Crosscut Seattle on America's "Green Mayor" Greg Nickels

Greg Nickels is many things, but a poor politician isn't one of them. Last February, as if sensing that other cities were catching up, the mayor made a bold new promise in his State of the City address: "We must go an order of magnitude beyond the goals of Kyoto and cut our emissions 80 percent by 2050. Skeptics will say that it can't be done. We will show them how it can."

When I asked him about that pledge, Nickels smiled. "Easy for me to say that, right? I'm not going to be around in 2050. I'm not going to get to an 80 percent reduction. But we can change the way we behave, the way we live in the city. This is a multigenerational partnership. It's going to take a long time to fix."
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Near the end of our interview, I asked the mayor what he hoped people would remember about him 20 years from now. He didn't mention the environment. He didn't even mention climate change.