About cool counties

The Cool Counties initiative seeks to marshal the resources of all 3,066 counties across the nation in addressing this shared challenge in a comprehensive and strategic manner.

We are certainly not the first community leaders to identify this great need. Several county and state governments across the nation are already taking aggressive action with respect to climate change, and it was just two years ago that our counterparts in the nation’s cities launched the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, which has been signed by nearly 600 mayors from 50 states representing over 67 million Americans. The central focus of the Sierra Club's Cool Cities and Cool Counties campaigns is to support local government and community-wide efforts to reduce global warming pollution with smart energy solutions such as energy efficiency, renewable power, cleaner vehicles, sensible land use planning and greater public transportation choices.

Results are being produced, and must continue to be, one community at a time. We as counties have a unique role to play in this effort through our regional cooperation and influence on major environmental factors like air quality, land use planning and zoning, transportation, forest preservation and water conservation. For starters, we can lead by example by looking at our own operations to assess what policy or program changes we have the authority and resources to enact in order to lower the emissions produced by us, county governments, as much as possible. The natural next step will be to work within our communities, educating residents and businesses, and to team with our regional partners to create an inventory of greenhouse emissions on a larger scale. By combining our efforts, we are more likely to succeed in halting the growth in emissions by 2010 and can move toward the goal of reducing them by 80 percent below today’s levels by mid-century, a consensus target within the scientific community. It also will be important to work with our counterparts nationally to reach out to our federal leaders, urging them to join us in this effort by supporting proposals already under review, including incentives for limiting and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and setting more rigorous Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards.

We hope you will join in partnering with us on this important environmental initiative. Cool Counties presents us an opportunity to affect real, lasting changes within our communities for generations to come.