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May 16, 2007 9:28 am US/Eastern
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Clinton's Program Calls For Green Makeover Of NYC
NEW YORK (CBS/AP) ―
Sixteen cities around the world will begin cutting carbon emissions by renovating city-owned buildings with green technology under a program financed by major global banking institutions and organized by former President Clinton's foundation.
Clinton was to announce the partnership Wednesday, joined by mayors of several of the cities, as part of an international climate summit he is hosting this week in New York City with Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It is the second meeting of the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit, which was created so mayors and local governments could share strategies for reversing the trends of climate change.
Clinton's foundation described the details ahead of the announcement. To start, Citi, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, UBS and ABN Amro have each committed $1 billion to finance upgrades of municipal buildings in the participating cities, which include New York, Chicago, Houston, Toronto, Mexico City, London, Berlin, Tokyo and Rome.
The building makeovers will include replacing heating, cooling and lighting systems with energy-efficient networks; making roofs white or reflective to deflect more of the sun's heat; sealing windows and installing new models that let more light in and keep the elements out; and setting up sensors to control more efficient use of lights and air conditioning.
Clinton's foundation said the planned changes could reduce energy use by 20 to 50 percent in those buildings. The reduction could mean a significant decrease in heat-trapping carbon emissions, as well as savings on utility bills.
Buildings often represent a city's worst culprits in contributing to overall emissions. In New York, for example, the consumption of electricity, natural gas, fuel oil and steam needed to operate buildings generates 79 percent of the city's total carbon count.
Ira Magaziner, chairman of the Clinton Climate Initiative, said cities and private building owners would like to build and renovate with more energy efficiency, but often cannot put up the initial costs. The partnership will make that possible and benefits everyone involved, he said.
"They're going to save money, make money, create jobs and have a tremendous collective impact on climate change all at once," Clinton said in a statement.
With the money from the banks, cities will get the green technology at no cost. The program assumes that cities already have money set aside for building operations and will pay back the bank loans, plus interest, through the energy savings that the projects achieve over several years.
To ensure those savings are realized, Honeywell, Johnson Controls Inc., Siemens and Trane will conduct energy audits of the buildings, complete the makeovers and guarantee the energy savings. If the expected savings are not realized, those companies will pay the difference or make the changes in the buildings to achieve the savings, the foundation said.
To expedite the project, the bank paperwork and building permitting will be streamlined so that the work can begin on groups of buildings, rather than one at a time, Magaziner said. That could happen as soon as this summer.
"By bringing together cities and partnering with the private sector, President Clinton and the Clinton foundation are providing the tools to help cities achieve our goals," Bloomberg said in a statement.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone called the agreement a "considerable breakthrough."
"This procurement alliance will make it financially feasible for cities to radically cut emissions from buildings," he said in a statement.
The other cities are Delhi, India; Karachi, Pakistan; Seoul, South Korea; Bangkok, Thailand; Melbourne, Australia; Sao Paolo, Brazil; and Johannesburg, South Africa. The foundation expects the partnership to expand to more cities and companies after the first round.
During the first day of the summit on Tuesday, mayors and local leaders from all of the participating cities said it was up to them to take action on climate change, and that they could not afford to wait for their countries to enact national policies.
"Unfortunately, it has fallen to the mayors to do it because at the federal level in this country and other countries, they seem to be tied up," Bloomberg said.
The motivation behind the gathering is the concept that cities bear a significant responsibility to address climate change because they cover less than 1 percent of the Earth's surface but are overwhelmingly responsible for polluting it, generating 80 percent of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
Many said the meeting comes at a crucial time when many countries worldwide are struggling to have similar conversations that would lead to global and national standards for reducing carbon emissions.
Meanwhile, mayors said Tuesday, local governments must forge ahead with their own policies.
Trenton, N.J., Mayor Douglas Palmer, who is president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, said Tuesday that 500 of the nation's mayors have signed the organization's climate agreement, a pledge that is essentially in line with the Kyoto Protocol.
That 1997 international treaty requires the industrialized countries that signed it to cut emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012; the U.S. is not part of the pact.
"Mayors are leading, quite frankly, because we have to," Palmer said. "Mayors took action because the federal government was silent."
(© 2007 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)