It’s not much, but it’s more than any other local media outlet gave us:
Mayor Bill White basked in his pro-environment credentials June 13 when he appeared with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the Hobby Center. The Prius-driving mayor told the crowd that half of the municipal-car fleet will be converted to hybrid technology, air-monitoring activities will be expanded, and polluters will be hunted down, tortured and slowly killed.
Well, not that last part. But White played the green card for all it was worth.
“Nobody has a right to chemically alter in some risky fashion the air or water they do not own,” he said.
White doesn’t want to go overboard on this whole tree-hugging thing, though. His office is refusing to sign the mayoral equivalent of the Kyoto Protocol against global warming.
More than 130 mayors — including those from Austin, Denton, Hurst and Laredo — have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, which was begun by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels.
“The overriding purpose of this is to encourage more action to reduce global-warming pollution in more cities,” says Steve Nicholas, an environmental aide to Nickels.
Mayor White ain’t signing. (Somehow he didn’t mention that in his Hobby Center speech.)
Why not?
Spokesman Frank Michel says White “stands by his environmental record here in Houston, but he’s not particularly interested in signing on to something the mayor of Seattle wants him to.”
Richard Connelly doesn’t mention what Mayor White said about his new $2 billion Metro expansion plan, but I’m sure the mayor brought it up. After all, if he had “played the green card for all it was worth,” his proposal to spend billions of dollars on light rail and (don’t say Bus) Rapid Transit probably would have been a hit with the Progressive Forum.
RELATED: Transcript of mayor’s speech won’t be posted (bH), A missed opportunity for local news coverage (bH)
