Cities want to lead global warming fight
Today, the Washington Post’s front page story is about “Cities Take Lead On Environment…” as if that’s a bad thing that the Bush Administration hasn’t done enough to curb “global warming” Now I’m not going to discuss whether or not global warming is real – I’m not a scientist, but I have my own opinions on it. What I’d rather point out is that this should be local issue and not a job of the federal government. It’s the essence of what separates the Left and the Right.
The WaPo piece, excerpted;
To the long list of evils being blamed on global warming — hurricanes, heat waves, melting ice caps — tack on the smaller interior of Steve Benesoczky’s cab. Inside, his passengers can already feel the squeeze of climate change in their knees.
“Of course it’s less comfortable. Look, there’s less leg room,” said Benesoczky, 55, as he pointed to the back of his new taxi — a hybrid Ford Escape.
The company Benesoczky works for has started complying with a new directive ordering New York’s entire fleet of 13,000 yellow cabs to go green over the next five years — part of an effort by the nation’s largest city to cut its carbon emissions 30 percent by 2030.
Most taxis here are now roomy-if-gas-guzzling Ford Crown Victorias. But hundreds of boxy hybrid cabs have already hit the roads, gradually altering the autoscape of Manhattan’s glittering byways.
“Some people are complaining — especially the tall ones — but most are saying, ‘Finally, you’re doing something for the environment,’ ” said Benesoczky, a Hungarian émigré and New York City cabbie of two-and-a-half decades. “Look, people will make a little sacrifice if they have to. They already are.”
New York is among a faction of U.S. cities from Boston to Portland, Ore., that are racing ahead of the federal government in setting carbon emission targets and developing concrete strategies to deal with climate change. Their solutions are already beginning to alter the fabric of life for millions of urban dwellers.
It is a direct consequence, municipal officials and analysts say, of the growing perception inside city halls that the Bush administration has largely ignored an issue that has reached a tipping point in American culture.
Well, that’s the way it should be – if local government doesn’t think the Feds are doing enough for their communities, they absolutely should take the lead. The same with unemployment and welfare and the whole myriad of issues facing individual communities. Why should they sit around and wait for some fat bureuocrat to make a sweeping decision that should only be applied to a small area instead of the whole country?
Why should a family in Arkansas pay for the environmental cleanup of Onondaga Lake in Syracuse, NY? Why can’t the Feds push responsibility down to the people who have the greatest stake in their local environment? And it gives locals a greater say, and more political control, in what the priorities should be on local problems instead of waiting for a years-long administrative process waiting for the feds to make decisions?
How realistic is it for the Feds to declare that taxis should all be hybrid cars when it doesn’t make sense for a guy driving a country hack in Backwoods, Idaho or Turkeyfoot Hollow, West Virginia? If these local governments want to regulate their citizens, they don’t need the feds’ blessings. That’s what this government is all about, any-damn-way.
What does the Labor Department in Washington, DC know about training unemployed workers in Eugene, Oregon? Why does it make sense for Congress to mandate a minimum wage that’s applied nationally, despite the varied cost-of-living across the country? A business trying to pay the minimum wage in DC wouldn’t have any employees since even McDonald’s starts workers a few bucks-an-hour over minimum wage.
A national environmental policy is just as useless. It’s about time States and municipal governments did their job instead of passing stupid no-smoking bans and cell-phone-usage-while-driving laws. The Code of Federal Regulations’ biggest titles are the Environmental Protection and Public Health series – maybe we could cut Federal taxes if more local governments took up leadership on these two problems that aren’t even mentioned in the Constitution as Federal government responsibilities.
Oh, and if global warming is such a serious problem, why is the Federal government still working under the same regulations as the Clinton-GORE administration? Did it just become a problem when this administration moved to Washington?
And if people are so ready to make sacrifices, why haven’t they? Governments wouldn’t have to regulate if that statement were true. Where are the hybrid cars on the road?
And it’s a little bit funny that almost the whole country mandates recycling, except the residents of Washington, DC don’t. I haven’t seen fewer cars on DC streets or an increase in public transportation use here.
I guess it’s the responsibility of the rest of the country to make sacrifices for the denizens of DC. That would explain the “do as I say, not as I do” attitude here.
