Chapter Nine
In chapter nine Burlington, Vermont Kolbert writes about Burlington, Vermont’s largest city. Years ago the citizens decided to stand up to global warming by using less power instead of buying more. The mayor of Burlington, Peter Clavelle, who has been mayor since 1989, came up with a program that encourages contractors to engage not in demolition but in “deconstruction”. This helps the city save energy by reducing waste and cutting down the need for new materials. Burlington’s electric department (BED) has a wind turbine that provided enough power for thirty homes and gets half of its energy from renewable sources, such as its 50 megawatt power plant that runs off of wood chips. The BED also leases compact florescent light bulbs for twenty cents a month because a family who uses these bulbs can cut their electricity bill by 10 percent. The city of Burlington estimates that their energy saving projects over the course of this lifetime will prevent the release of 175,000 tons of carbon. Burlington residents also eat locally and have turned old waste sites into an assortment of community gardens and cooperatives, the waste from these gardens is taken to a composting factory, and turned back into soil, making this process “closed loop”. Clavelle’s plan has begun to pick up across America beginning with Greg Nickles, the mayor of Seattle, who created a set of principles called the “US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement”. This agreement has been signed by over a hundred and seventy mayors, representing about thirty – six million people. This agreement is trying to prove how much can be done at the local level and Clavelle hopes that more cities will adopt this plan.