Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [85]
In every state there are local groups or state affiliates of national ones working for changes in health-care and energy policy. They’re usually looking for all the support they can get.
On climate change, however, most of the action has been at the local level. After President Bush rejected the mandatory emissions limits of Kyoto, about five hundred cities with Democratic and Republican mayors, under the leadership of Seattle mayor Greg Nickels, signed on to the Mayors Climate Protection Agreement to meet the Kyoto targets in their communities.
For example, Los Angeles has a vigorous strategy to reduce emissions in a way that will create jobs, cut utility bills, and improve the city’s air quality and quality of life. Under the leadership of its impressive young mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, the city intends to produce 20 percent of the electricity its municipally owned utility sells from renewable sources by 2010 and retrofit existing plants to reduce emissions; reduce air pollution at its port and airport through the use of alternative fuels, greater efficiency, and more use of electric equipment; plant a million trees and increase open green space; convert more city vehicles to alternative fuels, including, by 2010, all the trucks that collect trash; increase the number of green building and green roofs, which will both conserve energy and lower power bills; expand mass transit; consume less water and recycle more solid waste; and support education programs to teach public school students how to conserve, reuse, and recycle.
Led by Mayor Michael Coleman, Columbus, Ohio, has redeveloped a closed department store with more than one million square feet into one of the nation’s largest LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) registered green buildings to house educational, governmental, and commercial facilities. Chicago is planting a lot of trees and striving to green as many rooftops of old buildings as possible, dramatically reducing energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and utility bills. New Orleans has asked our foundation’s Climate Change Initiative to support its efforts to “build back better” with sustainable housing projects and schools, the development of green building rehabilitation plans, and a training program in green rebuilding with an emphasis on minority contractors.
Boulder, Colorado, voters approved the nation’s first municipal energy tax, averaging $1.33 per month on home electricity bills and $3.80 per month on business bills, to raise $1 million a year until it expires in 2012 to fund the city’s Climate Action Plan. Investments in efficiency, renewable energy, and alternative fuel vehicles will cut greenhouse gases and save an estimated $63 million in energy costs, a return of ten to one on the $6 million tax investment.
New York City’s emissions are already less than one-third of the national average on a per capita basis. Nevertheless the city has reduced its emissions another 446,000 metric tons a year through the use of hybrid and clean fuel vehicles, more energy-efficient equipment, and planting street trees. In April 2007, Mayor Michael Bloomberg released a comprehensive blueprint to make New York “the first environmentally sustainable twenty-first-century city.” Its most controversial provision calls for an $8 a day “congestion pricing” charge for people who drive into Manhattan below Eighty-sixth Street. Similar plans have reduced congestion, and emissions, in London and Singapore. The funds raised from the fee would finance major mass transit projects. Most of New York’s remaining emissions,