More Than Just Hot Air

Peter Steinbrueck, a soon-to-be--former City Council member, announced legislation today that would require all city departments that review the environmental impacts of projects to take greenhouse gas emissions into account.

Besides the fact that it's kind of crazy that they don't already do that, we think this is a great idea. It's great because it's an attempt to take into account and limit all of those emissions that are usually ignored as too hard to limit.

We all know that activities like driving and using electricity have some serious emissions associated with them and we know who is responsible for curtailing them as much as possible. That makes them easy targets for legislators who want to do something about global warming.

But tackling emissions sources like the actual construction of a capital project is harder to do because placing the onus to reduce those emissions on the right entity is nigh on impossible. Are they the responsibility of the manufacturer of the equipment or the user of the equipment? And how do we limit them without limiting growth?

We need people in government who are willing to find ways to reduce emissions across the economy even if it means working without a playbook and trying something new.

This plan shows that Steinbrueck is willing to do exactly that.

Steinbrueck's press release claims that if the bill becomes a law, Seattle would be the first city in the nation to implement this kind of review. As the PI pointed out in its Dateline Earth blog, that's a pretty lofty claim to make and a hard one to verify. We're a simple community blog with no time to look into it either, but know that this isn't something we've seen before (and we look for this kind of thing). Though the PI pointed to similar proposals California cities that are not yet law, we still think Steinbrueck's proposal is pretty unique and one that could have an impact and we like that.

The image comes to us courtesy of Seattle Daily Photo, a member of our Flickr Pool.