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 134 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
2 weeks ago we looked at your priorities. Last week we looked at your spending.
This week’s topic: Enforcement
Is SF’s reputation as an environmental leader real or just PR?
Based on both the mayor’s stated priorities and the board’s published legislative agenda, SF’s environmental rep is just PR.1 Based on SF’s spending on the environment, SF’s environmental commitment is only PR.2
But what about the green regulations SF passed over the last decade?
The Green Landscaping Ordinance of 2010 is ignored (especially in permeability and plantings), the 2008 Green Building Code gets spotty enforcement (or none at all if you’re politically connected or rich3, and where are the promised electric vehicle charging stations?), the city-wide recycling program is wish-cycling, the 2021 Green Purchasing Regulations are ignored if inconvenient, and older regulations are “forgotten about” or non-enforced (oil down storm drains and in run-off, dumping of toxins and garbage in parks, lackadaisical urban forest planting, glacially slow and incomplete radioactive waste cleanups, and the lack of enforcement of Slow Streets and traffic violations, for just a few examples.)
By not enforcing existing regulations and ordinances while claiming environmental leadership, SF gaslights and greenwashes.
So enforce those regulations fully
By heeding politics instead of science and slow walking environmental action, SF has replicated locally what national governments are doing globally: too little and too late.4 SF’s regulations and ordinances would have been great starts a decade or two ago. Now they’re almost nothing compared to current needs.
So what can SF can actually do?
Tons! Why are gas-operated vehicles running in SF city limits? Why are we wasting water, and destroying ecosystems and species to do so? Why do we have a huge non-recyclable waste stream flowing out of the city? Why aren’t we assisting our frontline sister cities in mitigating environmental impacts?5 Why aren’t we growing food everywhere we can? Where are the needed green pathways to support biodiversity in SF and beyond? Why are we talking about seawalls instead of horizontal bio-berms, bioswales, marshlands, and seagrass meadows? Want more? There are 133 prior Strike letters full of details, contacts, technical, and legal information on what SF can do. You just have to act.
Is SF an environmental leader?
Let’s look at your report card, calculated from scores listed in the last 2 Strike letters and this letter.
Agenda: 0% for the mayor, 3% for the Board (being generous) for an average of 1.5% — a very low F.
Spending: Between ⅓ of 1% and ⅕ of 1% = roughly ¼ of 1% — an even lower F.
Enforcement: Let’s exaggerate and give you a 62% success rate here — that a D-.
Total percent: 21.25% — a low F.
What’s needed for survival: 100%, nothing less.
Want to change your grade? Act big, act smart, act consistently, and act now!
Dear Editor,
SF talks big when it comes to environmental leadership, but actions speak louder than words, and our city’s actions have been very little and very late. COP26 in Glasgow told us clearly that the world needs to cut CO2 emissions by 26.8 billion metric tons by 2030. But the world’s governments have only pledged to cut 6.3 billion metric tons of emissions by then. Where are the rest of the cuts going to come from? Cities. Us. What does that look like? SF needs to be car-free immediately, eliminate all gas and wood burning in SF, and put huge investments into our urban forest, bio highways, coastal planting, blackwater recycling, and local electrical production. Either we change now or change catches us completely unprepared. SF needs to stop greenwashing and finally start acting green.
FOOTNOTES
1. See Strike letter week 132 — Act Like Our City’s On Fire.
2. See Strike letter week 133 — Fix Your Priorities.
3. Joe Eskenazi. “The state of San Francisco corruption”. Mission Local. 15 March 2021. https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/san-francisco-corruption/.
4. Emily Pontecorvo, Shannon Osaka, & Clayton Aldern. “The progress (and failures) of COP26, in 3 charts”. Grist. 15 November 2021. https://grist.org/cop26/the-progress-and-failures-of-cop26-in-3-charts/.
5. Specifically Abidjan, Thessaloniki, Bangalore, Amman, and Ho Chi Minh City to begin with.