The Pittsburgh Citizen

Nov. 3: This post has been updated. Workers at a steel mill and a power plant were the first to notice something strange about the Monongahela River last summer. The water that U.S. Steel and Allegheny Energy used to power their plants contained so much salty sediment that it was corroding their machinery. Nearby residents saw something odd, too.

The AFL-CIO’s annual conference was held here in Pittsburgh at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center one week before international leaders converged on the city for the G-20 summit. On Tuesday, September 15th, President Obama addressed delegates of the largest coalition of labor unions in the country. His speech focused on promoting healthcare reform but there were plenty of sidebar conversations on the convention floor among union delegates about the recent tariffs imposed on Chinese tires.

The Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, located in Oakland’s Schenley Park since 1893, has long served as a local getaway for Pittsburgh residents – providing a green escape for the harsh winter months. But for the G-20 leaders who dined there on September 24th, the Conservatory served a much larger role: as a symbol of a city and world learning to come to terms with it’s environment.

Prior to the dinner last Thursday night, Richard Piacentini, the Executive Director of the conservatory, was kind of enough to answer a few questions about the G-20 dinner.

The member countries of the G-20 account for more than 80% of world trade and two-thirds of the world’s population—but what, it may be fair to ask, about everyone else?

Last week, world leaders descended on Pittsburgh with a purported willingness to make hard decisions concerning bank executives’ bonuses, international finance regulations and trade agreements. But these decisions will affect not only their own nations, the scope of those decisions will extend to the one-third of the world’s population in those developing countries not given a seat at the table.