Mayor Nuisance

Orange County Register

Mayor Nuisance

Gavin Newsom, mayor of the world? From today to Sunday, San Francisco's mayor is hosting a Green Cities conference with at least 70 mayors from London, Rio de Janeiro, Tehran, Cape Town, Sydney and Shanghai, among other cities. It's been called "a municipal version of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming."

"We cannot afford to wait for the state or federal government to do the job," Mayor Newsom said, reported the Associated Press. "There are too many excuses going around, particularly in this country."

He wants cities to reduce global warming and promote "eco- friendly" development. As with other government interventions in land-use planning, in practice that likely would mean less development of new housing and infrastructure at a time when California's population is growing at more than 500,000 people a year.

The mayor also seems to forget that dealing with other countries, in America's federal system, is the job of the federal government. The Kyoto Protocol itself was rejected by the U.S. Senate by a 95-0 vote.

Finally, Mayor Newsom should realize that the science on global warming, especially mankind's supposed role in causing it, is far from settled. "[T]he drastic emission control policies deriving from the Kyoto conference - lacking credible support from the underlying science - [are]ill-advised and premature," read the 1997 Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change, signed by 100 major world scientists.

Mayor Newsom needs to go back to doing his real job.