Most people don’t think of Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory as a tree-hugging, greenhouse-gas-fearing, international wealth redistributionist.
Around here, the Republican mayor is generally known for redeveloping brown fields and getting light rail off the ground. You won’t find anything about global warming on McCrory’s campaign website. Among his “environmental” accomplishments, he lists rollout garbage collection, bike lanes, the fact that Charlotte’s drinking water actually meets federal regulations, and a tree ordinance that requires developers to save a whopping 10 percent of the tree cover when they clear lots.
So we were a little surprised to learn two months ago that McCrory was a speaker at Robert Redford’s Sundance Summit on combating global warming, given how poorly issues like global warming generally go over in Republican primaries.
At the time, McCrory declined to take a position on global warming, telling CL he didn’t have enough information about it to say whether he considers it to be a legitimate threat to the planet and to Charlotte.
But a review of his tenure as the chair of the US Conference of Mayors Environment Committee, which spanned 1998 through 2001 and the year 2005 shows that the committee cranked out some pretty radical stuff — from a Republican perspective — including a resolution imploring Congress to embrace the science behind global warming and make the issue a priority.
McCrory says he supported the global warming resolution because it endorsed pushing Congress to take local action to clean up pollutants in our air, which he supports.
“That’s the dilemma with these resolutions,” said McCrory. “I look at the end result rather than the preambles (about global warming) that aren’t as relevant to what we as local government can do. I don’t agree with every sentence. I’m interested in what actions mayors can take to clean our environment.”
For a guy who hasn’t spent enough time studying global warming to have a position on it, McCrory sure spends a lot of time working on global warming resolutions.
In an article in Grist magazine, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, a Democrat, credits McCrory with helping him get consensus among the other mayors on his pet project, the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. After the Bush Administration backed out of the Kyoto Treaty, which would have required businesses to meet stringent environmental standards, Nickels got more than 300 mayors to sign the agreement pledging to do their part to implement Kyoto protocols in their cities.
In the Grist article, Nickels describes McCrory as a helpful member of the opposition.
“We had heard from various sources that the Bush administration was not anxious to have the conference endorse this — there were some mayors close to the administration who would object — so we worked with Pat McCrory of Charlotte,” Nickels told Grist. “We tussled a little bit over the language and ultimately came to a compromise that both of them could support. It led to a unanimous endorsement in both the environment and energy committees, and ultimately by the full conference of mayors.”
As chair of the committee, McCrory has presided over resolutions on everything from the need for alternative fuels and banning fuel additives to resolutions to halt sprawl and reduce waste.
During that time, the committee of the US Conference of Mayors also passed a resolution backing the Earth Charter, a document that is radical even by liberal standards.
Among other things, the charter advocates the equitable redistribution of wealth, universal government-funded health care, eliminating nuclear weapons, demilitarizing national security systems and then using military dollars for ecological restoration and population control.
McCrory says he doesn’t remember the committee passing a resolution in favor of the Earth Charter in 2001, and that he might not have been at that meeting, because he missed some.
“I most likely wouldn’t have agreed with that type of stringent language,” McCrory said.
This article appears in Sep 21-27, 2005.
