Environmental Watch

In December, former Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels announced the city’s second greenhouse gas emission inventory, announcing that Seattle met the Kyoto target of 7% below 1990s levels. The Mayor and environmental activists hailed the announcement as a success and proof of the validity of their policies. Even a casual look at the data, however, shows that since the Mayor launched the Climate Protection Initiative, Seattle’s carbon emissions have actually increased and reductions lag behind the state as a whole in many key areas. Worse, the calculation ignores the emissions from products made outside the city but used in the city. The result is that the study would actually treat closing Seattle’s concrete plant and shipping that same amount of concrete into Seattle as a reduction in carbon emissions! Until Seattle is honest about its carbon accounting, emissions will continue to climb and officials will continue to advocate environmental policies that are costly and ineffective.

Read the full Environmental Watch here