The Cleveland Plain-Dealer reports:
The action plan makes the work a little easier by proposing six major areas the city wants its growing army of sustainability summit graduates to advocate:
• Energy efficiency and green building, including more programs and policies to encourage the insulation of existing homes and buildings while demanding tougher standards for new construction, and pushing utilities to develop “smart grids” that will help rate payers use less electricity.
• Advanced and renewable energy as called for by the 2008 state law now under attack by utilities with the help of some Republican lawmakers.
The plan advocates programs to accelerate solar installations and to get behind the Lake Erie pilot wind turbine project the nonprofit LEEDCo has been developing.
• Sustainable mobility, in other words developing programs to expand car pooling, encourage anti-idling throughout the city and to make biking and walking easier and safer.
• Encourage more recycling to keep trash out of landfills, and come up with ways to recycle the material in buildings being demolished.
• Develop neighborhood and downtown tree planting programs, increase water conservation, decrease storm water run-off by capturing the water on-site, and rewrite city building codes to encourage “sustainable” development.
• Support and promote local companies trying to increase efficiency and reduce their own emissions
By the end of Friday, the ideas of more than a dozen groups working on the floor of Public Hall had come up with the beginnings of strategies.
The goal of the plan is to cut the total carbon dioxide emissions of the city — its businesses, public buildings, industries, traffic and homes — over the next 40 years.
The aim is a 16 percent reduction by 2020 compared to what they were in 2010, a 40 percent reduction by 2030, and an 80 percent reduction by 2050.
That’s a tough task in a city where heavy industry produces about 30 percent of the total emissions, conceded city officials, who do not want to drive away industry and manufacturing.
If any of these ideas stand on their own — if there’s enough market for brick to pay for removing and reusing them — then they represent good stewardship.
Walking and bicycling may have some benefits to society but they are hard to define. The fact is that you can’t reduce energy use or real pollution enough with walking or biking to really matter. I might commute on a bike — total commute 14 miles daily — but that would have very little effect on gas use. The gas use is in the big commutes and they just aren’t feasible on foot. Ask a Moreno Valley suburbanite who works in Santa Ana.