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Five Questions Turning a county ‘green’
The Miami Herald, July 15, 2007
He had help,
but there’s no disputing that Miami-Dade Clerk of Courts Harvey Ruvin was the driving
force behind the county’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. He participated in
Gov. Crist’s summit on global climate change last week in Miami.
Q. When did the
county begin to reduce greenhouse gases?
A. In 1992, the County Commission, of which
I was a member agreed to join the International Council for Local Environmental
Initiatives, or ICLEI, a worldwide movement of local governments working on environmental
and climate change issues. Miami-Dade was one of 14 local governments around the
world that first worked out action plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Seattle
and Portland also joined up. We were pioneers at creating carbon-reduction programs,
and now other local governments copy us.
Q. What have you accomplished?
A. We developed the nation’s largest curbside recyclable
collection program. We capped landfills, capturing methane they were releasing.
We retrofitted government buildings to be energy efficient. We filtered nozzles
to capture gas fumes. When I became clerk we created an online process for paying
traffic tickets to reduce the miles people drive. The county has purchased 150 hybrid
cars. We have quantified that between 1993 and 2005 the county reduced or avoided
producing 34 million metric tons of carbon. And that’s despite the fact that, during
that time, Miami-Dade’s population grew by 27 percent. Now we’ve moved to the nest
stage.
Q. And that stage is?
A. Eighteen months ago we said, hey it’s great that we’re
reducing carbon emissions, but there are so many heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere
already that it will cost us decades of impact. South Florida is so vulnerable to
global-warming effects; stronger hurricanes, more flooding, salt-water intrusion
in our drinking water as sea level rises, loss of beaches and so on. We decided
that Miami-Dade needed to become more proactive to make our community more resilient
to the impacts of global warming. The County Commission agreed to create a new task
force to tackle how we can minimize damage and mitigate to prevent it. We’ll do
a pilot program that other communities can emulate. I’m really grateful to the commission
and Mayor Carlos Alvarez and County Manager George Burgess for agreeing to provide
staffing for the task force. All our members have other careers, so we needed a
staff to do the day-to-day work.
Q. You chair the task force, right?
A. Right, but I have to tell you I am blown away by the people
who agreed to be on this task force. We have scientists from the University of Miami,
Florida International University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
And a host of experts in government, regionalism, planning and sustainability are
on it. At our June meeting Mayor Alvarez signed on to the U.S. Conference of mayors’
Climate Protection Agreement. The county will try to meet the Kyoto Protocol target
of reducing carbon levels to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.
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