Think Globally, Act Santa Monically

Photo by Elizabeth Perrin

As recreationeers mill around licking ice creams and waiting their turn, the giant Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier turns against a perfect sky. Overhead, seagulls squawk belligerently, demanding crumbs, while beneath us, the sea splashes indolently against the pylons. It’s a scene that could be straight out of the early 20th century, until you look over to the roofs of the kiosk and the nearby buildings, where banks of photovoltaic cells suck up sunlight to power the fun. Collectively, the steel-blue racks of panels generate 50 kilowatts of power, enough to provide the yearly energy needs of the world’s first solar-powered Ferris wheel.

“It’s a ‘net zero’ energy facility,” Craig Perkins explained to me during a drive-by tour of the area. It is also an emblem of a future that Perkins, who is Santa Monica’s director of environmental and public-works management, envisions for the city as a whole. Over the past year, Perkins’ department conducted a study of rooftops and has identified 17,500 structures as suitable locations for photovoltaics. Added up, they would constitute 24 million square feet of space from which sunlight could be captured to channel energy into the electric grid. If the entire area were covered in solar panels, Perkins says, they would generate a total of 103 megawatts. Given that the city’s yearly power consumption is between 150 and 200 megawatts, well over half the community’s energy could come from the sun. By pursuing various energy-reduction programs, Perkins says, the entire city could become a net-zero-power consumer.

Cutting down power bills saves the city money; it also saves the atmosphere by cutting down emissions of the greenhouse gases that are the key contributors to global warming. Santa Monica is at the forefront of an emerging movement of cities that are beginning to think globally and act locally to combat this insidious trend. Perkins’ department will be putting before the Santa Monica City Council a proposal that would commit the city to reducing its greenhouse-gas output to 15 percent to 20 percent below 1990 levels — two or three times the reduction set by the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty that addresses global warming (and which the United States has not signed). But Perkins wants the city to do even better. If all the innovations his department has identified were put into practice, he says, Santa Monica could reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by 63 percent.

Such actions are becoming increasingly critical. A recent paper in The Journal of Climate reported that a sophisticated computer simulation had revealed that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (the leading greenhouse gas) are currently on course to double from preindustrial levels by 2070. After that, things go from bad to worse, with levels predicted to triple by 2120, and quadruple by 2160. The simulation predicted that climate warming would reveal itself most strongly in the Arctic, a result consistent with trends already being seen in the region. This summer, the floating cap of Arctic sea ice shrank to the smallest size ever seen in a century of record keeping, and in July, scientists studying Greenland glaciers reported that the rate at which one of the largest, the Kangerdlugssuaq glacier, is spilling into the sea has increased threefold since the last time it was measured, in 1988. The Greenland ice sheet contains enough ice that were it to melt, sea levels would rise by 7 meters, inundating coastal cities the world over.

From the tropics also comes grim news. Three recent studies have found evidence that storm activity is increasing. In August, Emanuel Kerry at MIT reported in Science that the destructive power of cyclones has increased by 50 percent over the past half-century, while a study from the Georgia Institute of Technology revealed a near doubling in the number of Katrina-style category 4 and 5 storms over the past 35 years. Almost all climatologists believe these trends are a direct result of global warming due to increasing greenhouse gases.

In the pantheon of environmental problems facing our planet, few loom so large, and the flurry of recent data is sure to intensify debate at the next round of the Kyoto talks, which take place in Montreal at the end of this month (November 28–December 9). The Montreal meeting, which is the 11th session of what is formally known as the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Climate Change Convention, will be the largest intergovernmental climate conference since the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997 — some 10,000 participants from all levels of government are expected to attend. Moreover, the introduction in Europe of a trading system for greenhouse-gas emission credits is also attracting unprecedented business interest. Perkins, who has been working on environmental issues for Santa Monica for more than two decades, notes that humanity has reached a critical juncture and can no longer afford the luxury of runaway emissions. “When you frame your analysis in terms of the next 25 years,” he says, “it really makes a difference to what you do.”

In March, Santa Monica Mayor Pam O’Connor was one of 10 mayors who decreed a resolution calling on local governments across the country to take the lead in combating global warming. In a letter sent to 400 mayors from Long Beach to Long Island, the 10 initial signatories, spearheaded by Seattle’s Greg Nickols, urged their counterparts to sign an agreement committing their municipalities “to meet or beat” the target levels set at Kyoto. Dubbed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, it asks city councils to adopt concrete action plans such as increasing the fuel efficiency of their fleets, converting city vehicles to biofuels, creating “compact, walkable urban communities” and promoting tree planting to absorb CO2.

The mayors’ action was precipitated by a singular lack of leadership on the part of the Bush administration. On February 16, the Kyoto Protocol became law for the 150 countries that had signed on. Those who have ratified it are now obliged to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to an average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels. Had the U.S. been among them, it would have been required to reduce its emissions by 7 percent. Although the U.S. accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s population, it produces more than a quarter of all greenhouse-gas emissions, with a per capita output more than double that of its nearest rivals.