I’ve been taking some time off after working as the editor of the 2008 Citistates Report, which debuted in Sunday’s Observer. If you read it, you may recall that writers Curtis Johnson and Neal Peirce suggested the inside-the-beltway crowd isn’t going to pass meaningful legislation on controlling greenhouse gas emissions – and thereby save the globe from grave peril – and that the best hope lies with “bold, visionary urban regions.”
Or maybe state regions?
This week marks the formal start of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. It’s a carbon cap-and-trade program among 10 northeastern states from Maine south to Maryland. Other regions, and California, are watching to see how it works.
But to quote Peirce and Johnson, why not Charlotte? Why shouldn’t this region become the first metro region to try something similar? To be innovative on energy? To lead?
If you’re thinking “Why worry about all this energy stuff when the nation’s financial system is in crisis?” here’s a possible answer.
It’s a report from my friend, Christine Gorman, a former Time magazine staffer and current free-lance science and health writer, who was at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York.
The plenary session yesterday [Wednesday] was kind of a sleepy affair until Al Gore got all worked up and said “clean coal is a lie. It’s like healthy cigarettes” and argued that the current financial crisis is nothing compared to what’s going to happen with the environment. “The world has several trillion dollars in sub-prime carbon assets,” he says. Then he went on to call for a national “smart grid” for electricity and a carbon tax to reduce the payroll tax.
North Carolina showed some initiative with its Clean Smokestacks Act several years ago, to help cut down on air pollution and ozone. Surely it’s time for some similar initiative to deal with the even larger problem of greenhouse gas emissions.