Toronto 'The Green', an environmental report card, was released today by the Toronto Environmental Alliance.

At a (sparsely populated) press conference in City Hall, the group focused on highlighting what they called the most significant issue facing the city: smog. Even though they give the City a B+ for efforts to reduce smog in 2008, they point out that many of the cities plans in this regard are not being given high profile and therefore risk failure from inaction. And after all, the state of global warming has turned out to be "worse than the worst case scenario" (okay I couldn't leave out mention of that somewhat dubious claim - but most of what they had to say was pretty solid).

The report highlights councilors' voting records by grading them based all the "key votes" that have taken place since 2006. Note that all of these initiatives passed with at least a two-thirds majority, backing up the TEA's claim that this is "the greenest council yet."

The overall message seems to be that even the greenest City council can't get the work done at the ground level. I agree that plans like the Green Economic Development Strategy are implemented too far from the City Manager, where priorities are decided.

This report adds to another report card by the Toronto Star published back in December.

Photo by boukesalverda, member of the blogTO flickr pool.