8 rounds with Rocky

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

By Richard Anderson

Jackson Hole, Wyo--Global warming. The impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Gay rights. Getting treatment, not jail time, for nonviolent drug abusers. Diversity in government. The Darfur genocide.

Rights for immigrants …
Sounds like the agenda of the stereotypical, dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding-heart Washington, D.C., liberal. Or a list of topics NOT to bring up when dining with your girlfriend’s ultra-conservative parents.

It also happens to be a list of a few of the priorities of Salt Lake City’s Mayor Ross “Rocky” Anderson. Since 1999, the capital of arguably the most conservative state in the country has been administered by a man who has appeared at anti-war protests on both sides of the country. He has, by his own admission, forced a green program on the city that is under his charge, and done a hundred other things to railroad any chance of a statewide political career.

“Some go so far as to say that anything he supports, the legislature will oppose,” Sasha Abramsky wrote in “The Other Rocky,” a profile of the mayor that appeared in the January 2007 edition of The Nation.

But if it sounds like Anderson wastes time tilting at windmills, bear in mind he’s brought more than a few of those windmills down and appears to be universally respected, if not loved, by his city’s non-Mormon majority.

Social justice is the thread that binds many of his initiatives: getting treatment for the mentally ill and nonviolent drug offenders, opening his city up to refugees from all around the war-torn world, speaking out against discrimination against gays and illegal aliens.

But his greatest coup has been to lead his city of 180,000 in an aggressive charge to get “green.” Call up the mayor’s office and instead of listening to Muzak while on hold, you get recorded messages about switching your light bulbs to energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs, using reusable canvas bags at the grocery store, remembering not to leave your car idling for more than eight seconds.

Visit his Web site (www.SLCgov.com/mayor) and, in addition to speeches calling for the impeachment of the president, you’ll find his comments about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling calling for the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide.

Mayor Anderson will visit Jackson Hole this week to speak and participate in workshops as part of The Murie Center’s ninth annual Spring Earth Festival. By way of a preview, he spoke with Planet Jackson Hole for a full hour.

Our talk was interrupted just once as he heard the news that the Vermont State Legislature had passed a resolution calling for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

Planet Jackson Hole: You were born in Logan, raised Mormon.
Rocky Anderson: Yes.

PJH: Where did this progressive streak come from?
RA: I think it comes from values that I learned as a child, to try to help those who are in need, be generous, help make things better in life.

PJH: Were your parents liberal?
RA: I don’t really attach much meaning to those terms, I think they mean very different things to different people, but my parents were both Republicans, but they were good people who would never have put up with what they’re seeing going on in our country today, regardless of their political affiliation. … If people call me a liberal because I believe in the Constitution, I think that’s a pretty conservative, patriotic American value.

PJH: Did you at some time in your life have an environmental awakening or was that also a part of your upbringing?
RA: I always enjoyed natural places, even as a young boy when we’d go up Logan Canyon or take trips up through Wyoming and to Yellowstone. I think that I always had a real appreciation for the preservation of the undeveloped parts of our planet.

But then, as I grew older, I saw what was being done by much of the corporate community to our air, to our water, the destruction of open spaces, and I just innately was appalled at what was becoming of our Earth.

I think my focus on global environmental crises, like the destruction of the ozone layer and global warming, came about probably in the ’80s.

I know when I became extremely concerned was after reading Al Gore’s book, “Earth in the Balance,” and sort of keeping an eye on this over the years, I was very inspired and encouraged by the fact that nations recognized the disastrous impacts on the ozone layer from the emission of CFCs and other chemicals, and they were able to come together at Montreal and work toward a solution to that problem.

But, unfortunately, especially with our present federal administration, we’re seeing just the opposite with regard to the greatest problem facing our planet, global warming. …

PJH: It seemed for a while that global warming had a partisan aspect to it in that there did seem to be a division down the aisle … That doesn’t seem to be the case so much any more, at least on the national level. How about in Utah?
RA: It’s almost straight down the line according to party affiliation. You’d think the people would be a little embarrassed that their party is being identified with such scientific illiteracy.

President Bush and members of his administration have made this a partisan issue, which is certainly not the case in most of the rest of the industrial world. When you go to Europe, about the only debate between parties is who can do the most to help solve the problem.

There are still a large number of people in this country that have fallen for this enormous misinformation campaign that the oil and coal companies have helped finance and which President Bush has helped to perpetuate.

… If you look at what the president and Republican members of Congress have done, it’s been clearly along party lines. Sen. Inhofe has labeled global warming one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated.

They, Republicans in Congress, have joined with this administration and with their corporate sponsors in misleading the American people and putting off the kind of national effort that it’s going to take to be the leader our country should be on the global stage when it comes to combating climate change.

I think it’s just going to be yet another enormous embarrassment for the Republican party that they ever aligned themselves with President Bush on this, because, already, far ahead of what anybody ever anticipated, our world, including many communities throughout the United States, are experiencing dramatic impacts from global warming.

PJH: Has Utah witnessed anything endemic to your part of the world, something specific to your state? Up here, all our glaciers are melting, for example.
RA: There has in recent years been far less snow pack throughout all the major river basins in the Intermountain West.

The owner of Park City recently sponsored a major study and public forum on the impacts of global warming, and it’s absolutely frightening what is going to happen, for instance, to our ski industry if current trends continue.

Those impacts, although harbingers of disasters to come, are certainly trivial in comparison to the destruction of species, the inundation by the oceans of major population areas along coastlines throughout the world, the spread of diseases, the destruction of forests, the real human and ecological crises to come, most of which were thought to be a long ways out into the future, but now are occurring in some parts of the world and imminent in other areas.

PJH: So what has Salt Lake and your administration been attempting to do?
RA: We have wanted to do everything we can to obtain greater efficiencies using less energy and for the energy we do use, demonstrate that clean renewable sources are available.

For instance, just before the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, I committed that in our municipal operations we would abide by at least the Kyoto goal of a 7 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by the year 2012.

Since we didn’t have a 1990 baseline, we moved it up to 2000 and set a 21 percent reduction goal by 2012. By 2006, in just four years, we exceeded that goal by almost 150 percent, with a 31 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

So, we took what we learned from our municipal operations and went to the business community with our E2 program … E2 stands for economically and environmentally sustainable.
We now have almost 50 businesses that have signed up with that program, incorporating many of the changes in their operations that we’ve incorporated in our municipal operations.

PJH: Switching to CFL, utilizing less toxic materials, ramping up the recycling efforts, switching over to cleaner transportation options, utilizing less water, purchasing locally produced products. Those kinds of things.

Then we took all of this one step farther, and that is to individual residents in our E2 Citizens Program. We have now over 600 E2 Citizens in Salt Lake City who have registered online and have committed to taking at least five steps in their everyday lives to reduce their carbon footprint.

PJH:  When did you go to the citizen level?
RA: About two years ago. We did all of this because we certainly think it’s the right thing to do, but also we wanted to provide a model of success for other communities. There’s nothing that inspires change and innovation so much as knowing that there are already success stories.

So I came up with the idea of an annual summit, bringing mayors from all over the country together to learn about climate change, what they can do in their communities, hear the examples of successes that some cities have already experienced …

We’ve held two of these summits, called it the Sundance Mayors’ Gathering on Climate Protection, and we anticipate that those will go on, that they’ll be continued annually into the future.

PJH: What kind of participation are you having?
RA: The two that we’ve had have brought in about 70 mayors. Among those participating have been everybody from Richard Daley from Chicago, Mayor Gavin Newsom from San Francisco. There’s been great geographic diversity, including Mayor Mark Begich from Anchorage and the mayor of Idaho Falls.

PJH: Getting an entire city to go green can’t have been the decision of one person –
RA: It pretty much was … I knew that with our council we’d never see any real leadership.

We have on the whole a very difficult council when it comes to change or understanding these issues, with a few exceptions. So, much of what we’ve done we’ve been able to do administratively.

But now the council is starting to pick up on it after I issued an executive order requiring that all city-owned and -managed buildings be LEED certified at least on the silver level.

We did get the council to pass an ordinance with a similar requirement and also requiring that … buildings receiving city funds also be LEED-certified …

I think people who are going to lead on these issues need to forge ahead and not wait for others to get on board. It’s like our light rail system.

There was so much opposition to light rail here, but now that it’s in place and has proven to be such a success, just about all of the naysayers are now supporters, and voters in four very conservative counties have voted for tax increases to support more light rail and commuter rail.

I think the same thing is true with climate change.

If you can just blast through whatever opposition there is, start moving ahead, others then will see the advantages to that.

I also wanted to make sure that we had a good, broad base of community support, so several years ago we formed the Salt Lake City Green Team.

These are some really great people from throughout the community who have been very supportive of our efforts and who have helped bring new ideas to us about measures we can take and also how to get the word out to the rest of the community.

Besides doing all these things on a local level, we’ve been very active in pushing for Congress to become far more aggressive. …

I think grassroots political pressure is the essential missing link thus far. I think if there had been more work done at the grassroots level, with citizens letting their elected officials know that they passionately care about this issue, we would have seen much more done at this point.

But now it’s happening, and I see that as positive.

That’s what I want to do when I leave this office, is to help organize at the grassroots level, because I think most people care, at least when they get the information, but there’s no real organizing mechanism to get the message to our elected officials that it matters to people.

It’s not just in this area. We’re well into the fourth year of a major genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, and our elected officials sit by twiddling their thumbs because there isn’t a call from the grassroots for intervention.

Most elected officials are not leaders. The leadership by and large has to come from organizing people at the grassroots.

PJH: What will you lecture on here in Jackson on Thursday?
RA: I’ll be talking briefly about what climate change is, how it’s caused, what we can do about it, and what actually is being done both at the city level by some major corporations and by other nations. I’ll also talk about some of the economic benefits that accrue to those who are willing to innovate in these areas.

PJH: Have you witnessed that in Salt Lake?
RA: Oh, yeah. Just something as simple as changing our lightbulbs over to CFLs in our city and county building saves $33,000 a year. About $50,000 in cost savings by switching over to high-efficiency LED lights in our traffic lights.

I drive a compressed natural gas car and pay less than one-third the amount for natural gas than most people pay for gasoline. …

PJH: I think you’re also going to help Jackson Hole with its “10 X 10,” helping us reduce our carbon footprint by 10 percent by the year 2010. … When I see these numbers – reducing our footprint by 10 percent by 2010 or going back to 1990 levels by 2012 – the first thing I think is, “Well, obviously every little bit helps, but that seems like an awful little bit.”
RA: But it’s a beginning. The goals of Kyoto are really very modest in terms of what we’re eventually going to have to do, but to finally focus and set some goals is crucial. We do need to recognize that by 2050 we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 percent.

But with these initial goals and efforts, you really get the sense that it can be done. The Hispanic phrase you hear so often, “It can be done,” that needs to be the mantra also of the campaign to combat climate change. This can be done. …

PJH: Finally, make your case for impeachment.
RA: The impeachment clause was added to our Constitution to protect against the very things we’re seeing happen to our country today because of a president who has egregiously abused his power, who has breached his trust with Congress and the American people, who has violated the most sacred treaty obligations, our own Constitution and our domestic statutory laws, and ultimately who has approved and condoned the most egregious human rights violations.

Impeachment is crucial to send the message to the rest of the world that what has been perpetrated … are not reflective of American values. It all runs so counter to our Constitutional form of government, to the system of checks and balances that is so crucial to our democracy.

And just as important as sending that signal to the international community, we need to make that statement for ourselves and those who come along in the future, that we value the rule of law and will not permit a president to get away with continually trampling upon our Constitution, domestic laws and treaty obligations. … [Extraordinary rendition is] something that we’ve seen happen with governments from whom we’ve always been very proud to distinguish ourselves, and now, under this president, we’re becoming very much like them.

Impeachment is not a radical notion. It’s mentioned six different times in the Constitution, and it is there not to prosecute somebody for a violation of the criminal code.

It’s there to call high government officials to account for serious violations of trust and abuses of power that have been harmful to our nation. And the harm to this nation, because of what President Bush and other top members of his administration have done, has been and will continue to be immense.

PJH: The easy response to that is, “We’re in a time of war and battling an unprecedented enemy calls for perhaps draconian measures.”
RA: That’s a very frightening concept, and it’s a concept fully embraced by this president when he declares he has what he called unitary executive powers, powers that basically give him the authority of a dictator to determine for himself when and under what circumstances the laws will be applied, particularly to his actions.

He demonstrated this many times, probably most conspicuously when, contrary to our Constitution and explicit statutory prohibitions passed by Congress, he secretly ordered for several years the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, snooping on e-mails and telephone conversations of American citizens.

That is exactly what Congress prohibited in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and there can be no excuse for ignoring that law, even during a time of a self-created, so-called war, because the statute even allows to resort to the courts to obtain a warrant within three days after the wiretapping. …

Also we’re in this war on Iraq solely because of the manipulation of intelligence and deceit by this president and his advisors.

At the time we invaded Iraq, the intelligence community consensus was that there was absolutely no operational tie between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden, no evidence of any chemical weapons in Iraq, and no truth to this story about Saddam Hussein supposedly trying to purchase uranium from Niger.

So, all of the justifications that this president led this country to believe supported invading and occupying Iraq were nonexistient at the time we invaded, yet this administration continued to lie to the American people, to deceive us, and then ultimately to change the justifications for why we began this disastrous misadventure.

Rocky Andersen, Mayor of Salt Lake City. Photographed by John Taylor/ http://visionfoto.com/

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