Seattle's Kyoto challenge

SEATTLE — Can Americans get off the dime on global warming? Is it OK to just wait for a more enlightened administration in Washington?

Across the country, pioneering citistate regions have begun to define directions we all need to take.

The Seattle region, prompted by King County Executive Ron Sims and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, is taking a national lead. And for good reason: Their area is the world's third-fastest-warming region (after the Arctic and Alaska). Snow pack in the Cascades, which supply Seattle its water supply and hydropower, has shrunk 50 percent since 1950 and is expected to shrink another 50 percent by 2050. Rising seas could flood Seattle's port.

Nickels last year issued a "Kyoto Challenge" to America's mayors to tackle the profound climate disruption that scientists now project. By last week, 284 mayors, representing cities with 49 million in total population, had signed on, urging both state and federal governments to meet or beat the Kyoto Protocol goals of reducing global warming pollution levels to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

The mayors' resolutions, explains Nickels, are a positive way for local officials to overcome their sense of powerlessness in the face of a national government indifferent to the perils of severe floods, storms and droughts triggered by climate change.

Seattle City Light, the municipal electric utility, has accomplished zero net emissions by its power plants. The city is using increased portions of biodiesel in its vehicle fleet, requires energy-saving "LEED" standards for all new or remodeled city buildings, and is now focusing on ways to reduce the big carbon footprint of the diesel-burning ships, trains and trucks that use its busy port.

Nickels appointed a "green ribbon" commission, including former EPA administrator William Ruckels-haus, to figure how the city can meet its Kyoto targets. The proposed ideas go so far as a regional road-pricing system, similar to London's controversial but highly successful effort to discourage vehicles in city centers. Major private employers, ranging from cement plants to the University of Washington, are signing on to a "Seattle Climate Partnership" agreement to assess and reduce their carbon emissions.

Global warming, says County Executive Sims, isn't the light at the end of a tunnel; it's a train bearing down on us at a high rate of speed. Today's receding glaciers won't come back, the Arctic and Antarctic won't recover their ice losses. "Impacts will happen, we need to act now."

Sims advocates a 2050 mindset — assuming it's already mid-century and looking backward to see whether today's major decisions — on big highway or public transit systems, for example — make sense on the basis of their carbon impact. Example: He questions whether the $2-billion-to-$4.5 billion price of a tunnel to replace the aging Alaskan Way Viaduct roadway along Seattle's waterfront makes sense — compared, for example, with a major expansion of the region's bus network.

Already, King County has partnered with General Motors on development of the country's first and largest hybrid diesel bus fleet, purchasing 220 of the big vehicles, which avoid major greenhouse gas emissions by switching to electric power at low speeds or standing still.

King County also launched the nation's largest hydrogen fuel cell project, using methane gas from its sewage plant to power the fuel cell, which then creates the energy for almost half the plant's power needs. And last year it bought an entire forest — development rights to 90,000 acres close to Seattle, its preserved greenery a way to absorb carbon emissions, its lands offering expansion opportunities for the area's already extensive system of walkways and bikeways.

Sims and Nickels both support the new "Cascade Agenda," a 100-year conservation and preservation plan for 2.6 million acres of the Puget Sound region's most prized waters, mountains and communities. "What we've saved so far is just a hill of beans," says Cascade Land Conservancy President Gene Duvernoy. "We're dying death of a thousand cuts — with a little development there, a shopping center there."

To curb the carbon-generating sprawl machine, the Cascade Agenda insists growth go into denser, well-planned cities, while rural lands are saved by a massive new market-based transfer of development rights initiative. The effort dovetails with the land-conserving goals of the Puget Sound Regional Council.

Global warming's answers, it turns out, won't just be imposed on our regions: Many can start there.