Chicago announces plan to reduce area emissions to Kyoto Protocol levels
The ongoing federal-state disagreement over the regulation of greenhouse gases has not prevented a major U.S. city from initiating its own efforts to reduce emissions. As recently reported in the New York Times and Washington Post, Mayor Richard Daley announced a plan to reduce Chicago’s climate-changing emissions. The express goal of the climate plan is to reduce Chicago emissions – by 2020 – to a Kyoto Protocol-inspired level of 25% less than the city’s 1990 emissions.
While there are approximately 780 signatories to the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement (a municipal level response to the targets proposed in the Kyoto Protocols), Chicago’s climate plan may be unique. The climate plan’s proposed reduction measures are meant as answers to a Texas Tech University/University of Illinois study – commissioned by Chicago authorities – which projected the city-specific impacts of climate change. These projected, city-specific impacts included quantified “increases in both morbidity (illnesses) as well as mortality (deaths)”, air quality decreases, and frequency changes for “vector-borne and water-borne disease outbreaks.”
Although many of the climate plan’s mandates will fall on the municipality, local and regional businesses will also be required to contribute to the emissions reduction goals. In addition to an announced – but unspecified – “agreement with two coal-fired power plants to reduce emissions or shut down by 2015 and 2017,” Chicago anticipates:
- Changing the industrial, commercial, and residential building codes to require “green building industry” renovations or “retrofits”;
- Procuring a greater fraction of its energy requirements from renewable sources; and
- Taking unspecified action to “improve the efficiency of existing electricity generation plants in the region that suppl[ies] Chicago’s power ….”
Most states are moving to address greenhouse gasses in some fashion, notably including California, where Governor Schwarzenegger recently announced plans to hold a climate policy summit, organizing regional and local government leaders. With hundreds of municipal authorities promising to add local legal mechanisms and targeted exertions of market power to that patchwork of state activity, catch-as-catch-can regulation of climate changing emissions is becoming a near certainty in the United States.
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