Cities Around World Find Ways To Stop Global Warming

While world leaders gather here this week to posture, horse trade and bicker over how to combat global warming, a quiet revolution is under way in local communities across the globe that are not waiting for an international treaty before they act.

The movement already involves 100 million people in 202 cities around the world that account for 5 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, the major byproduct of energy use blamed for destabilizing climate change.

Such important greenhouse gas-emitters as Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Chicago have joined the campaign and have already reduced their emissions by installing new streetlights and reducing traffic.

In Burlington, Vt., the only New England city participating in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, a program that uses the waste steam from a wood-burning facility to produce heat for the University of Vermont and the area’s largest teaching hospital is expected to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 7 percent, or 30,000 tons annually.

Mayors from Miami to Harare, Zimbabwe, who have joined the council say the key to fighting devastating climate change is to follow the old saw: Think globally, act locally.

Burlington, which joined the program early last year, set a reduction target of 20 percent of its 1990 carbon dioxide levels by 2010.

For starters, the city began capturing methane gas emitted from landfills for electricity, replaced electric heat in all low- and moderate-income housing with more efficient natural gas, donated florescent bulbs that last five years, and required an energy-efficiency upgrade when any apartment building is sold.

Forty-nine cities have joined the council since the U.S. campaign began in 1995, six years after the world campaign began in Toronto.

Together, they represent 25 million Americans and 7percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Boston and Cambridge officials have been approached, but have not yet joined, officials said.