Kyoto comes to Elgin

There was an item in the paper the other day that a member of our city council has requested that the staff prepare a proposal for our city to endorse the Kyoto accords on greenhouse gases. And he wants the city to take specific steps to reduce emissions.

As it turns out, this council member’s wife is an organizer of the local chapter of Slow Global Warming. (Pillow talk persuasion perhaps?)

Now this is the same city council that would not lift a finger to work on the illegal immigration problem because it was a “federal matter” and they are diving into this junk science notion that man is responsible for normal cyclical temperature shifts.

Now, I’m not opposed to saving a few bucks here by conserving energy. It is worth a look if we can send fewer city dollars to NiCor, ComEd, and the oil companies. But what I fear is that we will spend EXTRA money chasing this nonsense.

I can picture the city council as a result of this ordinance ignoring the economic impact of a program and spending extra money on a project just so they can say, “We are a green city.” An example might be retiring a fleet of trucks early so we can buy new ones that are more earth-friendly. Thus, we would spend more money than we would save.

But if the same people draft this resolution as the bunch that did the one on illegal immigration, we have nothing to worry about. It isn’t worth the paper it was printed on.