City mayors agree to cut energy consumption

The mayors of the world’s biggest cities have ended a summit in New York with an agreement to make huge cuts in energy consumption. The plan will see five global banks provide the finance to make buildings cleaner and greener. Six Asia Pacific cities have signed up, including Bangkok, Karachi, Melbourne, Mumbai, Seoul and Tokyo.

Presenter – Corinne Podger Speaker – Bill Clinton, former US president; Ken Livingstone, mayor of London; Gary Singer, acting mayor of Melbourne; Tricia Phelan of non-government environment organisation, Environment Victoria
PODGER: Cities consume an estimated 75 per cent of the world’s energy, and emit around the same percentage of greenhouse gases. The Large Cities climate summit is looking to turn that around, by creating a partnership between big cities on the one hand, and big banks and energy firms on the other, with the aim of putting state of the art energy-saving technology in big city buildings. London will be one of the participants; its Mayor is Ken Livingstone.

LIVINGSTONE: We can reduce total global carbon emissions by about 10 percent. This is not just a new initiative, this is the biggest single step to tackle climate change that has been taken by any layers of government, anywhere in the world, since the debate about climate change started.

PODGER: One of the summit’s organisers is the Clinton Climate Initiative, set up by former US president Bill Clinton. He admits that refurbishing an entire metropolis won’t be easy, but says it’s worthwhile to stop cities being such a heavy drain on environmental – and financial – resources.

CLINTON: Some cities will be more successful than others, some will have labour shortages, others will have gaps in operations. I’ll bet you anything we’ll have some delivery problems, and supplies. Real world, things will happen. But I know one thing, every day these people will get up and try to make something good happen. So the exhilarating thing to me is, that we’re back in the solutions business, which is what I think politics should be about.

Radio Australia