More than 900 mayors have signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, an agreement by the cities to take positive action to reduce global warming.

The United States Conference of Mayors has been working on such a resolution for awhile. Current vice president of the group, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, began soliciting membership for the conference shortly after the Kyoto Protocol went into effect, on Feb. 16, 2005.

The mayors of New Egypt, N.J., Savannah, Ga., Lake Placid, N.Y., Springfield, Ill., and Redondo Beach, Calif., were among the latest to sign the agreement, in which cities pledge to reduce carbon emissions by 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The Mayors Climate Protection Agreement now represents more than 81 million Americans.

This past year, Nickels championed a resolution establishing city priorities in a federal cap-and-trade system that embraced 80 percent reductions of global warming pollution from 1990 levels by 2050 as the appropriate and necessary national goal, and urged the federal government to act quickly to enact cap-and-trade legislation.

Links

• More information on the agreement