Cities Will Solve Climate Change, Not Nations
As world leaders gathered at the U.N. to talk about global warming, mayors set about actually doing something about climate change

9-23-2014 | David Biello

In the 1980s, the Chinese city of Shenzhen had some 300,000 mostly impoverished inhabitants. Today that city, the first to experience China’s reforms and economic opening, has more than 15 million residents and also hosts another first in China’s history—a carbon market. Shenzhen’s market to reduce global warming pollution covers some 620 manufacturers and other industries that collectively grew by 9 percent in 2013. The buying and selling of permits to emit carbon dioxide pollution resulted in a drop of 500,000 metric tons in the manufacturing sector and swapping cleaner energy for coal reduced carbon dioxide emissions by an additional 2 million metric tons for the entire city.

“If you can know Shenzhen can do this then you can believe Chinese government can do this as well,” says Tang Jie, vice mayor of one of the largest megacities in China, who says the overall goal is to have total pollution peak as soon as possible. “In 2020, our city will leap over the emission peak. If Shenzhen can make this peak, I think maybe in 10 or 15 years the whole of China can peak.”

As Shenzhen goes—and Beijing, Chongqing and Shanghai, all Chinese cities with new carbon market experiments—so goes China. And as China goes when it comes to spewing carbon dioxide into the sky, so goes the world—China is the world’s largest emitter of global warming pollution and thanks to a growing coal habit the 1.2 billion Chinese now emit as much per person as the roughly 500 million citizens of the European Union.

As world leaders gather at the U.N. on September 23 to reiterate or reveal pledges for action to combat climate change, it is in cities that such actions are actually happening. That could be alternative fuel vehicles in Jinan, China, a program to share electric cars in Paris, or rapid-transit buses in Curitiba, Brazil. Or it could be a massive program to retrofit old buildings here in New York City. At the U.N. summit, 228 cities representing 436 million people committed to avoid more than 2 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas pollution per year going forward under a new global “Compact of Mayors.” And 25 cities pledged to cut methane pollution seeping out of garbage dumps.

More.

It’s a start, but hardly a finish. Much more will need to be done. What is here proposed has not yet been implimented, and if implimented might result is slowing the effects of carbon-based fossil-fuels, fracking, and utterly toxic lithium mining, all of which continues, with signs of increasing, not stepping down to the Zero-Level I would prefer. Over time, though, this, too, may change for the better.