You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference!
This is the letter for week 122 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
Can you be convinced to do the right thing
as our chances of survival dwindle to nothing?
This week: CLIMATE COWARDICE
Clearly you are more averse to acting than to people dying from your inaction
Because you continue not to act even though it’s abundantly clear that climate change kills.1, 2, 3 No matter how much information I provide or how thoroughly I illustrate the need for action, no matter the legislative and legal information or the contacts for places doing the exact actions needed I produce for you, no matter how much I do the initial research and groundwork you should have been doing long ago, you’re still not going to act.
You are not going to act. The status quo is killing the city and the planet, but you represent the status quo so you’re not going to act. You are not leaders, you are followers of money and power and what was done in the past. What was done in the past is destroying the planet, and you know it, and you don’t care. And we know you don’t care because you don’t act.
So if you won’t act because it’s the right thing to do, what can make you act?
Shame. If enough voters know you don’t want to do the right thing for SF, that you don’t care about the people of SF, and start asking you why, you’ll have to at least give lip service to acting on climate change. It’s the only thing that’s worked with you so far.4 And it’s all we have to work with until we can get you out and get real leaders, people who actually care and will do something, in office.
How do we name and shame you on your climate cowardice?
In every way possible. For example:
Dear Editor,
Climate chaos is here, but the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors keep fiddling while the planet burns. The IPCC says big actions are needed immediately if we’re going to survive, yet the Board can’t even stomach street traffic reductions and the Mayor responds to resource inequalities by calling in homeless sweeps. If SF can’t produce locally controlled, clean, renewable power and water, the city will not survive. So what are the Board and Mayor doing? Well, their latest plan, the 0-80-100-Roots Plan, addresses power, but not water. But it’s just a plan and they don’t have a good track record with their plans (take Vision Zero, for example). They may talk a good talk, but the time for talking is long past. Current SF government isn’t leading the fight for a livable planet. In fact, are they really in the fight at all?
What will it take for you to finally act?
Are you like the Covid/vaccine deniers who have to catch Covid and get on a ventilator before you acknowledge that maybe you should have done something sooner, like when the science was telling you to act? Because the science is screaming at you now.
It’s now or never
We’re at “code red for humanity,”5 or as the Daily Beast put it so elegantly, “UN Climate Experts to the World: We’re Already Fucked.” 6 Children are pleading for you to act.7 ACT!
FOOTNOTES
1. Leyland Cecco. “Record heatwave may have killed 500 people in western Canada”. The Guardian. 2 July 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/02/canada-heatwave-500-deaths.
2. Abby Lee Hood and Paulina Firozi. “Survivors recount ‘living nightmare’ as Tennessee’s deadly floodwaters swept them up in moments”. The Washington Post. 23 August 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/23/tennessee-flooding-waverly/.
3. Livia Albeck-Ripka. “The Ashes of the Dixie Fire Cast a Pall 1,000 Miles From Its Flames”. The New York Times. 9 August 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/us/dixie-fire-california.html.
4. CH4 ban, Vision Zero, bike paths, yeah — not a whole lot there, is there. And all of it forced on you by the people of SF who are being injured and killed by your inaction.
5. UN Secretary-General António Guterres on the contents of the 6th IPCC Report.
6. Barbie Latza Nadeau. “UN Climate Experts to the World: We’re Already Fucked”. Daily Beast. 9 August 2021. https://www.thedailybeast.com/un-climate-experts-to-the-world-were-already-fucked.
7. David Wallace-Wells. “It’s Greta’s World But it’s still burning. The extraordinary rise of a 16-year-old, and her Hail Mary climate movement.” New York Magazine. 17 September 2019. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/greta-thunberg-climate-change-movement.html.