August 17, 2006
States, Cities and Regions Take Steps to Balance Climate Change
By Joe White
Nashville Bureau for NCSL
NASHVILLE – Two villages in Alaska Representative Reggie Joule's district are eroding into the ocean, Joule told legislators and legislative staff members during a session titled "An Ever-Changing Climate" at the National Conference of State Legislatures' 2006 Annual Meeting.
Joule blames the rising waters on hotter temperatures melting the area's permafrost.
"Climate change is imminent," said the Inupait state legislator whose home town is 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
As the annual pattern of freeze and thaw grows longer on the “thaw” side, the ocean pounds further inland each year, wearing away the ice, he said.
“Change is nothing new. We’ve had it for years,” he continued. “But the change is escalating. It’s happening at a faster rate." If change is unchecked, Joule said, villages of up to 300 people will have to be moved.
Joule represents 15,000 Alaskans in a 120,000-mile district that stretches from the Canadian border almost to Russia. He explained that in his state, the legislature has taken a research approach to global warming. Rather than debate to what extent it is occuring or whose fault it is, they set up a "climate impact assessment commission" to gauge the consequences of the changes in the weather.
“We called it ‘climate impact assessment’ rather than ‘global warming,’” Joule said. “We asked not who was to blame, but if it’s going to be here, how do we deal with it?”
That's a question being asked thousands of miles to the south as well. Dr. Robert Cluck, the mayor of Arlington, Texas, described the problems that residents of his high ozone, high emission town face.
“I only have to go down to the emergency room” to tell if it is a high ozone day, the doctor said. “I find chronic ‘lungers’ in an emergency room, trying to breathe, if it’s a high ozone day.”
Situated between Dallas and Fort Worth, Arlington is the largest city in the nation without public transportation, Cluck said. After the public voted down buses three times, the city is investigating light rail.
Local governments in Cluck's area have agreed to reduce carbon emissions by 7 percent, he said.
“My fear as a physician is that if we don’t do it well," Cluck said, "we will get an extension [from the federal government]. We’ve gotten three already.”
Efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions are also underway at the regional level, said Eugene Trisko, a Washington, D.C. attorney who represents both business and labor. Trisko described the ongoing attempt of the Northeastern states to create a Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI, pronounced “reggie”).
The RGGI, which includes New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, would institute rules for development that would limit greenhouse gases.
Trisko said the regional agreement would cap electric utilities at their 2002-2004 emission levels and require a 10-percent reduction between 2015 and 2019.
Even an interstate compact like RGGI wouldn't make a big enough difference, though, Trisko said. Computer models suggest that a successful RGGI would lower the projected 2-degree Celsius temperature rise of the next 100 years by a mere few thousandths of a degree. If the water level rises 38 inches during the next century, as some expect, he said, the difference made by RGGI would not be visible.
Trisko was pessimistic, too, about the feasibility of RGGI. He called it essentially a political proposal that "does not appear to be viable as a regional climate agreement.”
He believes the only way to alter the current path and stall climate change predictions is to take action at the national level. Trisko urged the U.S. and developing nations to validate the Kyoto agreement.
“Unless all parties work together, nothing we do, nothing the European Union does, or the industrial countries do, will have an effect,” he said.
Cluck, the Texas mayor, believes that "little Kyoto agreements" can add up. He argued that every part of government should do all it can.
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This summary is provided for information purposes only. NCSL does not endorse any views it contains.
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