I spent much of yesterday at a fascinating conference here in Albuquerque on climate change initiatives at the local level. It's sponsored by ICLEI (apparently the acronym no longer stands for anything), and brings together local officials from around the country trying to reduce their communities' greenhouse emissions, recycle better, etc.

Joel Gay has a nice piece up on the New Mexico Independent explaining what it's all about, and Heather Clark over at the AP also has done some good reporting.

Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chavez is playing a major role in the meeting, which inevitably has brought up discussion of the reporting the Journal did earlier this year examining the city of Albuquerque's greenhouse claims. I'll let Joel explain:

The city backed off some of its earlier green claims after The Albuquerque Journal in January noted numerous exaggerations on the city’s Web site. City officials acknowledged the errors — for example, that the “citizens of Albuquerque” had cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 64 percent from 2000 to 2005. In fact, that was the city government, not the entire community, the Journal found. Another claim, that the city’s greenhouse-gas emissions fell by 6 percent from 1990 to 2005, was based on an erroneous calculation that natural gas consumption had fallen by 87 percent.

In an interview Tuesday, Chavez told the New Mexico Independent that many of the problems cited by the Journal were the result of monitoring and measurement problems — an issue that will be front and center at this week’s ICLEI summit, he said.

“There are lumps in the road” in gauging progress in the war on climate change, Chavez said.

The mayor was quoted making similar comments in Heather's piece for the AP.

I think it's important to note that the heart of the Journal's criticism earlier this year regarding the city's greenhouse initiative was not the numbers, but they way they were used in marketing claims. I grant that calculating these things is a hard problem.

While it clearly backfired, the city has rolled out a new web site this week on its sustainability efforts that appears to have none of the problems of overblown claims that cause the earlier dustup.

For that, I commend John Soladay and his crew.

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