Green carpet won’t quite cover Inaugural footprint

Green carpet won’t quite cover Inaugural footprint
By Jordy Yager
Posted: 01/13/09 08:00 PM [ET]

The carbon footprint of Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration is likely to be huge as millions of people travel to see it — but at least the new president will know that his own footprints will be on a “green” recycled carpet.

However, with an estimated 4 million people descending on Washington, some express doubt that the steps Inaugural planners are taking, including recycling the manure from horses walking in the parade, will be enough.

“Everybody wants to be part of history, but as a result you’re going to have people flying in on their private jets, limousines and SUVs cruising around Washington, D.C. keeping everybody warm, and that’s going to have a big carbon footprint,” said Brian Darling, director of U.S. Senate Relations at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

“For people to make believe that somehow they’re making this a carbon-friendly Inauguration is really just a joke. If they really care that much about the environment, they would not have these millions of people coming to Washington, D.C.”

But the Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) is trying to be as green as possible, including a plan to scoop up all of the manure from the horses in the parade and sell it to a nearby farm.

“We’re committed to holding an Inauguration that isn’t just the most open and accessible in modern history, but also as environmentally friendly and sustainable as possible,” said Kevin Griffis, a spokesman for the PIC.

The PIC has planned to have 6,000 volunteers pick up recycling along the National Mall and the parade route after the day’s events.

And for the first time in history, the next American president is set to take the oath of office on a recycled, solid-blue carpet.

Obama will also walk from the bottom of the U.S. Capitol’s Rotunda steps to the West Front podium on an environmentally friendly carpet runner.

The recyclable carpet on the platform was installed Tuesday along with the runner, which has a blue center and red borders. They will extend about 725 square yards and were made by employees of the Chief Administrative Office (CAO).

Few previous presidential inaugurations have attempted to take such environmentally friendly steps. But the Chief Administrative Officer, who is appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), has been working to reduce the Capitol’s carbon emissions as part of the “Green the Capitol” project for the past year.

But unlike the House initiative, no one is keeping close enough tabs on the Inauguration’s environmentally friendly steps to quantify how much pollution it is curbing.

“Honestly, it’d be something very hard to measure and it would take a lot of resources to measure,” Darling said.

About 80 drapes, cascades and pleated panels were also made by CAO employees using 1,500 yards of water-resistant red, white and blue fabric. The upholstery, carpets and runners used for President Bush’s second Inauguration in 2005 were ruined by the week of snow and sleet surrounding the swearing-in ceremony.

“Many people will be surprised to know how much goes on in the background,” said CAO Dan Beard.

“We’re thrilled to contribute to this historic event.”

But not everyone sees the “green” efforts as having a far-reaching effect beyond making Obama and Congress look good in the public eye for their environmental concern.

“The recycled carpet and all of that probably makes everybody feel better and they can feel like they have a green Inaugural ceremony, but in reality it’s not,” Darling said.

“This is something that’s going to consume massive amounts of energy. If you believe that global warming is man-made, then the Obama Inaugural ceremony will do more to add to man-made global warming than any other political event in Washington, D.C. this year.”

One of the only presidents to hold an environmentally friendly Inauguration was Jimmy Carter, according to Jim Bendat, an Inauguration historian.

“Jimmy Carter was into the recycled paper stuff,” Bendat said. “The official programs — and I’m not sure but I think the congressional programs and the tickets may have been on recycled paper as well. But Jimmy Carter would be probably the only previous president who was thinking about those types of issues.”

The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies (JCCIC) said it is not certain if the tickets were printed on recycled materials. But the programs and more than 1 million invitations to the Inauguration were printed on Forest Stewardship Council-certified paper — ensuring that the trees used for the paper did not come from old-growth forests.

A spokeswoman for the JCCIC pointed to the fact that it is distributing several thousand programs and that, compared to the millions of people coming to the event, that number was relatively small.

“We don’t have that level of production and waste that one would see at your average football game,” said spokeswoman Carole Florman, adding that she was taking “green” steps herself.

“I’m not printing the hundreds of copies of media guides,” she said. “I’m sending them out as PDFs. It seemed incredibly wasteful, both monetarily and otherwise [to print them].”