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 132 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
Code Red! 5 Alarm Fire! Active Shooter! Global Pandemic! Emergency Alert!
This week’s topic: Act Like Our City’s On Fire!
The ecosystems that support human life are being destroyed
Humans are the cause of the ongoing Great Extinction Event. We are killing off species and ecosystems from coral reefs to redwood forests, from megafauna to microflora, while polluting the atmosphere, the ocean, the land, and the biosphere with accelerating speeds and increasingly toxic and long-lasting substances. Everything is connected. We are part of and depend on the biosphere we are breaking.1
Nations are doing nothing
Nations say they’re committed to keeping us to 1.5° C average temperature increase (note: this is already both catastrophic and permanent.) Nations pledge to cut CO2 to levels that will land us somewhere around 2°C. But nations act in ways that have the earth zooming toward a 2.7° C average temperature increase, or higher.2
Yet local actions can make a life or death difference
Trees reduce urban heat deaths, healthy riparian habitat and marshlands prevent and absorb flooding, robust native ecosystems fight off invasive species including those that bring diseases, forested areas bring rain, and on and on.3 Fixing local environmental problems saves local lives and reduces human-caused biosphere loss. Local actions make a difference and are absolutely necessary.
SF isn’t doing nearly enough locally
Where is your energy being spent? There were 72 separate items on the 26 October 2021 Board of Supervisors Meeting Minutes.4 Of those 72 items, only 6 could be said to pertain to SF’s existential environmental crisis, and only very generally. Of those 6 items, (PUC, Treasure Island, CleanPower SF rates, oil and gas facilities in the planning code, Stern Grove emergency, and Recology), the PUC, CleanPower SF rates, and Recology contract were treated as pro forma items, the Stern Grove issue is just mopping up after a disaster, the Treasure Island money is being thrown away (Treasure Island will be underwater5), and only the oil and gas planning code changes show any foresight or attempt to change SF’s environmental picture at all.
How much of your time are you working on SF’s life or death environmental issues? Slightly over 1%.
The solutions are obvious — stop COPping out and act now!
Dear Editor,
COP 26 is here, the science is clear, and even banks are starting to panic. San Francisco, though, continues to talk big while doing next to nothing about climate change — even though most of the adaptations we need to make to survive climate change have to happen locally. When will our politicians and bureaucrats and press respond to and report on the biggest challenge and the biggest story in the history of our species? Everything else is window dressing when our survival is at stake. It’s time SF wakes up and smells the Code Red. The situation is already getting ugly and is guaranteed to get a lot worse if we continue fiddling while the planet burns.
FOOTNOTES
1. “Everything relies on everything else…” The World Counts. Accessed 2 November 2021. https://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/Impact-of-Ecosystem-Destruction.
2. Harry Stevens and Brady Dennis. “National climate pledges are too weak to avoid catastrophic warming. Most countries are on track to miss them anyway.” The Washington Post. 1 Nov 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2021/climate-pledges-cop26/?itid=hp_Climate%20box.
3. See prior Strike letters for loads of details, specifically weeks 119, 118, 115, 110, 108, 106, 95, 94, 93, 92, 76, 72, 67, 52, 45, 44, 39, 38, 27, 23, 22, 11, 9 and 6 for more details.
4. “Board of Supervisors City and County of San Francisco Meeting Minutes - Draft”. City and County of San Francisco. 26 October 2021. https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/bag102621_minutes.pdf.
5. Molly Peterson. “Treasure Island Is Sinking As Seas Are Rising, and So Are Other Bay Area Cities”. KQED. 7 March 2018. https://www.kqed.org/science/1920819/treasure-island-is-sinking-as-seas-are-rising-and-so-are-other-bay-area-cities.