SEQUIM — The city of Sequim sent a letter last week to President Barack Obama urging action at the 2015 United Nations climate change conference that begins Monday despite the objections of two council members.
No vote was taken on Monday but the majority of the seven-member council agreed to send the letter.
Councilmen Erik Erichsen and Dennis Smith opposed it.
“There is no global warming,” Erichsen said.
“It is not human generated. It is what God does to this world on a routine basis. He is in charge.”
Said Smith: “I do agree that I don’t believe . . . the city of Sequim” should support “a letter that says basically what somebody else told us to say.”
“I absolutely cannot support this letter,” he said.
Council members Genaveve Starr, Laura DuBois and Ted Miller — as well as Mayor Candace Pratt and Councilman Ken Hays, who participated in the meeting by phone — supported the letter.
“I think to believe that we don’t have some responsibility to minimize our impact through carbon emissions and all the other things we can do is childish,” Hays said.
On that basis “I am in favor of telling our president to take a strong message to the rest of the world leaders to try to lead us to a better, more sensible, more energy efficient and a more practical” future, he said.
Obama is scheduled to leave for Paris, France today for the conference that ends Dec. 11 and return to the White House on Tuesday.
Janos Pasztor, the U.N. assistant secretary-general for climate change, has said that 171 countries that collectively account for more than 90 percent of emissions — including China, the United States, the European Union and India — have submitted national climate plans with targets.
“If successfully implemented, these national plans bend the emission curve down to a projected global temperature rise of approximately 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century,” he has said.
City Manager Charlie Bush described the conference, which is the 21st Conference of the Parties — the annual meeting of global leaders that seek to take action to lower carbon emissions, which are blamed for a rise in global temperatures that is affecting the climate.
“It is an opportunity to potentially get a climate change pact together across the globe for the very first time,” Bush said.
The letter describes actions taken by the city of Sequim to date in its efforts to address sustainability and climate change, and encourages Obama to take the lead in moving the global community toward a strong international climate deal during the summit, Bush said.
City efforts to curb emissions includes a resolution passed in 2012 to reduce energy consumption by city vehicles, infrastructure and lighting.
The letter can be read online at http://tinyurl.com/PDN-Sequimletter.
Citing regional studies, Bush said the Olympic Peninsula and the city of Sequim have experienced changes such as declining mountain snowpack resulting in drought conditions, shifts in precipitation, sea level rise, extended warm temperatures and increasingly corrosive ocean waters.
Erichsen said during the meeting such studies were “pseudo-science.”
He said he could not “support this political agenda by some people who want to make it appear that we are guilty of something that we are not guilty of. God controls the weather.”
As such, “I reject this letter,” he said, “because this is not something we should be doing.”
Said Hays: “I think simply attacking the idea of being better stewards of the planet as pure politics is silly and unreasonable.”
Erichsen objected to Hays “calling me childish.”
“That is going in the face of real science, not pseudo-science, and it is strictly political,” he said.
Erichsen requested his objections be included in the letter. The request was rejected by the majority consensus.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-681-2390, ext. 5052, or cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.
