| ANDREW C. REVKIN 9:49 p.m. | Updated A pair of energy and development specialists from the mayors' offices in New York City and Los Angeles are going global. Jay Carson, a former deputy Los Angeles mayor and aide to both Clintons, and Rohit Aggarwala, the former chief sustainability advisor to New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, are going to work for C40 Cities, a coalition of cities in rich and developing countries working to initiate and share ways to cut emissions of greenhouse gases and boost resilience to impacts of climate change. The two advisers make the move as Bloomberg prepares to take the chairmanship of the group for the next two years. He's in Hong Kong at a meeting focused on China's cities and is giving a speech laying out new goals for the group. The group was created in 2005 in London, largely under the direction of that city's mayor at the time, Ken Livingstone. In 2006, it held its second meeting, in New York City, and began working with the Clinton Climate Initiative, a project of former President Bill Clinton's foundation (and one that Carson worked on). I spoke with Carson and Aggarwala briefly earlier this week: "Our goal is to take C40 to the next level," Carson told me. "As it's become clearer that there's not going to be much action at the federal level, the importance of C40 grows. Some might say it's boring, nitty-gritty, nuts and bolts stuff, but it's in the implementation that happens at the city level where we're going to see the most action on climate change in the near future." Aggarwala noted that cities are natural hubs for initiatives that use energy more sparingly and move people more efficiently through transportation options involving feet, bicycles or mass transit. He said that the philosophy brought to the group by Bloomberg presumes that "economic growth, improving the quality of life and improvements to the environment are all the same thing." "A city is inherently more transit oriented and walkable than a suburb," Aggarwala said. "You're going with the grain of urbanization." Postscript: In the meantime, there are few signs of serious action by wealthy countries to carry out the pledges they made last December to help poorer ones withstand climate impacts and adopt less-polluting energy policies and technologies. On Friday, an advisory panel convened by the United Nations to propose ways to generate some $100 billion a year within a decade released a report on ways to start the money flowing. The best it could do was conclude that raising this money was "challenging but feasible." Oxfam America and other groups working to limit vulnerability to disasters, including those related to climate extremes, were cautiously upbeat about the analysis. "This should be a clarion call to negotiators tha |
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