Climate Group Review Results and Slimming Down Report

[James Kempf]

Team,
The results of the Climate Group review are back and available on the GoogleGroups Web site. The Climate Group made a high level recommendation that the report be reduced in size since it is unlikely to be read to completion in its current form. Steve Attinger sent a request that each WG reduce the number of recommendations to 4 (which would result in a report of around 100 pages).
I'd like to propose that we move three of our recommendations from the report to Bruce England's Wiki and add a short paragraph in the introduction explaining that we did this. I think that we can also keep the moved recommendations in the Executive Summary. The recommendations I'd suggest moving and the reasons are:
Recommendation 3: Measure Airline Travel
Reason: This recommendation seems unlikely to result in any specific action by the council because it would be too hard to implement and there would be no effective measures that the council could take to incent or otherwise cause mitigation of carbon emissions. One could effectively argue that emissions from business travel should be accounted to the businesses and they should be the organizations responsible for mitigating emissions. As for personal airline travel, San Jose and Oakland have now begun to count emissions from their airports in their municipal inventory, and we are recommending that the Council do the same for Moffett Field, in Recommendation 7. It seems likely that ICLEI will ultimately add airline emissions to its measurement methodology, since they are clearly the largest source of emissions that are currently not accounted for. I'd also like to suggest that we move Recommendation #7 to #3 in priority, because I think we all agree
that airline emissions are a top priority, and emissions from Moffett are something the city can count.
Recommendation #4: City Page on Business/Individual Action
Reason: The Climate Group pointed out that the city actually needs to do more than simply put up a Web page and calculators, it needs to work together with businesses and individuals to educate them and provide guidance about how to reduce carbon emissions. They also provided a couple of pointers to other organizations that partner with cities to do this. Many of the other WG recommendations contain suggestions for how the city can provide guidance on emissions reductions, so this recommendation seems redundant. I'd suggest we replace this with a sentence in Recommendation #1 saying that the city should partner with the organizations such as those mentioned by the Climate Group comment to help residents and businesses achieve the recommended goals.
Recommendation #6: Bruce Kaney has already requested that we modify this recommendation to be a specific city action, and the action is something like "work with PG&E to...". Again, this isn't something that the city can really accomplish on its own, though it could ask PG&E to do it, but it is unlikely that PG&E would do it unless they were forced to by the state PUC (which regulates the electricity industry) or they saw significant advantage to their business. Though one could make a coherent argument about some significant advantage, I think it not likely that it would be sufficiently convincing. It would be different if Mountain View had a municipal utility like Palo Alto, and, in fact, Recommendation #5 on water bill changes, now significantly beefed up with some ideas from the Water WG's report, *is* something the city can act on.
Most of the other comments were fairly straightforward and I am planning on integrating them into the document this week. I should have a completed document on the Web site by Friday for people's review.
If you feel strongly about moving the recommendations, please send email to the list *BY FRIDAY* and we can discuss it. I need to have the Climate Group comments and any other changes integrated into the report and send the report to the copyeditor by Monday. Unfortunately, this does not give much time for discussion, since I will be out of email contact on Saturday, but we can continue to discuss and possibly provide the copyeditor with some updated text next week if there are some changes that people really feel are needed.
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[Attinger, Steve]

Hi James,

As a point of clarity, I did NOT request that each WG reduce their recommendations to four. That was simply something that the Climate Group suggested as a possibility. Personally, I think having up to 5 per WG would be ideal, but this is not a formal request.

I do feel, however, that the report as it is will not be read very carefully. It's simply information overload.

Steve

[James Kempf]

OK, thanx for the correction.
            jak