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Jane Goodall Headlines Mountain Towns 2030 Conference

Mountain Towns 2030

Park City is welcoming as many as 40 mountain towns in early October for the first ever Mountain Towns 2030 Net Zero Summit.

This summit is a 3-day conference for invited leaders from mountain community governments, National Governing Organization’s as well as climate-oriented businesses from across the U.S.

In 2015, Park City created its ambitious goals to be net carbon free in all of its municipal operations by the year 2022 and for the entire community to meet them there by 2032. Since then, those goals have been pushed up by 2 years. Bryn Carey, the founder of Ski Butlers is one of the co-chairs of the conference. He says it’s become clear that Park City needs some partners.

“And during that time, we realized that it would be great if Park City reaches these goals but if no one else does, we’re not going  to have a huge impact. We attended Al Gore’s Climate Reality training in Denver CO at that time. And me and Luke were on a panel and we said, hey, this would be a great idea to get leaders in the mountain communities across the west  and across  the world to come to Park City and share best practices to learn from each other and to set ambitious, hopefully net zero goals  very similar to the town of Park City.”

Eyee Hsu has a degree in environmental science and spent 15 living in Beijing China – one of the most polluted cities in the world. She says she has first-hand experience about the impacts of climate change. When she moved to Park City with her family two years ago, she had no idea how progressive Park City and Utah were in renewable energy. She also attended the Al Gore Climate Reality leadership conference.    

“That’s how it started. Mountain Towns 2030 has been a conversation that we’ve had for about two years now. This is the culmination of a lot of thinking around how we get mountain towns together to create this coalition and even further, this collective voice around having this influence perhaps even globally, around climate change.”  

       

U.S. Congressman Ben McAdams will be giving a presentation on the first day of the conference with some perspective from the federal level. Rep. John Curtis will present on Thursday and answer questions from his perspectives as both a city mayor and congressman.

The public is invited to come listen to Dr. Jane Goodall  speak at the Eccles Center Wednesday evening, October 2nd. There are less than 200 tickets are remaining. Tickets for adults are $20 – children are free. They can be purchased online at www.mt2030.org.

“The idea of having Jane Goodall here was let’s inspire the entire community and let’s make this open to the general public.”  So not only is Jane going to be here, Dr. Goodall going to be here, but also Paul Hawken. And it’s really about let’s get the community rallying around what we’re trying to do. We can’t do this in isolation. It’s really going to be about bringing municipality, business,  and community together.”

Other sessions will discuss how Utah has passed one of the most progressive community renewable energy bills in the country and Project Drawdown Founder Paul Hawken takes a deep dive into effective solutions to reverse global warming by reducing and sequestering greenhouse gases.

Representatives from the four largest resort companies in the country, Vail Resorts, Alterra Mountain Company, Powdr and  Boyne Resorts will all be attending. Only Vail has made a commitment to net zero. The conference organizers are hoping that all the others will follow suit. The conference will be capped with announcement about those communities and resorts who choose to jump on the bandwagon as well.  More information is here: http://mt2030.org

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