Our Own Private Kyoto

Our Own Private Kyoto

A local plan for attacking global warming can make a difference, in part by putting citizens in the hot seat

-Editorial, The Oregonian: May 21, 2001

When cities and counties take grand stands against planetary problems -- nuclear proliferation, for example -- they sometimes succeed only in looking silly. Who do they think they are, anyway: Zeus throwing thunderbolts? Citizens snicker and roll their eyes.

If you feel the corners of your mouth twitching at the idea of a local attack on global warming, try reading the 35-page plan, recently approved by Multnomah County and the city of Portland. It's not a political prop. It's impressive, and it's disturbing -- take the example of Glacier National Park, which has already lost 18 glaciers and may be glacierless by 2070.

The plan lays out real, and serious, strategies to decrease the greenhouse gases emitted in Multnomah County. The chief culprit in global warming, implicated in about 82 percent of the problem, is carbon dioxide -- some of it coming from a tailpipe near you.

See, that's what's annoying about this plan. Just when you were prepared to sink into a comfortable despondency about global warming -- blame President Bush for abandoning the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, blame world population, blame consumerism, blame Detroit for not producing more fuel-efficient cars, blame Congress for not forcing Detroit to produce more fuel-efficient cars (all valid blames) -- the plan puts you in the hot seat again.

On this issue, local and global fit together logically. "Unlike the nuclear free zone, many, and perhaps most, energy decisions are local," explains Susan Anderson in the city's Office of Sustainable Development. "Cities control building codes, zoning and land use, street layouts, traffic controls (and) use huge amounts of energy."

It was embarrassing for Portland, and rightly so, earlier this year when it was disclosed that the city government had accumulated 135 sport utility vehicles. Sure, some may be justified. But the city that was first in the nation to adopt a global warming plan, in 1993 -- and loves to brag about that fact -- should have been keeping an eye on its gas mileage long before SUV expenses sparked budgetary concerns.

Like it or not, this latest version of the global warming plan, adopted jointly with Multnomah County, does inescapably point to the need to upgrade fuel efficiency of vehicles. Oregon drivers, on average, are getting only 18 or 19 miles per gallon of gasoline. Each gallon of gas we burn puts 20 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

That's a shocker, particularly when you realize what you'd need to do to cancel that amount. The plan shows you: You'd need to plant a tree. Just one, and you would remove 25 pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over a year's time.

True, that tree will keep scouring the atmosphere for, say, another 30 years, subtracting 750 pounds of carbon dioxide in all. But, meanwhile, you're still stepping on the gas. That one tree, even over its entire life, erases only an eighth of the 8,000 pounds of carbon dioxide your car emits in one year of driving.

The plan, in addition to laying out dozens of strategies local government can pursue, also makes it easy for individuals to do the math on their own personal global warming problem. If the odds look discouraging, here's where it comes in handy to have local government backing you up, to know from the plan, for instance, that from 1996-2000, the city of Portland planted more than 600,000 trees.

Global warming is one of those macro-problems that makes most people feel microscopic. But we're not as puny or powerless as we like to think, and the city-county plan doesn't let us get away with thinking that we are.