Setting the Eco Bar Too High?

A recent New York Times article highlights the challenges of keeping up with the eco-friendly Joneses in today's marketplace, illustrating the need for cities to have a uniform standard when it comes to sustainable programs and services, buildings, transportation systems, and others. Even in relatively green cities such as Arlington, VA, Providence, RI, and Austin, TX, the average citizen is having trouble keeping up with city legislation regarding green requirements and initiatives.

“We have been doing things like filling potholes and reducing crime since cities began,” said David N. Cicilline, the mayor of Providence, R.I., but energy efficiency requires “a whole new infrastructure to evaluate and measure.”

Ann Hancock, the executive director of the Climate Protection Campaign, a nonprofit based in Sonoma County, a wine-growing area north of San Francisco, said that the county and its nine municipalities signed climate-protection agreements with enthusiasm more than five years ago, committing to bringing down greenhouse-gas emissions. Then they tried to figure out how.

“It’s really hard,” Ms. Hancock said. “It’s like the dark night of the soul.” All the big items in the inventory of emissions — from tailpipes, from the energy needed to supply drinking water and treat waste water, from heating and cooling buildings — are the product of residents’ and businesses’ individual decisions about how and where to live and drive and shop.

“They’ve seen the Al Gore movie, but they still have their lifestyle to contend with,” she said.

“We need to get people out of their cars, and we can’t under the present circumstances,” because of the limited alternative in public transportation, Ms. Hancock said. And the county’s many older homes are not very good at keeping in the cool air in the summer or the warm air in winter. “How do you go back and retrofit all of those?” she asked.

Do you have any ideas to make it easier for municipalities to incorporate green initiatives more readily, and to create a more standardized solution?