LA Weekly

Santa Monica has been thinking seriously about global warming since at least 1994, when it adopted its first Sustainable City Plan. [Craig] Perkins, [the city's director of environmental management], explains that there are three core elements to the greenhouse-gas reduction strategy: cutting down on energy consumption, improving energy efficiency and generating power from renewable sources. Six years ago, on Perkins’ advice, the City Council decided that all the city’s electricity would come from what is known as “green power.” At the time it was still possible to opt out of the big suppliers like San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison and buy electricity on the open market from smaller providers. Back then, green power was more expensive, but over the past decade, the price of regular power has increased, so the council is now getting a cheaper rate than Los Angeles and other nearby cities, which no longer have the choice of buying on the open market. (That’s another little-known consequence of the state’s disastrous electricity crisis.) According to Perkins, the city of Santa Monica is the largest purchaser of green power in the state and the 17th largest in the nation, which, he notes, “either says a lot about us or is a sorry comment on everyone else.”

Can one city put a dent in global warming? Or is green power just good economics? Read my colleague and friend Margaret Wertheim's story (in the LA Weekly) on Santa Monica's effort to reduce CO2 emissions and cut its energy costs, too. It's good.

Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)