I called Mayor Greg Nickels office yesterday to ask whether they wish to respond to my point that all these active government measures about "global warming" seem a little funny when Seattle is experiencing record low temperatures day after day. I was pleasantly surprised when Mayor Nickels himself called me back and granted me a substantive phone interview on his plans for fighting climate change. Excerpts:

Nickels: First of all, Stefan, I want to thank you and your fellow writers at Sound Politics for your eagle eyes in the area of government accountability. Of course I hotly disagree with much of what you write. But we in government have so many more items on our agenda than is humanly possible to deal with at any point in time and we depend on watchdogs from across the political spectrum to remind us where we've let things fall through the cracks. Like when you busted my chops a couple of years ago on that gas guzzling city car. [link here -- Ed.] That was a welcome kick in the pants to my office to do the right thing that I had been intending to do for a while. So we now have a more fuel-efficient car and we've also slowed the rate of growth in miles driven. We're down from a projected 105 miles a day down to 102 miles a day. So the City of Seattle is grateful to you for your commentary on that one issue.

And of course we have to focus on climate change even, some would say especially, when we have record low temperatures. As you know, I'm not a scientist. I dropped out of college to go into public service before I had the opportunity to take any science classes. I'm humble about my own limits in that regard. But we have a world class team of advising scientists from UW and elsewhere who consult with us constantly. And as they explain it, and this might sound counterintuitive to those of us who aren't educated in science, the predictive models for climate change have very wide confidence intervals. The average trend is moving warmer, but the models also predict that the climate might get colder or might get more or less warm or cold than it would otherwise, or it might even stay more or less the same. So we have to prepare for all of those contingencies. That's why we don't talk about "global warming" so much any more as we do about "climate change", because humankind is changing the climate, especially through carbon emissions, and we have to fight that change by lowering carbon emissions, even if we can't predict with pinpoint accuracy how the climate would be affected if we do nothing at all.

So our priority in the City of Seattle is to do whatever we can to lower our carbon footprint. We've started by reducing dependence on vehicles, especially on carbon-based fuel consumption. We encourage energy efficiency in the home -- better insulation, more energy efficient appliances and the like; More recycling. But that's just the first step. Long-term we have to think very hard about how to reduce our individual carbon footprints. Some of these will be small changes, others may require deeper lifestyle and cultural adjustments, but they're all essential to minimize our impacts on the environment.

Take,for example, carbonated beverages. Most people have no idea how many millions of kilotons of CO2 are released into the atmosphere every day simply by people drinking soda pop. Starting next year, vending machines in City of Seattle buildings will only dispense non-carbonated soft drinks. And we're working with the Coca-Cola company on this. They'll provide us with non-carbonated versions of Coke and Fanta. Same great taste, but better for the environment.

And the CO2 that we humans release when we exhale is also enormously significant. Of course we all need to breathe, but we can all afford to breathe a little less. The average adult respiratory rate is 12- 20 breaths a minute. If everybody breaths just one less breath a minute, that's about a 5 - 8% reduction in respiratory CO2. That's huge. So we're developing a program to teach city employees exercises for slower breathing. And I can't stress enough the importance of avoiding unnecessary exercise. Strenuous exercise makes your CO2 output go through the roof. We'll still promote walking and bicycling to replace necessary trips that would otherwise be taken by car, but recreational exercise is very harmful to the environment. That's one of the lifestyle changes that I've mentioned. We need to transition toward a more sedentary way of life. If you've noticed, many of the most prominent spokespersons in the fight against climate change -- Michael Moore, Joel Connelly, myself. We're a little heavy. Al Gore's puffing out. Ron Sims, I tease him that he looks like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. That's not from overeating. That's from slowing down and not overexercising.

Finally, Seattle is going to make a big push on the Zero Waste initiative. You probably saw in the news today that the City Council is making it easier for citizens to recycle. [news link here -- Ed.]. Anything we can do to reduce waste is encouraged. And I do mean anything. Sheryl Crow got a lot of criticism for talking about using less toilet paper. Of course we're not going to legislate anything along those lines. But that's the type of innovative conservationist thinking I personally encourage. Use less toilet paper. And you don't necessarily have to flush every time you use the lavatory. And frankly, we should look to our diverse cultural heritage and learn from what some of the non-western cultures can teach us about conserving resources and minimizing waste. And I know some of these ideas might be difficult for most people from European backgrounds to swallow and I don't expect them to be widely adopted immediately. But here in Seattle, where we care deeply about the environment and where we are open to learning from other cultures, we can at least start the conversation.

Me: I'm not sure I follow what you're talking about.

Nickels: One of the men in 20th century world affairs that I admire the most is a Prime Minister of India from the 1970s named Morarji Desai. He lived to be 99 years old and he was a wonderful example of how to live a healthy and an environmentally responsible life. If you haven't heard about him, just look him up in google and I'll leave it at that. [link here -- Ed.]