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Daley and his environmental crew unveil the Chicago Climate Change Action Plan
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Today Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, along with his Chief Environmental Officer, Sadhu Johnston, and a bevy of commissioners of relevant departments like Transportation, Water, and Environment, unveiled the Chicago Climate Change Action Plan at Shedd Aquarium.
The actual plan can be found here on ChicagoClimateAction.org. It's pretty meaty, with lots of specific tactics and measurable goals for energy efficient buildings, clean & renewable energy sources, improved transportation options, reduced waste and industrial pollution, and adaptation.
The plan is firmly planted in the "green means green" camp of the environmental movement. One strategy is to retrofit fully half of all residential, commercial, and industrial buildings. That's a lot of work for insulators, installers of high-efficiency boilers, and other contractors.
On the Mayor Daley side of the scale, he was in his usual off-the-cuff form today, but I didn't hear any home-run non-sequiturs. I get the impression that this is a guy who wakes up in the morning, talks to a couple of his brothers, reads the front page of the papers, and goes to whatever event they've got planned for him that day. He reads from the script, and pops off on anything he feels like talking about.
His zingers today were all about the media, CTA haters, and city haters. To wit:
"When I became Mayor, just a few years ago, the press used to sit here and say, 'why is the Mayor planting trees?'. They'd write bad editorials. And I'd tell them, 'your industry cuts them down, and we plant them'".
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"This whole economy-- what's happening today, they're bailing everyone out-- but public transportation always ends up at the end. We've got to do something about that".
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"Cities are no longer the enemy of a natural environment"
The full Climate Change Action Plan can be found here in PDF format.
Update: here's a set of photos I took at the launch.
