Turns Out, Seattle Isn't So Green: How About Your City?

In the summer of 2005, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels convinced hundreds of urban mayors around the country to pledge to enact laws aimed at reducing greenhouse gases to levels mandated by the Kyoto Protocol, which was rejected by President Bush. The gutsy move earned him political points in magazines from Rolling Stone (which dubbed him an environmental "hero") to Vanity Fair (which praised him as a rising green star). But in his own city, Nickels's policies are frequently at odds with his professed green agenda. Meanwhile, other cities across the country are making real changes that will help them meet and even exceed Kyoto targets.

Nickels's much-touted "Climate Action Plan" -- the final product of a so-called Green Ribbon Commission charged with crafting climate solutions for the city -- calls for spending $37 million over two years to reduce Seattle's greenhouse-gas emissions by increasing fuel efficiency, building sidewalks and bike lanes, planting trees, conserving energy, and increasing the use of biofuels.

All are laudable goals. But only eight percent of that $37 million is new from this year's city budget (the rest comes from a ballot initiative that primarily funds road and bridge repairs.) The Climate Action Plan also includes many policies that have already been implemented -- such as maintaining zero emissions at the city's hydropowered utility, City Light -- and assumes large emission reductions from policies such as "strengthen the state residential energy code" and "substantially increase natural gas conservation" whose success is a matter of speculation.

As environmental policy, Nickels's Climate Action Plan ignores Seattle's real environmental problem: too many people driving too many cars too many places. Because much of Seattle's energy comes from clean hydropower, the overwhelming bulk of the city's contribution to global warming comes from cars. So if we're going to cut our emissions (7 million tons in 2000, with 8.2 million tons projected for 2010), it follows we'll have to drastically reduce our reliance on cars.

But the vast majority of Nickels's commitment to funding alternatives to driving focuses on building bike lanes and sidewalks to the exclusion of other strategies to get people out of their cars. Pedestrian and bike facilities are obviously important (Portland, Oregon, a smaller city than Seattle, has six times as many miles of bike lanes) but local government won't get people out of their cars without creating disincentives to drive (tolls, a moratorium on road expansion) and incentives to get around without a car (fast, reliable transit, something Seattle currently lacks). Nickels's plan includes substantial praise for a separate county ballot measure that would pay for $10 million in new bus service a year. But it includes no policy changes at the city level to break Seattle's car addiction.

On that score, Nickels is pushing Seattle backward. Last year, he worked his political will to help kill a 14-mile monorail line, abandoning two remote parts of the city that are ill-served by transit and dooming Seattle to a future in which a single light-rail line and slow, stuck-in-traffic buses are the only available transit options. And despite pledging in his climate plan to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 170,000 tons by "reducing Seattle's dependence on cars," he continues to push for $4 billion-$5 billion tunnel to replace the city's aging Alaskan Way Viaduct on the downtown waterfront-a position that only compounds his failure to stand up for transit. The underground freeway would provide capacity for 140,000 cars a day --the equivalent, coincidentally, of the 170,000 tons of auto-produced carbon Nickels says he wants to eliminate annually. No other city in the nation is building a freeway on its waterfront; in fact, the prevailing trend is to tear freeways down, as Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Portland, Oregon, New York City, San Francisco, and other cities have done.