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 126 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
How long can you tread water?
The topic this week is Elevation.
Why elevation?
Because you’re allowing yet another downtown mega-skyscraper to be built in SF.1 61-stories, 806-feet: do you truly have no idea why this is a bad decision? It’s bad because:
- SF is in earthquake country. SF will have major earthquakes.2 Downtown is mostly landfill and will liquefact in a major quake.3
- Downtown SF is already sinking due to the piling of megatons of mass on fill.4
- It only takes 4’ (48”, 1.2 meters) to flood downtown.5
- That flood water is coming and SF is nowhere near ready.6
To put it as simply as possible, big buildings downtown are a bad idea not only because of earthquakes, but because they lower SF’s land levels and because they are being built where it will flood. You are literally building disasters.7
Do you not even look at the science?
- Go here for the map for SF with sea level rise.8
- Go here for the map for storm surges in San Francisco caused by 100 year storms, and remember these storms now arrive every decade to every year.9
- Make sure you add in dead wetlands and impermeable surfaces so that little to no water is absorbed.10
SF is going to see frequent, increasing, huge flooding events.11 And you’re making decisions right now, knowing all this, to make the situation worse.
Do you understand science at all?
Politics is the practice of exploiting the human need for community in order to allow hoarding by the few at the impoverishment of the many; science describes reality. Politics doesn’t like science because politics doesn’t like reality. Faced with inescapable truths, politicians ignore, deny, slow-walk, and finally “compromise” to pretend they’ve done something, and nothing changes because the political calculus denies reality. But reality is. And the climate changes.
Can you act based on reality?
I mean, you have a long history of not being able to even when the stakes are low.12
How long can you tread water?
Dear Editor,
Sea level rise caused by climate change means increased and higher levels of flooding, especially downtown. Skyscrapers are already causing the land, especially downtown, to sink. Climate change is increasing the frequency of 100-year storms to almost yearly events. Drought is killing off the wetlands, so floods are faster and higher. And more and more of the permeable land in SF is being paved over, leaving fewer places for water to go. All this adds up to high risk for frequent disastrous flooding downtown. So why is SF building more skyscrapers? The greatest challenge humans have ever faced is climate change. Why are SF’s politicians and developers still acting like it doesn’t exist?
FOOTNOTES
1. J.K. Dineen. “San Francisco’s next major skyscraper will break ground in 2022”. San Francisco Chronicle. 9 September 2021. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/San-Francisco-s-next-major-skyscraper-will-16444701.php.
2. “Earthquake Risk in San Francisco”. California Earthquake Authority. 8 June 2020. https://www.earthquakeauthority.com/Blog/2020/san-francisco-bay-area-earthquake-prediction-risk.
3. “Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation”. CGS. Accessed 21 September 2021. https://maps.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/EQZApp/app/.
4. Kurtis Alexander. “Buildings like S.F.’s Millennium Tower are causing the Bay Area to sink under their weight”. San Francisco Chronicle. 19 February 2021. https://www.sfchronicle.com/environment/article/San-Francisco-Bay-Area-sinking-under-its-own-15961703.php.
5. “Sea Level Rise - Map Viewer”. NOAA. Accessed 21 September 2021. https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/dataset/sea-level-rise-map-viewer.
6. Stephen Stock, Robert Campos, Mark Villarreal, Michael Horn, and Jeremy Carroll. “As Sea Level Rise Threat Grows, SF Officials Don’t Have Public Plan to Save Sewers”. NBC Bay Area. 25 May 2021. https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/as-sea-level-rise-threat-grows-sf-officials-dont-have-public-plan-to-save-sewers/2554470/.
7. Liz Fuller-Wright. “Sea level rise is speeding up, says Princeton climatologist Michael Oppenheimer”. Princeton University. 13 January 2020. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/01/13/sea-level-rise-speeding-says-princeton-climatologist-michael-oppenheimer.
8. https://data.sfgov.org/Geographic-Locations-and-Boundaries/108-Inundation-Vulnerability-Zone-Line-Sea-Level-R/ff7h-99em.
9. https://sfplanninggis.org/floodmap/
10. Chelsea Harvey. “West Coast Wetlands Could Nearly Disappear in 100 Years”. Scientific American. 22 February 2018. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/west-coast-wetlands-could-nearly-disappear-in-100-years/.
11. Georgina Gustin. “U.S. Coastal Cities Will Flood More Often and More Severely, Study Warns”. Inside Climate News. 7 June 2017. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07062017/coastal-flooding-extreme-sea-level-rise-forecast/.
12. Chronicle Editorial Board. “Editorial: SF jumped the gun in its Great Highway reopening. That can’t happen at JFK”. San Francisco Chronicle. 19 September 2021. https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Editorial-SF-jumped-the-gun-in-its-Great-Highway-16469050.php