Act locally
Oct. 17th, 2007 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
openspace4lifeSo, Al Gore and the IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize and somehow I haven't posted about it until now. Well, maybe I've been reading too much Glen Barry lately, but I'm beginning to wonder just how far Gore's and Leonardo DiCaprio's strategy of top-down activism will get us. That said, I'll still vote for Gore for President if he decides to run.
In possibly related news, the mayor of Redlands finally put the U.S. Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement on the agenda of a City Council meeting yesterday. I'm hoping it has less to do with Gore's Peace Prize than with what the City Clerk briefly noted: the Council had received twelve communications in support of adoption and only one in opposition. To toot my own horn a bit, at least two of the former were last-minute emails I persuaded my coworkers to write, and some or all of the rest were postcards that I printed up and helped distribute. The result was a bit anticlimactic--the motion passed without real debate, 5-0, just like almost everything else on the agenda. Still, now we have a continuous bloc of USMCPA support with our neighbors to the north (San Bernardino), south (Riverside), and east (Yucaipa).
Meanwhile, up north in Oakland, the Apollo Alliance has a new partner group: the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and its new Green for All campaign. In the words of New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman, the Baker Center's president, Van Jones, is "on a crusade to help underprivileged African-Americans and other disadvantaged communities understand why they would be the biggest beneficiaries of a greener America. It’s about jobs. The more government requires buildings to be more energy efficient, the more work there will be retrofitting buildings all across America with solar panels, insulation and other weatherizing materials. Those are manual-labor jobs that can’t be outsourced." Replacing lost jobs for poor unskilled laborers, revitalizing our infrastructure, and cooling the planet: is there nothing green-collar jobs can't do?
I had a third related story, from this past Sunday's San Bernardino Sun, about how European cities are doing much better than their parent nations on meeting the goals of the Kyoto Protocol, but sadly it doesn't seem to be online. (Yes, I'm wasting literally tons of paper by getting a daily newspaper. It was a snap decision when some guy came to my door one day, and I'm really starting to regret it.)
In possibly related news, the mayor of Redlands finally put the U.S. Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement on the agenda of a City Council meeting yesterday. I'm hoping it has less to do with Gore's Peace Prize than with what the City Clerk briefly noted: the Council had received twelve communications in support of adoption and only one in opposition. To toot my own horn a bit, at least two of the former were last-minute emails I persuaded my coworkers to write, and some or all of the rest were postcards that I printed up and helped distribute. The result was a bit anticlimactic--the motion passed without real debate, 5-0, just like almost everything else on the agenda. Still, now we have a continuous bloc of USMCPA support with our neighbors to the north (San Bernardino), south (Riverside), and east (Yucaipa).
Meanwhile, up north in Oakland, the Apollo Alliance has a new partner group: the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and its new Green for All campaign. In the words of New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman, the Baker Center's president, Van Jones, is "on a crusade to help underprivileged African-Americans and other disadvantaged communities understand why they would be the biggest beneficiaries of a greener America. It’s about jobs. The more government requires buildings to be more energy efficient, the more work there will be retrofitting buildings all across America with solar panels, insulation and other weatherizing materials. Those are manual-labor jobs that can’t be outsourced." Replacing lost jobs for poor unskilled laborers, revitalizing our infrastructure, and cooling the planet: is there nothing green-collar jobs can't do?
I had a third related story, from this past Sunday's San Bernardino Sun, about how European cities are doing much better than their parent nations on meeting the goals of the Kyoto Protocol, but sadly it doesn't seem to be online. (Yes, I'm wasting literally tons of paper by getting a daily newspaper. It was a snap decision when some guy came to my door one day, and I'm really starting to regret it.)
