyDD (recommended diary), this is a diary from Rocky Anderson, the Salt Lake City Mayor who is leading the charge to get cities across the country to take action on global warming. He's done incredible things in Salt Lake and has stood up to political heat (pun intended) to do so. Get to know this guy and the other mayors. They're real heroes in the Global Warming fight.
And, folks, please read this stuff -- the more you know, the more you realize that the truly worst thing Bush has done is to set up us back by 8 years in addressing Global Warming when there was so little time left to begin with....
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by Mayor Rocky Anderson, Thu Jul 20, 2006 at 01:48:17 PM EST
Several commentators have recently expressed profound pessimism about the possibility of addressing the challenges posed by catastrophic climate change. Some have argued that current technology is insufficient to address the problem, and that we can only hope for an as-yet unknown technological panacea to effectively combat global warming.
Our experience in Salt Lake City shows that individuals, businesses, and governments on every level can employ measures available with current technology to address the serious challenges of global warming. On the eve of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, I committed Salt Lake City to reduce global warming pollution from municipal operations by seven percent by 2012, in accordance with the Kyoto Protocol. Last year, we surpassed our Kyoto goal, seven years early. Salt Lake City's efforts in improving efficiency and sustainability can be easily undertaken by other municipal, state, and federal governments, and lead to significant cost savings.
An op-ed I authored on how climate change can be effectively addressed at the local level, using current technology, appeared in the Arizona Daily Star and other newspapers through the McClatchy-Tribune Wire. The op-ed is available here: http://www.azstarnet.com/.... The Arizona Star also published an accompanying editorial enumerating effective solutions on the local level to the problem of disastrous climate change, available here: http://www.azstarnet.com/...
We know that Kyoto is only a modest beginning, and that we must make even greater changes to our patterns of consumption in order to fully address the challenges posed by disastrous climate change. However, we presently have the means at our disposal to make a real positive difference. If all communities, businesses, and individuals work collaboratively to significantly reduce our energy use, we can meet the challenges of global warming, energy dependence, destabilizing fuel price fluctuations, poor air quality, and declining public health.
http://mydd.com/...