In 2005, K.C. Mayor Kay Barnes signed on to the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. She was one of the first two hundred mayors to do so, and the impact on her city has been impressive and heartening. Dennis Murphey, the city’s chief environmental officer, spoke last month at the St. Louis Climate Action Summit about what Kansas City has accomplished.

The city set up work groups to assess the use of energy in its buildings and its transportation. Buildings are responsible for 47 percent of emissions in the U.S.; transportation accounts for 27 percent. Another work group looked for ways to employ carbon offsets, that is to say using plantings to take greenhouse gas emissions (ghge) out of the air. Another analyzed the city’s waste management. Did you know that landfills emit methane, which is 21 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide?
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