Catalonia, Spain's Director of Climate Change Policy visited us at SustainLane on Friday to discuss the progress his province is making in carbon emissions inventories. He said his US State Department chaperoned trip was piqued by The SustainLane US City Rankings and we spent much of the visit comparing our sustainability research.
Inaki Gili Jauregui came to SustainLane's San Francisco offices as part of his visit to US cities to investigate which cities are taking the biggest steps in inventorying carbon emissions that contribute to global climate change. Catalonia, which is in northeast Spain and includes beautiful Barcelona, has already inventoried about 40-50 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions by working closely with industries ranging from cement factories to energy producing companies.
The rest of the province's carbon emissions come from "things that you and I do" such as transportation, and those have yet to be inventoried completely. Spain is developing goals for reducing greenhouse gases as part of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which set goals for industrialized nations to reduce their carbon emissions.
Jauregui met with city officials in Chicago (#4 in the SustainLane City Rankings) and San Francisco (#2) as his interest in both cities came from their high rank in our study. Because of the recent greenhouse gas inventories both cities had conducted in 2003, he said such efforts may exceed the rigor of inventories that cities are undergoing in Spain.
Spain's overall greenhouse gas reduction goals as part of Kyoto are being conducted by provinces such as Catalonia and Andulacia and then are fed up into a national model for calculation. The EU nation will determine how close to or far off it is from its Kyoto goals in 2008.
We also discussed the culture of innovation in the Silicon Valley that allows companies to experiment and fail, an approach that would never be attempted in more conservative Europe. Providing an underhanded compliment on our city rankings, he said "such rankings would never be published in Europe unless they were perfect," though he did say they were "the best such rankings of cities that exists."
Jauregui is now off to Oklahoma City, which finished second-to-last in the city rankings, mainly because of its 2 percent public transit use and pervasive sprawl. The word "sprawl" forced a translation from the note-scribbling State Department official, which I heard as "disembodied." I would have added "major export of the United States" but held my tongue.
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