Eugene weekly., June 10, 2004, Page 14, Image 14

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. . . our already dry summers will get warmer and water in streams will diminish. Winters will see big
rainstorms but less snow. That translates into more winter flooding and less water storage — bad news
for summer drinking water, for fish, for agriculture and for forests — and more work for firefighters.
“In broad terms, obviously global warming is a serious issue
that both government and the private sector should be working
on aggressively,” he says. “The city of Eugene government has
certainly got an ethic of environmental sensitivity.”
He cites efforts including improving the energy efficiency
of existing city buildings, designing new buildings such as the
library based on green building principles and buying hybrid
vehicles for the city fleet. In the last two months, Eugene
switched its diesel vehicles to biodeisel.
“Certainly we could always do better,” Kelly says. “But the
bottom line to me is what
are the day-to-day actions
of the city government
rather than what have we
signed or not signed.”
Scientists are banding
together, too. West Coast
ocean researchers expect
$500 million in federal
funding in 2007 to estab-
lish an Integrated Ocean
Observing System, which
will help catch new signs
of climate change.
And even Oregon’s
landmark land-use laws
help, by reducing sprawl
and the driving that
accompanies it.
“The largest part of our
greenhouse-gas problem
here on the West Coast is transportation, and that really ties
back to land use,” says Patrick Mazza of Climate Solutions in
Seattle, a nonprofit that advocates for policies and actions that
reduce greenhouse gasses. “If you have a poor-mileage vehicle
that only gets 20 miles to the gallon, you’re basically popping
out a little carbon dioxide brick onto the road every 20 miles.”
California offers major support for solar innovations,
and is working to implement controversial caps on carbon
emissions from cars. And very significantly, California
requires that 20 percent of all energy used in the state by
2017 must come from renewable energy sources such as
wind or solar — a move that will drive development of
those technologies. Twelve other states have similar stan-
dards, including Texas, where the law was signed, ironical-
ly, by then-Gov. Bush.
Not everyone agrees. George Taylor, Oregon’s state clima-
tologist based at OSU in Corvallis, says conservation is good,
and adapting to weather extremes can only help. But Taylor
doesn’t believe humans are changing world weather and so
doesn’t favor putting money into reducing carbon at the
expense of reducing sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide —
or making sure more people have access to clean water.
“I don’t think the science of global warming is settled, even
though some people say it is,” Taylor says. “I don’t necessar-
ily feel that I’m correct on this issue, but I think at the very
least that this is an issue that has at least two sides.”
But Mazza believes that cleaning up carbon dioxide has
many benefits, not just to slow global warming.
“Even if we weren’t confronted by climate change … we’d
want to find better and cleaner ways to power our vehicles,
and ways we don’t have to use our vehicles as much,” he says.
“We’d want to figure out ways to generate our electricity more
cleanly. There’re so many benefits to this.”
6. THERE’S MORE WORK TO BE DONE
Although Oregon is leading many innovations, Mazza
says “I have to admit that California is kicking our butt.”
Orna Izakson is a former contributing editor to EW, and recently published a
chapter in the book Feeling the Heat: Dispatches from the Frontlines of
Climate Change (Jim Motavalli, ed., Routledge, 2004) on the effects of a
changing climate on marine ecology along the California coast.
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