Many of the largest cities in the United States are competing to be the "greenest" city in the country. While the implementation of many of these efforts remains in development, the race never would have started without the leadership of Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, who forged the way for the first cities to ratify the Kyoto Protocol in the face of federal indifference. VerdeXchange News is pleased to present the following speech, which Mayor Nickels delivered at the League of California Cities' Annual Conference earlier this month, where he presented a passionate argument for the role of cities in sustaining the emerging green movement.
Mayor Nickels: The issue of climate change was frankly not on my front burner when I got elected mayor. Like those of you who are mayors, I had a council to tame. Like those of you who are elected officials, I had constituents that I needed to work with, constituents I needed to meet and get to know and serve well. But obviously, climate change was something that I cared about. I think we've all known about it for a number of years, the great work that Vice President Gore did when he was in the Congress and the Senate made us aware that something was happening. But for me it was something that was a long way away and a long time in the future. It wasn't one of those front burner issues that you have to work on as mayor.
And then came the winter of 2004 and 2005, which in the Seattle area and the Cascade Mountains, was a very dry, very warm winter. As a result, 100-yearold systems that we'd built for our city to provide clean, fresh water and green power were at risk. We had record-low snowfall in the Cascade Mountains. One hundred years ago some very smart people set aside a 100,000-acre watershed as our water supply. We capture that snow, and when it melts, we use it for our water. We do the same thing for electricity, and we've done that for over 100 years. So when my city lights superintendent (we own the electric utility) told me we were at 1 percent of normal snow pack, and when my water director told me we were at 1 percent of normal snow pack, that was significant, that was important. That was here and now, and all of a sudden climate change became a much more important issue and was put on the front burner.
Remember that at that same time, in early 2005, the Kyoto Protocol was becoming law in 141 countries, but not our country. The combination of those two things—the effect the climate was having on our city's ability to sustain itself and the fact that our country was not in the leadership, and, in fact, wasn't part of the solution to the problem—made me angry. So, on February 16, 2005, which is when Kyoto went into law, I stood up and said that we in Seattle will meet or exceed the reductions called for by the Kyoto Protocol, 7 percent from 1990 levels. But I knew that if we did it alone, it would be purely symbolic. You can't get people to take hard action if it's purely symbolic. It has to mean something. It has to have some context so that people are willing to make that sacrifice. So I challenged mayors from around the country to join with me in this effort, and we hoped at the beginning to get 141 mayors to join—one for every country that had signed on. We thought that that would send the message to the rest of the world that, indeed, there is intelligent life in America.
We started out by calling around to some mayors we thought would be very receptive. Of the first eight mayors who signed on, three were from California, and then, then-Mayor Jerry Brown of Oakland, Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, and then-Mayor Pam O'Connor of Santa Monica...And we went out and we started to talk to our colleagues, our fellow mayors, about this effort, and one by one, we got mayors to sign on. Today, there are 667 mayors who have signed on to take local action to meet or exceed the reductions of Kyoto. Those 667 mayors represent 73 million Americans. Almost one in four Americans lives in a city that has signed on to take local action on climate change. And so, in the face of a lack of leadership at the federal level, we did what cities and people at the grassroots do all the time: we started a movement. Something that started as a symbolic protest is now very real. We now have 667 laboratories around the country. Of course, mayors have no ego, so there really isn't any competition for ideas. We don't ever steal one another's ideas or build upon them or take credit for them. In fact, we have mayors who have done some courageous things.
In Seattle, this is a pretty easy issue. In California, I suspect it's a fairly easy issue. But for the mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, I can tell you that this was not an easy issue. And when Kay Barnes signed onto this agreement, the press in Jackson County immediately criticized her because the private utility in Jackson County was about to build a coal plant. How does it square that you're going to reduce emissions when you're going to build a coal plant? But Mayor Barnes stuck with the idea. She called together a taskforce in her city. That taskforce reported shortly before she left office earlier this year with a plan for how Kansas City was going to meet this challenge. At the same time, the private utility in Kansas City has announced that they are not, in fact, going to build that coal-fired plant. Not only are they reducing emissions, but they're finding ways to avoid creating new emissions.
So, why cities? Why are we involved in this issue? This is something that nations should be doing, that states and regions should be doing. At the city level, we should be filling potholes and doing all of the great stuff that we're elected to do. For the first time in human history, more than half the human species lives in cities. Because we are the engines of the economies of our countries, we put out over two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions that lead to global warming on this planet. There are those who look at cities and say that they're the problem, and I have to tell you that I believe that cities are going to be the solution. We're the ones who are going to find a way to make this crisis into an opportunity. I believe that not only because of the experience we've had with the U.S. Mayor Climate Protection Agreement, but also because when you live in close proximity, you put out less emissions. A city-dweller, on average, emits about 25-30 percent less carbon than someone who lives in a rural or more suburban area. A 200-unit tower in my city will reduce the need for a 45-acre subdivision, and will only put out a fraction of the carbon pollution that the subdivision would put out.
That colors, in many ways, the job that we do. It puts another prism on why it is that we're trying to create livable places in our cities, because if our cities aren't safe, people aren't going to live there. If our public school system isn't excellent, people are going to leave and find schools that will teach their children in the manner that they want. If our cities are not attractive, dynamic, wonderful, and compelling places for people to live, we will not succeed. And so, the plethora of issues that we deal with really relates, sooner or later, to how successful we're going to be in curbing global climate change. The challenge that we've accepted, to reduce our emissions by seven percent from 1990 levels, is great. As formermayor Brown mentioned, he had no idea, beginning with his signature, how he was going to achieve that. Let me tell you what we've been able to do in Seattle, and I know that there are dozens of stories around here that are very similar, because 102 California cities have signed on, and you represent 14.4 million Californians who have signed on to take global action. In Seattle, we decided we would lead by example. The city figured out how to reduce our own emissions. We reduced them by 60 percent from 1990 levels. So we showed our public, we showed our business community, and we showed our civic community, that we could, in fact, reduce those emissions. The biggest success that we had was with that electric utility that I mentioned, Seattle City Light.
Seattle City Light, a year and a half ago, became the first major electric utility in America to have zero net greenhouse gas emissions, and we're really proud of that. So when we turn on the lights in Seattle, we do not toast the planet. We're very proud of that. The next thing that we did was we went out and engaged our community. I created a Green Ribbon taskforce of civic, business, and environmental leaders in my community. I asked them to come up with a plan for how Seattle would reduce its emissions by 680,000 metric tons— that's our seven percent reduction. They put that plan together, we worked with that plan, and we're now implementing that plan. There are elements of it that have to do with transportation, creating better mass transit and local transit systems, having more people live in the central city so that their toughest transportation decision is what color shoes to wear on their walk to work. We now have 15,000 housing units under construction in the downtown and the immediate areas surrounding downtown. We're really proud of that. That has allowed us to reduce our emissions, today, to below 1990 levels.
We are confident that we will be able to meet our goal of the seven percent reduction by 2012, with one caveat. That is, with 15,000 more people moving in, we're going to have to not only reduce it by the seven percent, but reduce it by significantly more because of the added population that we're going to have in our city. But we're up to that challenge, and we're excited about that. Cities are going to be the answer to this problem. We're going to provide the federal government, when it finally does engage in this issue, with a menu of things that have worked and a menu of things that we tried and that probably shouldn't be tried again. But it's the creativity of the leaders at the city level that is going to help us through this. The next steps, of course, are huge, because 7 percent reduction does not stop climate change. It's a first step. We need to go an order of magnitude beyond that. That's why it is so impressive that the state of California made it policy that by 2050, they will reduce your carbon emissions by 80 percent. Our state has adopted somewhat similar, although somewhat weaker, legislation, and the United States Conference of Mayors has used that as the yardstick that will guide our lobbying in Washington, D.C.: 80 percent by 2050.
The next steps that we have to take are going to be huge. They're going to be very significant. They're going to involve changing human behavior. That's another reason why cities need to be involved, because when you're talking about changing behavior, it's not an executive order from the President, it's not a bill signed by the governor. It's what you and I do every day in our cities, and every day we explain to our citizens when we see them in the aisle of the grocery store and they tell us that we've had this effect on their lives—it's the kind of interaction that's going to help us change human behavior.
I want to take my hat off to each and every one of you for the job that you do in your cities. It's very important, and I can tell you from personal experience that it makes a difference in the lives of our cities. One city at a time, across this country and across this globe, we're going to tackle this problem, and we're going to be able to tell our children and our children's children that we at least got a start on the biggest challenge facing our country and our globe.