Rio+20 Sidenote More Good Brain Food: Major cities tackle climate change while Rio summit’s outcome remains uncertain - The Washington Post

Major cities tackle climate change while Rio summit’s outcome remains uncertain - The Washington Post 

This makes the brain happy to read: some leaders are leading.
Good on New York City's Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

"“We’re not arguing with each other about emissions targets,” Bloomberg told reporters in a teleconference Monday. “What we’re doing is going out and making progress.”

The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group — a network of 59 cities, including Los Angeles; Tokyo; Bogota, Colombia; and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia — was launched in 2005 to provide support for mayors hoping to cut greenhouse-gas emissions in urban centers across the globe. The group analyzed data from 48 cities to determine a suite of policies that are now in place to cut 248 million tons of greenhouse gases, the equivalent of taking 44 million passenger vehicles off the road for a year.

The 59 cities of the group, Bloomberg added, have the capacity to cut their carbon output by 1 gigaton, or a billion tons, by 2030 compared with business as usual. That reduction, which could be achieved through steps such as the capture of methane from urban landfills and installation of more-efficient lighting and energy-efficient building codes, would be equivalent to the combined greenhouse-gas emissions of Canada and Mexico."