CITY OF SEATTLE
RESOLUTION __________________
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A RESOLUTION stating the Seattle City Council's opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline, and requesting the Department of Finance and Administrative Services to investigate ways to establish contracting criteria to prioritize the City's goals to avoid contracting with financial institutions that provide it with project-level loans or other financial services.
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WHEREAS, in Resolution 31346, adopted December 12, 2011, The City of Seattle resolved that "Climate change is not an abstract problem for the future or one that will only affect far-distant places but rather climate change is happening now, we are causing it, and the longer we wait to act, the more we lose and the more difficult the problem will be to solve"; and
WHEREAS, in December 2015, representatives of 194 nations signed the Paris Agreement to prevent catastrophic and irreversible impacts on the world's climate, with the aim of "[h]olding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2?C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5?C above pre-industrial levels"; and
WHEREAS, a September 2016 Oil Change International report, "The Sky's Limit: Why the Paris Climate Goals Require a Managed Decline of Fossil Fuel Production," found that currently developed reserves of oil, natural gas, and coal "exceed the 2?C carbon budget and signi?cantly exceed the 1.5?C budget," and that "[o]il and gas emissions alone exceed the 1.5?C budget"; and
WHEREAS, a January 2017 Oil Change International report, "Climate on the Line: Why New Tar Sands Pipelines Are Incompatible with the Paris Goals," found that "to have a likely (2 in 3) chance of keeping warming below 2?C, global emissions must be halved within little more than 20 years. To keep warming to 1.5?C, emissions must be halved in about 15 years"; and
WHEREAS, the 2012 analysis produced by the Congressional Research Service, "Canadian Oil Sands: Life...
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