U.S. Mayors Join Kyoto in Defiance of Bush

Posted on May 14, 2005

Fed up with rising children's asthma rates and breathing polluted air, a bipartisan group of 132 U.S. mayors is defying President Bush and embracing the Kyoto Treaty on their own. The New York Times reports:

Unsettled by a series of dry winters in this normally wet city, Mayor Greg Nickels has begun a nationwide effort to do something the Bush administration will not: carry out the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
Mayor Greg Nickels of Seattle formed a bipartisan coalition of mayors to adopt the Kyoto Protocol on global warming on the local level.
Mr. Nickels, a Democrat, says 131 other likeminded mayors have joined a bipartisan coalition to fight global warming on the local level, in an implicit rejection of the administration's policy.
The mayors, from cities as liberal as Los Angeles and as conservative as Hurst, Tex., represent nearly 29 million citizens in 35 states, according to Mayor Nickels's office. They are pledging to have their cities meet what would have been a binding requirement for the nation had the Bush administration not rejected the Kyoto Protocol: a reduction in heat-trapping gas emissions to levels 7 percent below those of 1990, by 2012.
On Thursday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg brought New York City into the coalition, the latest Republican mayor to join.

The White House said it opposed the treaty because it would cost 5 million American jobs. But the mayors think otherwise. They say that global warming is threatening the water supply in California, and flooding could easily destroy New Orleans and that action must be taken now. They also say that reducing emissions actually creates jobs and economic growth.

The coalition is not the first effort by local leaders to take up the initiative on climate change. California, under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, is moving to limit carbon dioxide emissions, and Gov. George A. Pataki of New York, also a Republican, has led efforts to reduce power plant emissions in the Northeast. But the coalition is unusual in its open embrace of an international agreement that the Bush administration has spurned, Mayor Nickels's office said, and is significant because cities are huge contributors to the nation's emission of heat-trapping gases.

Global warming and polluted air are not partisan issues. They are issues for anyone that breathes. Reducing pollution just makes good economic sense. After all, think of how much we could save on healthcare if we had less asthma and lung disease to treat?