Sunday, September 1, 2013

Mayors at odds with interests of oil industry

The Boston Globe: "...One vivid example of the kind of cooperation Barber believes can empower the world’s mayors took shape after the United States withdrew from the Kyoto Protocols—an international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—and more than 130 American cities pledged to meet the treaty’s targets anyway. In Los Angeles, that meant modifying the city’s ports. In New York, it meant insulating old buildings. Elsewhere it meant promoting public transportation. Today, more than 1,000 American mayors—from towns and cities whose population totals almost 89 million, more than a quarter of the country’s population—have signed on to the agreement.

To Barber, who founded a group called the Interdependence Movement to press his case, that cooperation amounts to a new era of global governance, one that offers a way through policy obstructions at the national level. “What’s happening in an interdependent world is issues of transportation, immigration, climate, and banking become global, and cities have been better at dealing with one another and talking about these issues than nation-states have,” Barber said. “Los Angeles and Shanghai talk a lot about common port problems with one another, while the US and China are still locked in ideological battles that make that much more difficult....”

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