City of Seattle Calls Kyoto Protocol 'Political' and 'Cumbersome'
After years of touting its commitment to meeting the carbon emissions reductions of the Kyoto Protocol, the City of Seattle is dismissing its failure to meet that target with a waive of the hand. Indeed, city staffers now echo exactly our critique of City Hall's carbon emissions reduction efforts.
In an interview with the Seattle Times published on Sunday, the head of Seattle's Office of Sustainability and the Environment offered this assessment of the Kyoto Protocol:
"The Kyoto framework was very cumbersome and not very easy to understand," said Jill Simmons, the city's director of Sustainability and the Environment. "It was powerful from a political standpoint."
Put simply, Simmons admits the goal for the city was not environmental benefit but political benefit.
This has been obvious for some time. In February of 2010, we noted that Seattle was not meeting its goals because the policies were not designed to be effective or good for the environment, but were "good for politicians in Seattle looking to claim 'leadership' on the issue."
Now the City of Seattle itself is admitting just that.
The problem is that environmental groups and the City Council are unlikely to take a lesson from this. When the faulty 2009 numbers were released, the Sightline's Institute Executive Director told The Seattle Times "I'd say the city of Seattle did better than I expected" cutting emissions. It was obvious at the time that the emissions numbers were false, but politics superseded the data and the environmental community continued to support a failed approach.
Worse, the City Council has now pledged to make Seattle "carbon neutral" by 2050. They don't have a detailed plan to achieve this, but the first step they took to achieve the goal provides a hint as to their seriousness: they created a logo contest for the effort. Ironically, there were so few entries, the City dropped the contest.
For nearly a decade, support for the Kyoto Protocol was the moral standard environmentalists set for seriousness about climate change. Now, in the face of failure, it is derided as a mere political tool that wasn't really a serious effort.
The lingering question is how much time and taxpayer money was lost playing politics?
Comments
where is the facts to make your statements truth?
Mr. Meyers,
You state, "Simmons admits the goal for the city was not environmental benefit but political benefit,"
yet the quote from Simmons from both your post and the Times article is, "...[The Kyoto framework] was powerful from a political standpoint..."
Nowhere has Ms. Simmons said anything about why the City of Seattle chose to adopt the Kyoto Protocol. Nowhere in the entire Seattle Times article does it make the same claim as you. In fact the entire article is about exactly the opposite of what you claim. It's entire subject is about the environmental goals of the City and how they have changed (arguably improved) from one mayor to the next. They even quote Mike O'Brien stating that the Kyoto Protocol was a step in the process to a more environmentally sound city. I guess that's why you didn't bother to link this Seattle Times article to your post.
Kyoto Protocol? What's That?
Here is the link to the article: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2017186338_newkyoto08m.html
I'm happy to have anyone read it. For instance, here is the subhead included with the story:
"Former Mayor Greg Nickels' 2005 pledge that Seattle would meet tough international emissions standards by 2012 made him a climate-protection superstar. But now that Nickels is out of office and 2012 is here, Seattle isn't in any hurry to find out whether it achieved the goal."
After years of proclaiming Kyoto to be the standard against which all climate policy is judged, the fact that they now ignore it says it all.
Mr Myers continues to ignore
Mr Myers continues to ignore what is obvious: the city is moving beyond (not ignoring) the Kyoto standard in order to pursue a more aggressive climate target of carbon nuetrality. In fact, the city continues to produce high quality and detailed evaluations of carbon emissions that they benchmark against the Kyoto standards.
Mr Myers says that the city has no detailed plan to achieve carbon nuetrality, but conveniently ignores the fact that the city has, in fact, done a detailed analysis of the emissions reduction scenarios required to achieve the target. It remains for policymakers to adopt specific actions, but considerable work
AGREED!!!!
Mr. Meyers,
thank you, that is the article I did read too (plus a few other sources).
wpcsophistry,
You are spot on!
A thank you to you too.