Greg Nickels, Mayor of Seattle, speaks at REFF West

Event: REFF West 2008

Speaker(s): Greg Nickels

Media Type: Transcript

It is a great pleasure to join with you bright and early this morning to talk about an issue that is of great concern to each and every one of us that is a member of the human species -- and who have children and hope that our children have children. 

As Michael Eckhart said in introducing me, renewable energy and energy efficiency are issues that I have been involved in very directly and intimately for the last 3 or 4 years. But I have to admit to you that when I became Mayor of Seattle in 2002 this was not on the front burner. 

We were suffering from the recession following 9/11.  The Boeing Company had laid off some 30,000 people in commercial airplane manufacturing.  Nobody was visiting, so the hospitality industry was suffering. And the dot com bust had hit us very hard.  So the economy, getting people back to work, and obviously following that attack, keeping people safe—those were the things on the front burner in 2002.

I thought that global warming was something that I was concerned about as a human being, but I figured it was being taken care of by the federal government and policymakers, and then it was something that was off in the future sometime, and an issue for far far away places like Las Vegas and Phoenix maybe, but not Seattle.  But that changed for me in 2004 or 2005, when we experienced an extraordinarily warm and dry winter.  And that was a tragedy for skiers because the ski season was cancelled, but for me as mayor it went a lot deeper.  

We have relied for over 100 years on sustainable systems to provide energy and water for our people.  We relied on snowpack in the Cascade Mountains, and when the snow doesn’t come, we don’t have electricity and we don’t have water.  And the trend since WWII has been very clearly downward.  And the Mayor of Takoma and I at some point that winter had a press conference encouraging people to shower together to save water.  And that’s pretty radical even here in Seattle. 

So as the Kyoto Protocol was becoming law in 141 countries but not the United States, it seemed to me to be a good time to step up and to say that in this city, we were going to find a way to reduce emissions to the amount called for in that treaty.  But we also knew that if it was only Seattle it would be purely symbolic.  And it is hard to ask people to change their lives for purely symbolic reasons. 

So that’s why I asked mayors across the country to change with me.  And each of those 884 mayors has pledged to reduce their emissions by 7% from 1990 levels by 2012.  And there is some great and creative work that is happening around the country as a result of that.  We’ve been able to send a message to the rest of the world that there is indeed intelligent life in America.  And that’s been a nice message to be able to send…and hopefully a week from today we will send that at the federal level as well. 

So that was then.  What are we doing now?  We felt that it was very important that we walk our talk in Seattle.  That we not just sign a piece of paper and make declarations but that we actually find on-the-ground ways to keep the promise that we made, in part as a responsibility to the constituents in Seattle who expect us when we say something to follow through on it, but also as part of our responsibility in this city, to lead the way by getting those other mayors to sign on and take whatever political risk that it might take in cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Kansas City, Missouri.  They deserve to have Seattle to point to as a place that was following through and that they could emulate. 

So we found a lot of different ways to make a difference in our carbon footprint.  We continue to try to break the envelope on that.  In Seattle, our electric company is owned by the people of Seattle—it’s called Seattle City Light—and it’s the first major electrical utility in America to have zero net greenhouse gas emissions, and we’re very proud of that.  But we have an advantage. We don’t burn a lot of coal.  Instead, we rely on that snow melt, to run water through turbines, and we found some ways to offset any of the other emissions that we have through our operations.  One of the ways we do that is when cruise ships come into Seattle to take tourists to Alaska, those cruise ships turn off their huge diesel engines when they’re in our port, and they plug into the electric grid. We along with Juneau, Alaska, were the first cities to allow those cruise ships to do what is called cold ironing.  And we’re proud of that.

So the question, then, is where do we go from here?  The Kyoto Protocol is not the be-all or end-all.  It was the first step that was a significant step because it was the first time the community of nations came together in common cause that did not involve war, to meet a threat to our planet, a challenge to our species’ future.

I think the fact that you are gathered today in Seattle is an example of why I am hopeful.  If we had gathered here in 2005 in Seattle, I suspect that most of the folks in the room would have been from non-profits, would’ve been advocates, would’ve been folks that knew that there was a huge problem and were trying to get political attention to it.  Today, most of the people in this room are business people, hard-nosed—I’ve seen some very sharp pencils—trying to figure out how we get this done in terms of business innovation and in terms of financial innovation. 

And I think that this is a huge step forward, because the way that we’re going to resolve this, I believe, is through the kind of creative, innovative entrepreneurship that has been the hallmark of places like Seattle for generations. 

If you think about Seattle, it’s a very innovative place.  Bill Boeing came here, decided to build airplanes that led to the 707, that created the jet age, that shrunk our globe.  Bill Gates and Paul Allen developing software here that led to the information age, that helped to shrink our globe.  And most of all the folks at Starbucks who figured out how to charge $3 for a $.50 cup of coffee are from here.

We are a very creative city.  And it is going to be that creative energy, not particularly in government, but in the private sector, that is going to help find the answers for how we power our buildings and our transportation systems so that we don’t toast the planet.

There is also some very good news in terms of what is going on on the ground throughout the country.  The 884 mayors that have signed on to the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement represent all 50 states.  And the most enthusiastic members in fact are from places you might not associate with environmental causes.  But they see a great opportunity, an economic opportunity, the idea of green jobs as a way to expand and protect opportunity for their people.

When I first announced this, the mayor of Milwaukee came up to me and said, “there is no way we’re ever going to sign onto this Mayor Nickels.  We are the home of Briggs and Stratton.  They make internal combustion engines, and we cannot afford to have more people out of work in Milwaukee.”  Six months later he signed on.  He signed because he figured out a way to talk about this issue in terms of economic opportunity in Milwaukee. 

When Barack Obama visited our city in January he wanted to go see a green business.  And we took him to see a business in South Seattle called McKinstry Company.  McKinstry is a 60 year old family business.  It started as a plumbing and heating contractor.  It evolved in the 70s and 80s as an HVAC contractor or a mechanical contractor.  And today it employs 700 people in Seattle and throughout the country.  Their average wage and benefit package is $100,000 per employee, and what we saw when we were there was a combination of things—a factory floor where they were building the systems and a computer control room where they were monitoring the energy use in a factory in El Paso, Texas, and a school in Pascau, Washington.  And they were adjusting that energy use based on what they saw in those systems and in those buildings.  They are today an environmental engineering firm.  They are figuring out how to get the most bang for our BTUs.  They have figured out what it takes to be a green business and they’re creating great jobs. 

We have an opportunity to create millions of those changes as a country and as a world, and the energy that you bring here in terms of the innovative mechanisms and alternative energy sources, and how we finance those and how we develop good, solid public policy that promotes that—that is going to take us a long way. 

So it is my pleasure to welcome you to Seattle; we’re glad that you’re here.  Work hard, and have some fun. 

Thank you.