Are you kidding me? Clearly you are not familiar with Boulder. There are few places with a longer, more activist history of avant-garde civic policies than Boulder. It's no surprise that Boulder would be among the first municipalities to take such a step.

I. too, am a little shocked that the author isn't familiar with Boulder's reputation. "College town liberal" is a bit of an insult for a city that headquarters numerous environmental, health and wholistic organizations and has a world wide reputation.

Instead of worrying about an image (one that doesn't at all capture the lively, free spirited Boulder, by the way) maybe you should have read what the local press, environmental organizations, etc had to do to get this passed. There is a LOT more to this story, and a lot has been written about it; a quick google is all it takes. And you might learn something about Boulder in the process.

It would be nice to read a Treehugger post that was a well rounded, well researched and informed post that informed and provided resources to find out more.

Treehugger has blow another chance to inform it's readership.
==== author's response follows ===
We appreciate it when our lively, wise, and worldly readers help out through comments. This works especially well, we have noticed, when a post refers to a place where our writers lack local insights. So thanks!

However, I wonder if you feel the same way about the lengthy NYT story we relied on a main source of information for this post? Did they 'blow it' too?

Until you wrote this comment I had never given any thought about TreeHugger playing a "clearinghouse" role for municipal climate change ordinances. Assuming, as I do, that nothing productive is going to come out of the Federal level anytime soon, this might be a good opportunity to fully document, as you say, what went on with the Boulder initiative -- the key players, the big insights, the trips and mis-steps, opponent's strategies, and so on.

I'll make you a personal committment right now to round this up if you can point me in the right directions. JL

Incidentally, TH has no 'research department'; and no 'editing department.". The time invested writing any given post is a labor-of-love tradeoff against personal committments like a "day job."

My town, Springfield, IL, just got bullied into passing a pretty good clean energy plan. Our public utility finally got city council approval to build a new 200-MW coal plant last November. Through the air permit process, the Sierra Club got involved, and indicated it intended to hold up construction of the plant by appealing the permit. The two negotiated, and produced a pretty good compromise. The city gets its coal plant, sadly, but commits to:

* buy 120 MW of new wind power (about 20% of the city's base load; half of that is just for the state government)
* increase funding for energy efficiency and conservation by a factor of ten ($40,000 to $400,000, with potentially another $1mil from a carbon tax put on energy sold outside of the city)
* lowering emissions of NOx, SOx, and mercury
* committing to Kyoto levels for carbon emissions, for the utility's in-city sales.

It was a pretty ugly process to get it into place, but as of Thursday night, it's officially What We're Doing.
=== author's response follows ====
Must have been a bruiser indeed, given that Springfield is the IL State capital and infused with the lobbying power of big coal (from down-state). Sounds like some of the California approach was incorporated? JL

JL, I applaud your efforts at TH -- the volume of postings is almost too much to keep up with as a reader. But you gotta be careful about speculating on the motivations of communities you're not familiar with. I didn't point out the most insulting part of your commentary:

all those Californians that moved to Colorado, importing and spreading a 'we do it first' kind of climate courage.

You touched a raw nerve there.
=== author's response follows ====
Thanks for the tip.

I have this theory I'm working on which revolves around the flux of pragmatic and innovative green topics. Especially climate mitigation topics. Right now it seems, just intuitively, that TH is catching much of what deserves coverage, but that we're on the edge of coming wave of greenwashing, and "me too" stuff that's about to engulf us via the traditional media. Might think of it as a "green bubble", analogous to the housing bubble or the 'dot-com' bubble.

Anyhow, I'm trying to work out ways to distinguish original work from me-too or from poorly explained (overly general) reports. Clearly the Boulder ordinance is original. But how original I was unsure of.

Admittedly, I used an 'elicitation' technique in this post to see if we could learn via comments how much of this might be California dreaming writ wide and how much of it was green field innovation from seminal local thinkers.

I take it, then, that there are primarily local thinkers behind this ordinance. Hopefully they will surface as the week proceeds and I can elaborate with another post in great detail, including a link to the actual ordinance, that other cities can take advantage of.

As a Boulder Native, I too took offense at the comment, "all those Californians that moved to Colorado, importing and spreading a 'we do it first' kind of climate courage." Boulder is first off home to a bunches of original environmentalist hippies who migrated here 30 to 40 years ago, before the California deluge. Many of these hippies have become yippie entrepreneurs that have the time and the money to spend on promoting good environmental deeds. Ruth Correll, neither a hippie or a yuppy, but instead Boulder's first female mayor and a city council member for something like 20 years was instrumental in the implementation of the blue line, which prevents building in the mountain parks area and directly in the city's view of the mountains. Will Toor another longtime mayor (current county commissioner) was also the head of CUs environmental Center for a good 10 years or more. Will Toor is basically responsible for the City's and the universities recycling program. Incidentally, neither Will nor Ruth is from California. Given the long history of leaders like Will and Ruth, in addition to the fact that Boulder is home to NCAR (not on the outskirts, but smack in the middle of town and the ONLY building marring the blue line), NOAA, and the University of Colorado, it should be no surprise that this legislation was passed. Incidentally, the City of Boulder has also committed to a Zero Waste program, in which numerous local businesses and schools are already willing participants.

A few very Boulder links:

http://ecenter.colorado.edu/about_us/will.html
http://www.boulderbiodiesel.com/
http://www.ecofuturesbuilding.com/
http://www.resourceyard.org/
http://www.carshare.org/
http://www.whdc.com/
http://www.solarrow.com/

Boulder’s nick name is “40 square miles surrounded by reality.” I used to think this was an insult, but these days my treehugger self is proud to herald from a city whose citizens try to care.
==== author's response follows ====
Thanks Alison. My 'outskirts' error was taken from Wikipedia. Will fix ASAP.

Yabbut, this is really just a half-measure, since about half of the carbon released in the U.S is from cars and "light trucks" (http://environment.about.com/od/globalwarming/a/autoemissions.htm). Boulder is only taxing electricity used in the home.

about half of the carbon released in the U.S is from cars and "light trucks

It's 16%.

You have to wonder what this tax will do to the sale of Renewable Enegy Credits (RECs, or Green Tags) within city limits for those that are paying the tax. Will it reduce offsetting? Even though it's not an offset, will people feel that they've already contributed financially to reducing their carbon impact?

Anonymous 16%: I posted a link that mentions a study that backs up my statement.

Do you mean to say that we should believe you instead just because you say so?

Per Steveo's comment on the tax being a half measure since it does not tax mobile fuel sources - this is quite true. It clearly would be preferable to have a true carbon tax, which would tax electricity, natural gas, and mobile fuel use. However, there were several factors that went into the decision to only tax electricity. First, a GHG inventory for Boulder showed that electricity use was the largest source of GHG emissions and the fastest growing source. Second, there is some real virtue to simplicity when placing a tax measure on the ballot. Third, there are greater social equity issues associated with natural gas use (electricity use scales very much with house size, and rich people use a lot more of it; poor people are much more likely to have older houses or rentals which are less efficient in use of natural gas). Finally, when it comes to vehicle fuels, the Colorado Constitution does not allow local governments to enact a gas tax.

Commissioner Toor --

Thanks for your comments. I can certainly understand your constraints under the law. Taxing carbon in the home is a commendable start.

Anonymous 16%: I posted a link that mentions a study that backs up my statement.

You need to pay closer attention to your own source. Here is what it actually says:

"U.S. automobiles and light trucks are responsible for nearly half of all greenhouse gases emitted by automobiles globally"

This is not the same as your claim:
"half of the carbon released in the U.S is from cars and 'light trucks'"

Do you mean to say that we should believe you instead just because you say so?

The 16% figure I gave was a correction to your assertion. And no, you shouldn't just accept something because I say so. But I didn't think it was necessary to go into too much detail, since you had already demonstrated you weren't even properly comprehending your own source, and because 50% is nowhere near the actual number.

But, here's the numbers and the source, if you want confirmation.

First, one needs to distinguish between actual CO2 emissions and greenhouse gas emissions as a whole (usually reported in CO2 equivalent terms). One also needs to decide whether land-use change and forestry, as well as international bunker fuels, are going to be included in the calculation.

The "16%" figure I came up with is the percentage of US greenhouse gas emissions from light vehicles (ie, cars and light trucks), excluding land-use changes, but including bunker fuels. The total for all that was 7,074.4 Tg CO2 eq. as of 2004.

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/downloads06/06ES.pdf
(see Table Table ES-2)

The amount from light vehicles was 1,162.4 Tg CO2 [eq.].

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/downloads06/06Energy.pdf
(see Table 3-7)

1,162.4/7,074.4 = 16%

If one were just strictly speaking about CO2 (and not other greenhouse gases), then the total US emissions (before land-use/forestry sinks) in 2004 was 6,293.8 Tg.

1,162.4/6,293.8 = 18%

It's most common to track all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as opposed to strictly CO2, but since CO2 is by far the biggest source of GHG emissions, it doesn't tend to effect the contribution percentage that much, as you can see from those two calculations above.

I haven't looked into the accuracy of the claim from that about.com page (sourced from the NRDC), but it sounds close to about what it should be, and probably a bit high if it's not accurate (since the US accounts for 37% of transportation sector emissions as a whole).

http://pdf.wri.org/navigating_numbers_chapter12.pdf

But that's not really relevant with respect to the claim that you made on this thread.

Thanks, Anonymous, for your detailed analysis. I apologize for posting the wrong URL.

However, using the table ES-2 you quoted above, I see that in 2000, "fossil fuel combustion" accounted for about 94% of all CO2 emitted (5533 / 5864).

Then at http://www.rightofway.org/research/newoilage.pdf
in Table 1 (page 8), I see that cars and trucks (including frieght this time) use a total of 53.4% of all "oil" products.

94% of 53.4 is 50.2% -- which is what I had in mind when I remembered the 50% figure, but I, in my haste, grabbed a wrong URL to back it up.

I can't explain why this differs so much from your 18% figure, though.

However, using the table ES-2 you quoted above, I see that in 2000, "fossil fuel combustion" accounted for about 94% of all CO2 emitted (5533 / 5864).

Then at http://www.rightofway.org/research/newoilage.pdf
in Table 1 (page 8), I see that cars and trucks (including frieght this time) use a total of 53.4% of all "oil" products.

94% of 53.4 is 50.2% -- which is what I had in mind when I remembered the 50% figure, but I, in my haste, grabbed a wrong URL to back it up.

I can't explain why this differs so much from your 18% figure, though.

The main error in that reasoning is that oil and fossil fuels are not the same thing. Oil is a fossil fuel, yes, but so are coal and natural gas.

If you go back to that second link in my previous post (the one ending in 06Energy.pdf), you can take a look at Figure 3-2. It's a quick graphical representation of inputs and emissions flows. You'll see how petroleum combustion emissions comprise about 44% of fossil fuel combustion emissions in the US. The detailed numbers are in Table 3-3.

Looking at that table, you'll see under "Petroleum" a subsection for "Transportation". Light vehicles generally account for about 65% of total transportation energy use in the US.

http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_04_06.html

("Passenger car and motorcycle" and "Other 2-axle 4-tire vehicle" are the same as "light vehicles")

The other thing is that not all fossil fuels are created equal when it comes to emissions. Generally, coal puts out the most CO2 per unit of energy, followed by petroleum products, then natural gas.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/coefficients.html

Regardless, if you were just estimating based on energy use (ignoring emissions coefficients), you'd take petroleum's share of CO2 emissions (2,279.3/5,656.6 = 40%), transportation's share of petroleum emissions (1,731.4/2,279.3 = 76%) then take light vehicle's share of transportation use (65%) and multiply those three percentages together.

40% * 76% * 65% = 20%

That puts it in the right ballpark.

I appreciate your patience, Anonymous. It all makes sense now.

Here's one more quote I found:

"Based on current greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reporting guidelines, the transportation sector directly accounted for approximately 27 percent of total U.S. GHG emissions in 2003."

http://www.epa.gov/otaq/greenhousegases.htm

I appreciate your patience, Anonymous. It all makes sense now.

No problem. You just kind of have ot wade into it and sit with it for awhile. A lot of the nomenclature is confusing when you first start examining the data.

Here's one more quote I found: "Based on current greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reporting guidelines, the transportation sector directly accounted for approximately 27 percent of total U.S. GHG emissions in 2003."

Yep.

If you go back to that 06Energy.pdf document, they cover the transportation sector on pages 3-8 to 3-10, though it's limited to CO2 emissions, not total GHG emissions. Table 307, which I mentioned earlier, has all the specific end-use data by mode.

In terms of CO2 emissions, the four biggest overall polluters, in descending order, are automobiles (33%), light trucks (27%), commercial trucks (19%), and airplanes (12%) -- a total of 91% of transportation sector CO2 emissions.

Fun, wonky stuff.

Cheers.

What a bunch of kooks. From what I've read about Boulder, it's an enclave of spoiled, rich limousine liberals. You know the kind, like Al Gore and Barbra Steisand, that live a certain way and tell us all to live a different way. Typical on the left.

In addition to the carbon tax (and it is on business use as well as home use),

Transportation: Boulder is a Gold Medal bike city and has excellent public transit for what is a small town. They provide electric car refueling parking spots at city facilities.

Waste: The city has instituted a Zero Waste plan, helping events and businesses re-route what would normally go to landfills into recycling and composting.

Local Infrastructure: One thing Boulder is famous for is their greenbelt. They placed limits on sprawl in the late 70's and today there are still active farms within a close bike ride from the city center. The density the greenbelt encouraged means lots of walkable neighborhoods and a very pleasant place to be carless in.

Of course, making these decisions (and being people who choose to live here) so far ahead of the curve is what causes people to call Boulder an enclave of nutcases, but we're also proof that there is another way to be an American city and to be *happy* doing it.