00:00🎵Outro Music🎵
00:30We own our own power company, and now we've reached about 50% power generation as renewable
00:36energy.
00:37We're doing composting around the city, required at restaurants and food establishments, nearly
00:44now to all of our residences in the city.
00:49We're trying to take our transportation system, which is a huge opportunity for us, and to
00:55electrify it.
00:57We're rewriting our land development code so that we can live in a more compact and
01:02dense way to encourage walking.
01:04We've greatly expanded the mileage of protected bicycle routes in our city.
01:12So even though it's Texas and we live in a city where people love their cars, we recognize
01:18that we're going to have to have a considerable mode change in our city if we're going to
01:21be able to meet so many of our objectives.
01:27You know, reaching zero carbon is not only possible, but it's an imperative.
01:45It's to ensure that we're not contributing to this massive worldwide challenge that we
01:52have to maintain temperature increases below a level that the world can survive.
02:09In order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States
02:19will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.
02:29Even when the Paris Accords were signed and the United States was involved, it was recognized
02:35that half of the work that needed to be done would be done at the city level because it's
02:40at cities where we control a lot of the generation decisions, a lot of the purchasing decisions,
02:46a lot of the land use and mobility decisions.
02:49Now that the United States is pulling back from the Paris Accord, it becomes that much
02:55more important for cities like Austin, but not just Austin in the United States.
03:02Other cities like Philadelphia and Los Angeles and Boston and Seattle and Portland, cities
03:07all across the country that are saying that this has always been our work, but we need
03:14to step up even more now to pick up any slack that might be created from what I hope will
03:20be just a momentary withdrawal from the Paris Accords.
03:26When a community sees the extended drought that we've been through, when we see the flooding
03:34that is now more regularly occurring in our city, when we lose lives to that flooding,
03:40when we watch the wildfire just outside our city limits just devastate an entire community,
03:49it really brings home in very real and visceral ways the challenges associated with not mitigating
03:57climate change, the conditions we've already seen.
04:10For more UN videos visit www.un.org
