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.
This is the letter for week 21 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 to see topics for all the strike letters, see this story.
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
Because the planet won’t die – we will.
You watch the news, right? If you’re not panicked, you’re not paying attention. Pay attention.
This week’s topic is PRIORITIES.
ASSUMPTIONS
1. We must act now
(see the IPCC, IPBES, IUCN, The Guardian, grist, Daily Climate, National Geographic, Mother Earth News, Environmental News Network, EWG, etc.)
2. We must take big actions
(see Greta Thunberg, Bill McKibben, Fiona Harvey, David Attenborough, Jane Goodall, Dai Qing, Amory Lovins, Wangari Maathai, Marina Silva, etc. for specifics)
3. We have already lost a lot and are going to lose more no matter what we do
(Nuatambu Island, St Helena Redwood, Hawaiian Crow, Santa Cruz bryophyte, permafrost, temperate rain forests, Emperor Penguin, glaciers, Irawaddy dolphin, Xerces blue, etc.)
4. But we will lose everything if we don’t act immediately
(we have an 18-month timeline to start big projects that must be in place by 2030, we must stay
below 1.5°C warming when some places are already over 2°C average change, etc.)
This means SF must establish and act on environmental goals before everything else.
Priority actions should be divided up into three groups:
- immediate long-term (items that require long-term bonds for funding),
- immediate short-term (i.e. easy and a big bang for the buck),
- and sequential medium-term projects (if we’re lucky, these will become our new normal).
Immediate long-term actions are:
Water recycling – Namibia has been doing blackwater recycling for 51 years; it’s not new tech
Massive planting – especially on the shores and in the coastal waters
Retreat from the shoreline – housing only at higher elevations, mobile infrastructure, etc.
Immediate short-term actions are:
Albedo – increase SF’s albedo
Transit – all electric or human-powered, closing down roads to internal combustion engines
Planting – no artificial turf, require living walls and roofs, put a tree every 10-15 feet
Sequential medium-term projects are:
Planting – it’s in all three groups because it’s vital and varies depending on the plant
Really ratcheting up transit and eliminating all internal combustion motors in SF
Wildlife corridors and victory gardens (and eliminating light pollution)
Carbon rationing – not a carbon tax, but a carbon diet
No plastics
All three groups need to start at the same time. Additionally, a second set of priorities should be developed for if we survive the coming 12-20 years; ideally this second set of actions would begin being implemented as soon as possible before 2030.
WAYS TO GET THIS DONE
These priorities form the basis of an SF Green New Deal. They require hiring and training workers for a wide variety of jobs. The quicker SF becomes expert at these goals, the sooner we become a destination for other municipalities wanting to learn how to do the same (much like happened with composting.) All of these actions will save SF money either in the long run or sooner (for instance, increasing our albedo saves the city money immediately.)
SO THE BOARD AND THE MAYOR SHOULD:
- Use the declaration of a Climate Emergency to
- Start action immediately on the above priorities while
- Shaping them into a Green New Deal for SF and
- Making science and data the deciding factors in all decisions (not politics or emotions or corporate interests.)
I am tired of saying it, and you’re tried of hearing it, but our fatigue doesn’t change the facts, and those facts are getting worse every day. When I began teaching I knew we were messing up the planet, but it was all in separate categories in disparate places; the plotline wasn’t clear. By midway through my career, I thought I’d see a little of climate change, but my students would get it worse. By the time I left teaching full-time, I knew that I was going to live through awful stuff and my students might not live long past me because of what’s happening to the planet. In just the last year, though, I realized that not only are my students and I going to experience the realities of a dying biosphere, but my parents are too.
It’s getting very bad, very fast now.
SAN FRANCISCO MUST ACT NOW! WE MUST ACT NOW!