The Sierra Club posted this on Tuesday:
Nice piece in The New York Times
by Thomas Friedman, about yellow cabs turning green. We can do our
share as individuals to curb carbon emissions and hold off the
consequences of global warming, but what we also need to do--beyond
changing light bulbs--is to change leaders. New York City Mayor Michael
Bloomberg put it simply:
When it comes to health and
safety and environmental issues, government should be setting
standards. What you need are leaders who are willing to push for
standards that are in society’s long-term interest.
Below is the transcript of the piece because I don't think the link is working correctly.
October 21, 2007
Save the Planet: Vote Smart
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
People often ask: I want to
get greener, what should I do? New light bulbs? A hybrid? A solar roof?
Well, all of those things are helpful. But actually, the greenest thing
you can do is this: Choose the right leaders. It is so much more
important to change your leaders than change your light bulbs.
Why? Because leaders write the rules, set the standards and offer
the tax incentives that drive market behavior across a whole city,
state or country. Whatever any of us does individually matters a tiny
bit. But when leaders change the rules, you get scale change across the
whole marketplace. And the energy-climate challenge we face today is a
huge scale problem. Without scale, all you have is a green hobby.
Have no illusions, everything George Bush wouldn’t do on energy
after 9/11 — his resisting improved mileage for cars and actually
trying to weaken air-conditioner standards — swamped any good works you
did. Fortunately, the vacuum in the White House is being filled by
leaders from below.
Take the New York City taxi story. Two years ago, David Yassky, a
City Council member, sat down with one of his backers, Jack Hidary, a
technology entrepreneur, to brainstorm about how to make New York City
greener — at scale. For starters, they checked with the Taxi and
Limousine Commission to see what it would take to replace the old
gas-guzzling Crown Victoria yellow cabs, which get around 10 miles a
gallon, with better-mileage, low-emission hybrids. Great idea, only it
turned out to be illegal, thanks to some old size regulations designed
to favor Crown Vics.
Recalled Mr. Hidary: “When they first told me, I said, ‘Are you serious? Illegal?’” So he formed a nonprofit called SmartTransportation.org
to help Mr. Yassky lobby the City Council to change the laws to permit
hybrid taxis. They also reframed it as a health issue, with the help of
Louise Vetter, president of the American Lung Association of the City
of New York.
“New York City has among the dirtiest air in the U.S.,” Ms. Vetter
said. “When it comes to ozone and particulate matter, New Yorkers are
breathing very unhealthy air. Most of it is tailpipe emissions. And in
New York City, where asthma rates are among the highest in the nation,
the high ozone levels create very serious threats, especially for kids
who spend a lot of time outdoors. Converting cabs from yellow to green
would be a great gift to the city’s children.”
Matt Daus, who heads the taxi commission, which is independent of
the mayor, was initially reluctant, but once he learned of the health
and other benefits, he joined forces with Messrs. Yassky and Hidary,
and the measure passed the City Council by 50 to 0 on June 30, 2005.
Since then, more than 500 taxi drivers have converted to hybrids —
mostly Ford Escapes, but also Toyota Highlanders and Priuses, and
others.
On May 22, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of the greenest mayors in
America, decided to push even further, insisting on a new rule, which
the taxi commission has to approve, that will not just permit but require
all cabs — 13,000 in all — to be hybrids or other low-emission vehicles
that get at least 30 miles a gallon, within five years.
“When it comes to health and safety and environmental issues,
government should be setting standards,” the mayor said. “What you need
are leaders who are willing to push for standards that are in society’s
long-term interest.” When the citizens see the progress, Mr. Bloomberg
added, “then they start to lead.” And this encourages leaders to seek
even higher standards.
I asked Evgeny Freidman, a top New York City fleet operator, how he
liked the hybrids: “Absolutely fabulous! We started out with 18, and
now we have over 200, mostly Ford Escapes. Now we only put hybrids out
there. The drivers are demanding them and the public is demanding them.
It has been great economically. With gas prices as they are, the
drivers are saving $30 dollars a shift.” He said drivers who were
getting 7 to 10 miles a gallon from their Crown Vics were getting 25 to
30 from their hybrids. The cost of shifting to these hybrids, he added,
has not been onerous.
Now Mr. Hidary is trying to get law firms and investment banks,
which use gas-guzzling Town Cars — 12,000 in the city — to demand
hybrid sedans only.
This is how scale change happens. When the Big Apple becomes the
Green Apple, and 40 million tourists come through every year and take
at least one hybrid cab ride, they’ll go back home and ask their
leaders, “Why don’t we have hybrid cabs?”
So if you want to be a green college kid or a green adult, don’t
fool yourself: You can change lights. You can change cars. But if you
don’t change leaders, your actions are nothing more than an expression
of, as Dick Cheney would say, “personal virtue.”
AIRMAP (Air Monitoring, Analysis and Prediction) program eventually
covered 1,500 monitoring sites throughout the northeastern United
States and included the majority of power generating facilities east of
the Mississippi.
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