Mayors brainstorm green ideas

The Associated Press
July 15, 2005

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PROVO, Utah - Mayors from Chicago to Seattle traded ideas for cutting pollution and making their cities more livable at the final day of a conference on global warming.

Richard M. Daley of Chicago gave other mayors a how-to session Tuesday on absorbing combustion emissions with extensive gardens throughout his city - from the ground to the rooftops.

"All of our major big boxes have to do green roofs," Daley said at actor Robert Redford's Sundance mountain resort just east of Provo.

Daley boasted about having a locker- and shower-equipped bicycle station, 10,000 bike racks throughout his city, plans to install solar-thermal collectors atop city buildings and a large fleet of hybrid and natural gas-powered vehicles.

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels underscored worries about climate change by saying his city's hydropower output has been steadily diminishing. He said the volume of the snowpack in the nearby Cascade mountains has declined by half since 1950, reducing runoff on the city's 90,000-acre watershed.

Nickels boasted that 60 percent of Seattle's residential waste gets recycled. And he said Seattle is trying to rehabilitate its 3,700 acres of forests by removing ivy and deciduous trees in favor of native fir.

The Utah conference, hosted by Redford, Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson and the U.N.-sponsored International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, drew about 45 mayors.



The conference, which opened Sunday, was busily signing up mayors pledging to meet or beat emissions standards set by the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty ratified earlier this year without the United States.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously passed a resolution last month supporting the 12-step program, which has drawn pledges from mayors of 170 cities across the country, Nickels said.

The cities' resolution urges federal and state governments to meet or beat the goal of reducing global warming pollution levels to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

The cities' efforts will include reducing dependence on fossil fuels by accelerating development of technologies such as wind and solar energy, efficient motor vehicles and biofuels.

Salt Lake's mayor helped organize the conference and has been promoting his city's efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The city buys some wind power, converts sewer plant methane into energy, uses low-energy LED lights in traffic signals and runs 79 vehicles on natural gas.