Climate conference, part 3
Just to avoid losing any more posts or parts of posts, I’ll keep them as separate entries.
Next speaker is Kim Lundgren - regional director of ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability, Northeast Regional Capacity Center.
Local Governments and the Cities for Climate Protection Campaign
An international association of local governments interested in global environment issues through cumulative local action. She covers the 9 northeast states (NY, NJ, Penn, plus New England).
Local governments influence all major sources of global warming. They work with all levels, but local governments have certain unique benefits.Cities for Climate Protection is the largest ICLEI program; 200 US participants and growing steadily.
They have a milestone-based process. They provide software to run it. Ugly screenshot. It will do cost savings calculation plus sum local energy data. You can do building-by-building stuff for city buildings. It’ll do energy analysis and units conversion. So you can get a profile of city operations, which is typically 3-5% of the total community emissions. Not that significant, but permits local governments to lead by example.
A survey showed that of their participant base, 40% of their participants saved $500 Million (spread among 64 towns). Real ROI.
Adaptation is a new part of the campaign; testing in Keene NH. People are feeling the impacts and need to address it. Working with NOAA to develop a sustainable approach.
In Mass there are at least 30 communities doing it. They meet quarterly to talk about it and share ideas and resources.
What they’re doing: Municipal clean energy purchases, installations, alternative fuel vehicles, green buildings, energy efficiency policies.
Ann Arbor, MI — landfill gas to energy. Waste processing is huge — 78% of what people do comes from the waste sector. Low-hanging fruit, yes, but very significant. Paybacks are around 3-6 years.
St. Paul, MN doing emission reductions through other objectives, like public health and fiscal responsibility.
Austin, TX has a municipal utility, generating 5% of the city power. Half the growth met by conservation and renewables. Doing plugin hybrids for taxis; they have PV taxi stands.
Municipal fleets can have a huge impact on car manufacturers, and they’ve been getting together to demand plugin hybrid support for manufacturers.
Maryland buying green power and providing group purchase services to anyone within the state. Trying to control ozone and pollutants.
Philadelphia has a fleet carsharing program, similar to Zipcar, and it applies to government employees. Replaced 330 internal vehicles, saving $2M a year.
Seattle is doing waste management — no recyclables in the garbage stream, and they’re enforcing it. After one round of enforcement, compliance was 98%. Saves $2M a year. Works well with pay-as-you-throw.
Chicago and Boston doing green roofs and green buildings. Boston hosted the Green Roofs conference, and they’re trying to set standards and developing a program.
Burlington VT: 10% challenge. Try to reduce GHG by 10%.
Cambridge doing a good program with awards…and that helps.
Salem and Worcester have residential programs and are competing.
Elected leader statements:
* US Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement (but they have 7% target, whereas the program she runs typically goes 10-20%).
* Sundance Summit
* Clinton Global InitiativeThey work with cities from NYC to Shutesbury MA (1800 residents).
Developing countries — tend to be large cities. But they’re really working on sustainability.
Q:Is ICLEI actually successful? Portland, OR hugely successful, but maybe other cities not so big?
A: Didn’t really answer the question. Some discussion that they’re a small organization with international scope and can’t do so well everywhere. Left me with the impression that Portland IS an aberration.