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 127 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
Do you know what you’re actually doing?
The topic this week is Transparency: It’s Not Just For Windows
SF is terrible at transparency
Do you know San Francisco’s current power generation status and energy sources? What about our water stats, actual recycling numbers, detailed carbon footprint, urban forest health, usable bike lane milage, percent permeable surfaces, nighttime candela change, local biosphere loss, health differences connected to environmental injustice, implementation of the precautionary principle, or lasting impacts of prior city and county environmental decisions? No? That’s because it’s ridiculously, absurdly, and insanely hard to find any of this information for SF.
Do you know what environmental work SF has done or is doing?
There’s no one place collecting, organizing, and making accessible SF’s environmental data, work, and goal achievement information. SF Environment should be the place for an overview of the city’s green policies, with links to histories, regulations, ordinances, legal decisions, agencies responsible for implementation, and where to go for assistance, right? But underfunding and over-assigning make SF Environment’s docket impossibly broad and impossible to encompass. They do as well as they can with little money and less access but, in jigsaw puzzle terms, we don’t even have the border yet and no path to get to the whole picture.
So why don’t we have reliable and accessible green data? If it’s because the powers-that-be in SF have relied and thrived on opacity1, 2, 3, 4 that has to stop now. Hiding the truth won’t help.
Try transparency
It works.5, 6 Solving a problem requires knowing what the problem is and what’s been tried. How can you deal with climate change’s impacts on SF if you don’t know what’s been tried, what’s supposed to be done, who is doing it, and why? You are elected and therefore accountable, so we are holding you to account7 and accountability requires transparency.8
Can SF do transparency?
Well, it’s either transparency or a combination of prison terms and environmental devastation. So isn’t it about time you tried transparency?
Dear Editor,
The former president’s continued crying about last November isn’t the Big Lie. It’s a lie, but it’s small compared to ExxonMobil’s greenwashing and Monsanto’s pretending to care about sustainability. To fight these lies about the destruction of our environment, we need truth and transparency. Let’s start in San Francisco. Set up a central clearinghouse with all SF’s environmental data, regulations, agencies, ordinances, history, goals, and contacts in one place, accessible to all. Transparency not only prevents corruption scandals, it can give us the means and tools to fight for the survival of the city. Give us transparency and we can hold our elected officials accountable. Give us transparency and we can put our energy into fighting climate change, instead of lies.
FOOTNOTES
1. “San Francisco Corruption Scandal: 2 Contractors Plead Guilty To Bribing Mohammad Nuru Over 7-Year Span”. KPIX. 27 May 2021. https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/05/27/sf-city-hall-corruption-scandal-2-contractors-plead-guilty-bribing-mohammed-nuru-7-year-span/.
2. Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez. “SF Corruption Saga: Newly Released Messages Between Former SFPUC Chief and City Contractor Suggest Cozy Relationship”. KQED. 17 March 2021. https://www.kqed.org/news/11863771/sf-corruption-saga-newly-released-messages-between-former-sfpuc-chief-and-city-contractor-suggest-cozy-relationship.
3. Joe Eskenazi. “The state of San Francisco corruption”. Mission Local. 15 March 2021. https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/san-francisco-corruption/.
4. Sid Patel. “New Charges, Plea Deals in SF City Hall Corruption Investigation”. FBI. 17 September 2020. https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/san-francisco-charges-091720.mpeg/view.
5. “Environmental transparency, participation and justice”. The Transparency & Accountability Initiative. 2011. http://transparency-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/7-environment1.pdf.
6. Ramon Arratia. “True sustainability needs transparency”. The Guardian. 17 March 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/blog/waste-and-recycling.
7. Damian Carrington. “‘Blah, blah, blah’: Greta Thunberg lambasts leaders over climate crisis”. The Guardian. 28 September 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/28/blah-greta-thunberg-leaders-climate-crisis-co2-emissions.
8. Barack Obama. “Memorandum For The Heads Of Executive Departments And Agencies, Subject: Freedom of Information Act”. The White House Office of the Press Secretary. 21 January 2009. https://sgp.fas.org/obama/foia012109.html.