Santa Fe Environmental Impact Fee
Community Empowerment Initiative
To better account for environmental impacts of our economic activities & energy choices, to creatively help meet the climate challenge and to justly phase out our greenhouse gas emissions, we as community members, residents and/or local business owners petition the city and county of Santa Fe to adopt an environmental impact fee and community empowerment initiative. We hereby not only propose a locally progressive form of carbon pricing and green impact investing, we pledge to lead by example and start paying a fee in advance of one being enacted. Encouraging concerted city and county action on environmental pricing will have maximal local impact (akin to a carbon fee and dividend on a national scale). In the meantime we will leverage our initial voluntarily paid fees to generate a community seed fund supporting demonstration projects that magnify the following objectives:
- help alleviate poverty thru sustainability (by for example planting community gardens in association with local homeless shelters and providing participating shelters with vouchers for Farmer's Market /organic food);
- sow 21st century environmental education excellence (by for example supporting solar power, health gardens and water catchment at our public schools and using the commensurate energy savings at each participating school to ramp up its critical thinking, ecology, problem solving and project based learning); and
- support economically empowering pathways to reduce Santa Fe's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (by for example weatherizing low income neighborhood homes, providing zero or low interest loans for those needing help installing renewable energy/energy efficiency, moving toward 100% renewable power/energy storage/ demand response as a leading municipal utility, harnessing landfill methane, reinforcing our watershed by carbon sink re-foresting and biofuel supporting forest thinning, and accelerating public conservation education in order to become the community with the best combined, least wasteful water use & carbon emission footprint in the nation!).
For more information contact the Climate Change Leadership Institute (CCLI)
ccli@takeresponsibility.us / 505-988-3364
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