Westneat: It seems Seattle ain’t so green after all

Think about that. The city is only a few years into a 15-year plan to cut carbon emissions roughly in half, by 2030. And already we’re lagging to such an extent that we need to go seven times faster?

In fact, carbon emissions stubbornly have risen — by about 7 percent since 2012. It’s the usual suspects — growth plus cars, as well as an incredible boom in airplane travel.

The report does note that Seattle’s carbon emissions have declined slightly on a per-person basis. That suggests some progress, though still not enough to meet the goals. With Seattle booming, the urgency of climate change has been left in the gold-rush dust.

A personal problem

The latest inventory shows the city sits at 3 percent above 1990 emissions levels. The latest figures for the State of Washington, released in January, are slightly worse, at 8 percent above the 1990 levels.

So neither the Emerald City nor the Evergreen State got green after all.

Why not? Well there’s been the reluctance of the voters and the political system to do much about the issue in a big way.

But there’s also the small, individual things. Reading the city’s carbon-footprint report, I realized it was basically describing me. Not only do I still drive to work in a gas-fueled car, but my family is on track to take a record number of flights this year. Start with aging parents in faraway places, add one kid in college out of state and another looking there, and all of a sudden we’re in frequent-flyer clubs on multiple airlines.

I know from the report that I’m no outlier in this progressive utopia. My point is that if even the people who believe climate change is a serious problem are hypocrites and won’t change, then what hope is there?

This is all a long way of explaining why I’m skeptical of the newest climate-change plan, the Green New Deal. I salute it for trying to make climate a hot topic. But to the extent it tries to get people to stop driving or flying or eating meat, or to pay significantly higher fuel taxes, it’s probably doomed.

So what to do instead? The best idea came from our own Gov. Jay Inslee. Not recently, but 17 years ago, when he was a congressman, he proposed what he called a “New Apollo Project.” His idea then was simple: To convene the world’s best scientists and charge them not with taking a shot at the moon, but to design and invent a “a new energy future” to save the Earth.

Asked the other day about what a tough slog it’s been on climate change, Inslee mused that “sometimes perseverance is more important than genius.”

I don’t know: We humans seem immune to perseverance on this particular issue. It’s time to call in the geniuses.