Global Warming: How to Seize the Initiative

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Similar programs are under way across the country. In the northern town of Aapua, a wind farm opened just last month, thanks to local residents who began lobbying town officials five years ago; it should supply 40% of Aapua's electricity. The old university city of Lund gets 30% of its heat from a geothermal plant. And Fjaras, in the southwest, just opened a solar-powered health center. Some of these are small efforts, to be sure, but when an entire nation embraces a pledge to wean itself from oil, there's no reason it can't be done. --By Michael D. Lemonick. Reported by Ulla Plon/Helsingborg

THE MAYORS SAVING ONE CITY AT A TIME

Seattle mayor Greg Nickels has news for President George W. Bush: global warming is also "local" warming. So for Nickels and his constituents, climate change is about the Cascade Mountains, where the city gets its water and hydropower and where the snowpack has shrunk by half over the past 50 years. It's about the effect of Puget Sound's warmer waters on wild-salmon runs. It's about hotter summers cooking up more smog. It's about a rise in sea level that could flood Seattle's port. "The stakes are high--globally and locally," he says. "We need to act."

So in February 2005, when the Kyoto Protocol took effect in 141 countries but not the U.S., Nickels launched the U.S. Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement. So far, 218 mayors in 39 states, representing nearly 44 million Americans, have signed on to its 12-step program for their own cities to meet or beat Kyoto's original target for the U.S.--cutting greenhouse-gas emissions to 7% below 1990 levels over the next six years. Some cities got a head start. Portland, Ore., which zeroed in on global warming beginning in 1993, has already slashed emissions by 13% per capita, partly by building light rail and 730 miles of regional bikeways. In Austin, Texas, the city-owned utility was able to cancel construction of a 500-MW coal-fired power plant--planned to power 50,000 homes--thanks in part to an intensive green building program that offers energy-efficiency audits to all residents and businesses, retrofits schools and installs insulation and shade screens to reduce sunlight in low-income housing. "We're frustrated by the lack of national leadership," says Mayor Will Wynn, an early backer of the Nickels initiative. "This is about the future of the planet."

Other cities are crafting their own solutions. St. Paul, Minn., which has had to forgo Winter Carnival ice sculptures and on-ice softball tournaments in recent years because of rising temperatures, is using a biomass-fired power plant for both heat and electricity. Keene, N.H., is harnessing methane and other gases at its landfill to run a generator that powers its recycling center. Salt Lake City, Utah, has converted 1,630 traffic stops to energy-efficient light-emitting diode signals--which alone will save more than 500 tons of CO2 pollution each year and cost the city $53,000 less than conventional bulbs. "The idea is to solve global warming one city at a time," says Glen Brand, an energy specialist for the Sierra Club, which has launched a "cool cities" website.