U.S. Cities Will Measure Carbon Footprint

21 U.S. cities have announced this week that they will be measuring and sharing their carbon footprints with the public, including New York, Las Vegas, Denver, West Palm Beach, St. Paul and New Orleans. The cities will gather emissions data for their “municipal functions” (Reuters) such as fire and police departments, government buildings and waste services. They will also look at the city’s footprint as a whole.

“If you don’t measure these emissions, you cannot manage them,” Paul Dickinson, the chief executive of the UK-based Carbon Disclosure Project, said, who joined forces with these select cities. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has also expressed his wishes for a fully collaborative process. “Working together, and with the best data, we can manage this problem,” he said in a release on Monday.

The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) will be conducting the measurements, and have gathered emissions date since the year 2000. The company represents “385 global institutional investors that manage a total of more than 57 trillion in assets,” reports Timothy Gardner for Reuters. The CDP claim they have conduced the most greenhouse gas data in the world, as well as climate change data. The company has also successfully disclosed secret information from large corporations like Wal-Mart Inc., who have just recently agreed to cooperate with their carbon findings.

All 21 cities will report their measurements to CDP by the last day of October and the results will be published by January of next year. At least 9 more cities are expected to jump on the bandwagon before then.


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