Europe's cities take the lead on cutting emissions

Christian Science Monitor:   With solar-powered streetlights and energy-efficient power generators, this town 25 miles southwest of London is at the vanguard of a promising movement accelerating emissions-cutting programs.

From the metropolises of London and Stockholm to hamlets like Güssing in Austria, communities are showing that you don't necessarily need international treaties or global rules to force climate change action.  "Our aim is for the cities to push the governments to act on climate change," says Pedro Ballesteros Torres, manager of the European Commission's Sustainable Energy Europe campaign. "If we want to tackle climate change we have to be local."

Woking, England officials indeed see the town of 100,000 as a shining example of the power of alternative energy.  "We have cut emissions by 21 percent since 1990," says Lara Curran, who heads the climate change program for the local council. If the national grid were to go down, locals here boast, the town would remain lit up. "Woking is a small town but this shows we can make a difference," says Curran.

Governments struggling to meet even the 5 percent set by the 1997 Kyoto agreement on limiting greenhouse gas emissions, may well need some pushing from local initiatives. As more than 180 nations meet to draft a post-Kyoto treaty in Bali this week, the signs are not encouraging.  CONTINUED

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In our case, it'd be more than the government struggling:  we American's would have to overcome some serious cultural mores:

1.  Everyone must own a car, carpools suck, and public transportation (outside of DC and New York) carries the stigma  of "only poor people ride the bus." 

2.  We also loooove our personal space, and are willing to drive in search of more (I knew a guy at one base who's daily commute was 4 hours).

3.  Zoning laws and town layouts make cleaner transportation alternatives impractical.  I could walk to work at my last two assignments, but I have a 10 mile commute here; and I'll painfully admit I'm not about to bike 20 miles round trip up a mountain to work every day.

4.  Even if we all up and decided to change things, who's going to foot the bill?  Then again, we can barely foot the bill maintaining the roads we have now.

5.  Suburbia McMansions are typically built to suit the developer's vision and profits and the clientele's lifestyle and ego, without consideration for cross-breezes, passive solar alignment, and so on.

6.  ...and sorry, that solar panel violates the Home Owners Association by-laws.

Feel free to continue the list in the comments!

Comments

[Sam Tresler]

Well, I've been shouting from the rooftops for quite some time now about the need for an environmental industrial revolution in the United States. Perhaps I need to find higher rooftops, or write more about it.

Not to be a doom-sayer here, but we've outsourced our economy in many ways. We're looking at grim times ahead . Sub-prime mortgages are just the tip of the iceberg, credit card debt has a reckoning coming, as does secondary mortgage, and as you point out, our infrastructure is taking a hit already, due to lack of funding. Oh yeah, and China owns more than a little of us.

We also have an environmental crisis on our hands. Global Warming is real - a NorthWest Passage exists where it never used to. Explain that one to me. I don't much care if people think it is a natural process or not, the sea is rising measurably, thats a problem for say, coastal cities.

Now, the way I see it we can mitigate (note, I didn't say 'solve') both problems in one re-industrialization. I want to see America become the place other countries outsource their environmental issues too. And No, I don't mean taking in their pollution and making our lives worse.

I mean taking in their recycling, selling the world biodiesal, selling the world solar panels. Produce clean power, put it in a battery and sell it to Europe. Make it economically feasible to produce these goods and services in the U.S. through a combination of subsidies and tariff regulation.

Environmental Industrial Revolution.

More jobs.
More revenue flowing into the country.
You put the environmental game into the capitalist machine.

p.s. Happy belated birthday.