Toronto Star: Jim Byers

NEW YORK — Mayor David Miller has challenged his fellow mayors to help fight global warming. Miller today held a press conference here to announce a “cutting-edge” web-based tool that will help citizens of cities around the world fight global warming.

Working with Toronto-based Zerofootprint and a Paris and San Jose-based software company called Business Objects, the effort will allow residents to go online and see how changes in their lifestyle can reduce their carbon footprints — and eventually let municipalities compete with one another for the title of greenest city in the world.

“It’s exciting, innovate and, quite frankly, pretty cool,” Miller told reporters attending the C40 Large Cities climate summit. “Our residents are anxious to do what they can to help save the planet and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and they are looking for ways to do it.”

Ron Dembo of Zerofootprint said that if everyone who lived in the 40 cities represented at the conference merely turned off their computer screen savers when they weren’t working, it would save the amount of electricity that requires 150 coal-fired power plants to generate.

Continue reading the full article in The Star.