More conservative angst about Cool Cities

The Rhino Times, a weekly right wing rag published in Greensboro, has been hammering on the Cool Cities program week after week for almost a month now. 'Hammering' is a bit of a pun as the guy doing it has been Editor John Hammer is his weekly screed.

He started with the July 26th column, 'How to save Planet Earth.'

On August 9th, two days after a large mass of citizens came out to show their support for the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement and the Council agreed to discuss it on the 21st, Hammer wrote:

City Councilmember and mayoral candidate Yvonne Johnson said she had received over 100 emails and insisted that the item be placed on the agenda. It is an election year and Yvonne Johnson wants to be mayor. The lesson to citizens is if you want the city to do anything and have 100 friends who will send emails, or if you have access to 100 email accounts, you can get it done between now and Nov. 6.

Those darn elected officials listening to public input! You can read the column here.

After the City Council unanimously authorized the Mayor to sign onto the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, it appears Hammer went into denial:

One key point was that the resolution passed by the City Council states, "the City of Greensboro will support the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement." It doesn't say endorse. What the city actually agreed to do is much of what it is already doing – trying to reduce air pollution and figure out what the greenhouse gas emissions were in 1990 in order to come up with a plan to reduce that level by 7 percent.

Mayor Keith Holliday signed the agreement right in front of the assembled crowd...you can't do much more of an endorsement than that! You can read the rest of that column here.

When it's making them mad, you know that it's working...