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These are the urban environmental accords that mayors from around the world signed Sunday in San Francisco: Energy Action 1: Adopt and implement a policy to increase the use of renewable energy to meet ten percent of the city's peak electric load within seven years. Action 2: Adopt and implement a policy to reduce the city's peak electric load by ten percent within seven years through energy efficiency, shifting the timing of energy demands, and conservation measures. Action 3: Adopt a citywide greenhouse gas reduction plan that reduces the jurisdictions emissions by twenty-five percent by 2030, and which includes a...

Mayors from around the world met this weekend to cut emissions. SAN FRANCISCO – Sunday, when mayors from around the world gathered in this most environmentally aware of American cities to mark World Environment Day, they hoped to make a clear statement: Local communities - even more than nations - can be the pioneers of environmental reform. The choice of place and time could hardly have been more auspicious. In recent months, it has become increasingly obvious that a critical mass is developing around perhaps the most nettlesome issue of modern American environmentalism - climate change - and that states,...

When former Vice President Al Gore gave a long list of doom-and- gloom statistics Saturday about global warming -- warning people that rising sea levels could drown out parts of Florida, Louisiana and Manhattan -- there were no loud gasps or headshakes of disbelief from a roomful of Bay Area environmentalists. At the World Environment Day conference in San Francisco -- a five-day U. N. gathering dedicated to adopting sound environmental practices for urban centers -- he was preaching to the choir. "To an audience like this, Al Gore needs little introduction," Randy Hayes, founder of Rainforest Action Network, told...

"Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger aimed to steal the show at the United Nations environmental conference Wednesday by unveiling a plan to combat global warming by setting goals for reducing California's emissions of greenhouse gases..."

The thing is, Earth Day is over. I know it’s over because when it was still going on, I suffered through the painful media coverage of every last cutesy school project designed to “celebrate the trees” or “reclaim the land". If Earth Day is over, though, what is all this about houses made of scrap metal and environmentally-sound sculptures created from used chopsticks? These sound like the things one would usually only encounter on Earth Day, making me wonder if the whole thing has somehow repeated itself early this year. It turns out, upon further investigation, that Earth Day has...

SACRAMENTO - Bucking the Bush administration, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is set to unveil an ambitious plan this week to combat global warming that would make California the largest state in the nation to set concrete goals for cutting greenhouse gases, the Mercury News has learned. Under an executive order Schwarzenegger plans to sign Wednesday, the governor will call on state officials to develop new ways to reduce greenhouse gases by 11 percent over the next five years, 25 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050. The proposal would put California at the forefront of a burgeoning state and...

San Francisco plays host this week to mayors from around the globe who will be attending a United Nations conference dedicated to adopting sound environmental practices for urban centers -- where the majority of the world's population lives. .... an annual event in its third decade, but the first in the United States -- comes 60 years after the city served as the setting for the signing of the charter that created the international body. This time, the issues at hand are quite different. The theme of the conference is "green cities,'' and the mayors will hammer out an accord...