Restrained applause for the green building initiative announced by the Clinton Foundation yesterday.
“Major business and financial institutions increasingly understand that shrinking the world’s carbon footprint is a pro-growth strategy, indeed the only pro-growth strategy for the long term,” he said.
Energy use in buildings accounts for about a third of global releases of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide. In densely populated older cities, like New York City and London, buildings are the dominant source of the gases.
Bloomberg and Clinton showed up in a lavish press conference to announce a consortium of banks, cities and companies with a project to cut down on C02 release by buildings in cities around the world. This is good news, less for the actual plan than as indicative of attention being paid in high places. And none too soon, either:
…a new satellite analysis shows that at least once in the last several years, masses of unusually warm air pushed to within 310 miles of the South Pole and remained long enough to melt surface snow across a California-size expanse.