NEED FOR SPEED - Cleveland Sustainability Manager Watterson addresses the Step it Up crowd.

It was a Saturday afternoon in early November, after a week of temperatures the likes of which drive armchair climate-change pundits to crack about how global warming is impossible to ignore, or the president to say the effects might not be all that bad. Cleveland's Step It Up rally attracted about 85 people to Edgewater Park - a small crowd of the most optimistic and ignored people in politics: grassroots activists, a representative from the city of Cleveland, a few Democratic state representatives and Congressman Dennis Kucinich. A folksinger strummed a guitar and sang with steadfast hope, but without amplification: "We are living on a living planet, circling a living star."

Step It Up is the national network of activists hoping to urge state and federal officials to accelerate efforts to reduce carbon emissions. As Buckeye Forest Council activist Randy Cunningham told the crowd, "We need legislation on a scale not seen since the New Deal."

That means federal action. The goal of the campaign is to motivate governments to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent by the year 2050. That may be even more ambitious than it sounds. Just like losing weight, it's easy to take tiny steps - replacing light bulbs, setting thermostats lower - to shed those first few percentage points. And if you divide 80 percent evenly across 43 years, it sounds manageable to reduce emissions by 2 percent annually.

But after those first few steps, the bulk of the journey is where the real challenge lies. The messages from speakers at the rally reflected the scope of what's necessary, and right now that only seems to be felt at the lowest levels. Climbing through the levels of government hierarchy means navigating increasingly deceptive levels of smoke-and-mirrors legislation and ultimately the economic interests of some of the nation's and the world's wealthiest lobbies - the energy industry.

As Cleveland Sustainability Manager Andrew Watterson explains, some local governments are trying. Cleveland's mayor has been a steady proponent of reducing carbon emissions, having signed a climate protection agreement last year - an indication that the city officially agrees that climate change is happening, and that human factors are contributing. The mayor has also thrown his weight behind city ordinances that would use Cleveland's spending power to push for green building, with a proposal to require energy-efficient technology before builders and rehabbers could get tax abatements, loans and other help from the city. More recently he's proposed to require Cleveland Public Power to generate a minimum of 25 percent of its electricity from renewable resources - wind, solar and gas from landfills - by the year 2025. City Council will ultimately decide whether the measures are implemented, and some members have already voiced concern about how much it will cost.

But that's the kind of action cities around the world are taking. Cleveland is a relative latecomer, joining 700 cities representing some 300 million people worldwide that are members of ICLEI, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives. Three other Ohio cities - Athens, Alliance and Oberlin - are also members. Besides solidarity that the members hope higher levels of government might eventually notice, the organization offers computer modeling software that Watterson says Cleveland will use to size up its carbon footprint. The software considers features like airports, the number of cars and the size of the population to calculate the volume of carbon emissions. Once that inventory is done, he says the city can decide whether an 80 percent reduction - which he calls an "aggressive" goal - is attainable in Cleveland.

But of course the global problem isn't solvable by individual cities, and in fact solving it may require that some central cities actually increase their carbon footprints by attracting people back from far-flung suburbs.

"To reach these goals, people will have to live in more densely populated areas," Watterson says. "We can talk about energy efficiency and renewable energy, but at some point you have to talk about people that live way out and drive into the city every day. It means changing the direction we've been headed for the last 50 years."

THE FIRST LAYER beyond individual municipalities - county government - was not represented at Cleveland's Step It Up rally. And the three state-level politicians in attendance told tales of legislative "greenwash."

Three energy bills have kicked around the Ohio statehouse, each of them claiming green credibility on different grounds.

Republican Jim McGregor, of Gahanna, introduced House Bill 357, which called for 20 percent of Ohio's energy to be generated by renewable means by 2018, and included benchmarks for progress along the way - but it also would have allowed for drilling in state parks.

Democrat Michael Skindell, of Lakewood, introduced HB 313, which would have required 20 percent of electricity generated from renewables by the year 2018. The bill included annual benchmarks for progress and didn't give the utilities a loophole. But HB 313 hasn't even gotten a hearing.

All three state reps that came out for the Step It Up rally - Skindell, Mike Foley and Dale Miller - advocate for a more ambitious plan than the one that is gaining traction, Senate Bill 221, Gov. Ted Strickland's energy bill. As passed by the Senate, the bill calls for 25 percent of electricity generated in Ohio to be generated according to advanced energy portfolio standards - including so-called "clean coal" - by 2025. Just half that requirement, or 12.5 percent of the total, would have to be generated by renewable sources like wind and solar. But as Skindell points out, the bill includes no benchmarks for progress along the way. And there's a gigantic loophole: If the cost of complying goes up by 3 percent or more, the utilities don't have to.

Watterson calls the bill "weak and toothless."

And that's just energy generation. The most anyone says about dealing with the carbon produced by all the cars driving across our sprawling landscape is that mass transit could help. Not even Dennis Kucinich will tell people to give up their cars or move back in to the urban core.

Kucinich's role as a presidential candidate has often been to say what no one else is willing to say. "The United Nations Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change came out with a report [two weeks ago] that makes it abundantly clear that if we build more coal plants, we will contribute to melting of ice shelves and rising sea levels," the congressman observes. "If we know that's happening already and will continue, then what are we doing? I would submit that coal and oil have such a hold on our political process that government officials are unable to act in the public interest."

Instead, he proposes something on the historic scale environmentalists have called for: a Works Green Administration, modeled on the old Works Progress Administration.

"We need to rebuild the infrastructure to permit the possibility of mass transit. The Department of Energy should stop subsidizing coal, oil and nuclear energy, and start subsidizing wind and solar power. A Works Green Administration would create manufacturing jobs to retrofit tens of millions of US homes with technology that would enable the reduction of our carbon profile. This would decentralize the generation of power. I'm calling for that, to create jobs and prime the economy. My idea is to make government an engine of sustainability."

In the meantime, activists like Cunningham are pushing people to contact Governor Strickland and members of the state legislature to urge that Strickland's bill require more energy to be produced by renewable means, include benchmarks for progress and eliminate the 3-percent loophole.

"Global warming is here," Cunningham said to the Step it Up crowd in November. "Human activity is behind it. The question is, what are we going to do about it? Activism is the pulse of society. Activism is the hope of the world."