Dear Council,
Please consider my comments at all meetings concerning environmental
issues, and in particular Sierra Club's "Cool Cities" Initiative.

On behalf of myself and other neighbors, we urge Council to vote NOT
to endorse Sierra Club's "Cool Cities" Initiative, for at least three
separate main reasons:

1. Adopting this initiative is inconsistent with the main role of
Council, which is mostly to ensure that basic city services are
provided, that disaster preparedness is adequate, and fiscal
responsibility maintained. Council's role is not to help implement (as
championed by this initiative) an international treaty (Kyoto
Protocols) that hasn't even been ratified by the U.S. Senate. (I might
add it was President Clinton who did not ask the Senate to ratify the
treaty b/c he knew there were 90+ votes against it, for sound policy
reasons.)

It is inappropriate to adopt this initiative especially given the fact
that the public has not been given any type of meaningful opportunity
to review this initiative, or any other environmental policies that
might make more sense to adopt. If there is indeed broad consensus
within the community to make environmental policy a top priority in
Menlo Park, then we should employ a similar community-wide outreach
program as was done with respect to determining policy priorities two
years ago in order to ascertain what it is and what to do about it, as
a community. (While I do appreciate the effort made in December to
reach out to residents and hear from them about their
concerns/priorities, and it is an important first step, holding one
community in Dec. right before the holidays w/ very little notice is
not a "consensus" to make national and international environmental
policy a top city priority.)

2. There is good reason why local governments are not supposed to
branch out into national and international matters; councils lack the
expertise to make judgments about these matters AND doing so
represents a major distraction from time spent attending to more basic
council responsibilities.

On the first point, I'm reminded of a comment I once heard a veteran
meteorologist make about the weather and environmental policy - that
it is an incredibly complex matter, that no one should so easily draw
conclusions about. What about he "law of unintended consequences"?
Just 25+ years ago, alarmists warned about a "cooling period" with
disastrous consequences (for which Newsweek publicly retracted its
statements in Dec. '06, after admitting that its articles from 25+
years ago were overblown, based upon what was known at the time). All
of us can think of examples of unintended consequences. Why would we
want our city to incur negative unintended consequences, especially
without having first calculated the costs of compliance with the
proposed initiative?

The second point is that adopting the resolution necessarily means
that Council will not devote as much time to disaster preparedness as
it should. We know from the U.S. Geological Survey that there is 62%
risk of a disastrous earthquake within the next 25 years, and we know
that we are unprepared. It will take a major effort to get the
residents to do their part, and to get the city ready. There is no
passion that I've detected yet from this Council to making sure that
our City is prepared for an inevitable disaster, and I know that it is
a topic that many of us would rather not deal with. But we must, and I
strongly object to adoption of the "Cool Cities" Initiative until, at
a minimum, our City deals more effectively with emergency
preparedness.

3. Even if environmental policy were the proper purview of Council, we
need to have a far more extensive and open debate about environmental
priorities and costs. Public policy is all about trade-offs.
Economists understand that if we spend money and time on one thing, it
means that another priority won't be achieved - to use a cliche "you
can't have your cake and eat it to." We need to understand what we are
giving up before launching into something as complex and overreach
hing as adopting the Kyoto Protocols, especially when there are
significant critics of this treaty. (Ironically, the latest issue of
Scientific American that I bought at Whole Foods this week has an
article on pg. 30 by a leading environmental professor that bemoans
the problems with Kyoto and urges a new framework, in its place -
adopting Sierra Club's initiative takes us in just the opposite
direction.) This article highlights the complexity of these issues and
argues against adoption of the proposed initiative.

Bottomline: Mos of us are environmentalists, who value the environment
and are willing to sacrifice certain things to help conserve resources
and improve efficiency. You can believe this and still strongly oppose
the "Cool Cities" Initiative, as I do.

Sincerely,
Nicole Lance
Menlo Park
Received on Thu Feb 15 11:23:04 2007