Black Mountain Cool Cities Event

Sierra Club member Sheridan Hill, Mayor Carl Bartlett and I celebrate Black Mountain's Cool City honor.

We had another great Cool Cities event today in Black Mountain! A couple dozen people and a healthy amount of media folks turned out to hear about what their community is doing to fight global warming.

Mayor Carl Bartlett, who has lived in the town since he was a boy, told me that beyond the scientific consensus he had pretty strong anecdotal evidence for the reality of global warming. He related that when he was a child in Black Mountain, 'we didn't have air conditioning and we didn't need it.' Now he says 'all we need to do is look at what the temperature was like last month' to see how things have changed.

It was a nice ceremony, with Sierra Club member Sheridan Hill making some great remarks in addition to Mayor Bartlett. It was great to meet Sheridan! She is a former Black Mountain Planning Board member and also used to be active with the Foothills Group when she lived in Winston-Salem. She is an accomplished writer and author and you can see her website here. If there's one thing I've learned in this job it is that Sierra Club members are sure talented people!

I wrote earlier this summer about a lot of the good work Black Mountain is doing. Black Mountain is continuing to look for good new things they can do though. They have:

-Secured a grant for an electric car for the Police Department
-Done two energy audits of town facilities and come up with resultant initiatives for reducing energy usage.
-Begun to fuel many of its vehicles with B20 biodiesel.

Thank you to Assistant City Manager Bo Ferguson and Planning Director Elizabeth Teague for all their great work, and congratulations Black Mountain!