“It’s not quite as easy as we thought.”
The Daily Camera reports,
Whether the city should revamp its approach to addressing climate change — including whether to extend an expiring tax to pay for related programs — is among the questions facing the Boulder City Council this week.
City leaders are scheduled to hold a study session Tuesday night to discuss the city’s “Energy Future” project to start a municipal utility, the future of the city’s climate-related goals and a possible extension of the Climate Action Plan tax.
According to a recent city document, a newly formed multi-department team will “begin an evaluation and planning process that will engage the Boulder community around a vision for future (greenhouse gas) emissions reductions.”
The effort is being called “CAP 2.0.”
The project is expected to create goals for the next phase of the city’s Climate Action Plan, including how the plan fits in with the city’s efforts to start a municipal electric utility.
“It’s a very critical time of deciding what we want our future to look like,” said Sarah Huntley, a city spokeswoman.
The city in 2002 adopted the Kyoto Protocol, which calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. Now that 2012 has arrived, the city still needs to cut the equivalent of about 521,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide to meet its goal.
“It’s not quite as easy as we thought,” Huntley said… [Emphasis added]
Why comment, the folks in Colorado wouldn’t understand it.
No, they’ve always been that way, we call it “The People’s Republic of Boulder”. Boulder used to have kind of a hippy vibe but, because of their zoning policies and other regulations, is now the realm of the hypocritical leftist rich, with a few college students thrown in. Their struggles with Occupy Boulder have been especially amusing.
They refuse to expand their streets, creating gridlock, even when it’s not rush hour. I’m sure that alone makes it impossible to meet their self-imposed carbon goals. They are under the mistaken impression that providing fewer streets and no parking will force people onto bikes and feet. What it really does is create a nightmare where it takes 20 minutes to go 5 blocks.
They’ve also imposed growth and building height limits which made the cost of housing skyrocket. Most of the people who work in Boulder live in suburban areas outside of the city and, of course, have to drive in to work.
I worked in Boulder for years on and off and now try to spend as little time as possible there.
It sounds like a large percentage of Boulderites originally hail from California.
If someone wrote a novel looking at these self-consumed municipal dolts debating punishing their citizen’s energy use as their “Energy Future” – to save the world no less – I have a title: Narcissus Shrugged.