Psst ... Pass It On

It's great to see our Cool Cities Campaign in Tom Paine.com's "Pass It On" slot. In case you're not yet familiar with it, Cool Cities is a campaign to further the goals of the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.

Spearheaded by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, the agreement fills the leadership vacuum created by Bush administration policies (or lack thereof) on global warming, by engaging municipalities across America in an effort to meet or exceed the emissions reductions targets stipulated under the Kyoto Protocol. As of July 28, 275 mayors representing nearly 50 million Americans have accepted the challenge.

Nickels, who has been called the "pied piper" of the climate cause, was recently awarded the Sierra Club's Edgar Wayburn Award, along with King County Executive Ron Sims. Named for the much-loved five-term former president of the Sierra Club, the Wayburn Award has traditionally been given to federal lawmakers. When it comes to tackling climate change, however, the real leadership is occurring outside the Beltway.

Sims is a prime example of that leadership. He has been urging Seattleites to take the problem seriously since 1988, when he first attempted to create a county-level office to study the localized effects of global warming. The Seattle Times mocked the effort, accusing the politician of spewing "hyperbolic clouds of rhetorical gas."

"The point is," the editorial continued, "that the sky-is-falling, icecaps-are-melting, oceans-are-rising rhetoric must be tempered by common sense." Last month, the paper ran an apology of sorts in an article headlined: "Global warming: They're not laughing at Ron Sims now."