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 162 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
Let’s look at pieces of the puzzle to figure out the big picture, shall we?
This week’s topic: It’s not a hard puzzle
Turn the pieces face up and spread them out
- San Francisco declared a Climate Emergency in 2019.
- Mayor London Breed again budgeted $0 for environmental work in her budget proposal.1
- Fossil fuel use will cost California trillions of dollars by 2045.2
- Sea level rise is accelerating.3
- SF’s four sewage treatment plants (including Treasure Island) are at sea level.
- Blackwater recycling is relatively cheap, has a long history in multiple locations, can be done using a variety of methods, and is supported in CA through laws and regulations.4
- San Francisco is not doing blackwater recycling.
- San Francisco has not municipalized the grid, nor invested in local clean energy production.
- PG&E owns the grid; PG&E has multiple convictions for killing people.
- PG&E’s energy is generated 27% from large hydro, 44% from nuclear reactors, and 29% from a mix of “renewable” resources.5
- San Francisco has a large amount of local potential energy available in wind, wave, heat pump, tidal, and solar energy.6
- SF is building low and moderate income housing in locations at current sea level.7
- The Bay Area has 2x as many parking spots as people, undermining public transit, housing, and communities.8
- The way to make scooters, bike riding, and walking safer is to have more people doing all of those activities. For that, there needs to be more infrastructure support.
- Cycling is 10x more important than electric vehicles for reaching net zero.9
- SF is very slow to create or change infrastructure that in any way impinges on cars, even with the deadline of Vision Zero approaching. (see JFK Dr, Slow Streets, and Great Hwy)
- Non-permeable surfaces, especially dark surfaces like roads, increase the urban heat island effect, reduce aquifer recharge, and channel pollution from cars into the ocean and bay.10
- All evidence indicates CA is in a megadrought, i.e. a drought that will last decades to centuries.11
- SF depends on water that has to travel 167 miles through areas that are running out of or have already run out of water.12
- CA has a history of water wars.13
Patterns emerge as you fit pieces together
Taken together, points 1 and 2 above show that SF is not serious about climate chaos, and SF’s leadership is answering to something other than facts and what’s good for the citizens. Even though, per 3, the cost of not acting is astronomical.
Numbers 4 through 7 show a specific instance where this lack of action is leading to disastrous failure. When, not if, the sewage treatment plants go underwater, we’re looking at the rapid spread of waterborne diseases like giardiasis, cholera, and dysentery. Moving sewage treatment plants to higher elevations now would allow us at the same time to change them to blackwater recycling facilities that would run at a smaller cost than current sewage treatments while providing potable water. Yet we continue to do nothing.
PG&E is a murderer. Any individual who did what they have done would be in jail. SF needs to have local control of the grid and be getting power from green, renewable, local sources yet, per 8 through 11, we continue to pay PG&E to further the destruction of CA. And, referencing 3 again, it is costing SF a lot of money to do so.
Looking at 3 in the context of 12-17 shows us that SF’s leaders value cars more than people, especially people who are not wealthy. From the evidence, it is apparent that in SF cars are more important than lives.
Numbers 18-20 make it clear that SF is going to run out of water sooner rather than later. Add in 10 which, remember, explains that 27% of our energy comes from large hydro (and 2% of the “renewable” is small hydro), and not only do we lose water, but we lose power, too.
Now for the big picture
The image emerging as pieces are fitted together is ugly. It looks a lot like hubris and greed, the same forces that led to the Millennium Tower. These are idiotic principles for running a city and the Millennium Tower is a textbook demonstration of why; hubris and greed can’t win against physics.
Yet the forces that led to the building and habitation of that failure are the same forces that are writing San Francisco’s doom by building in areas that will flood, having the sewage treatment in flood areas, not securing our water or energy, not funding necessary changes, thinking the same bad choices that got us into this mess will rescue us from this mess — these are insane propositions.
But this is exactly what SF continues to choose, over and over. Again, from week 82 --
As Dr. Jason Ur of Harvard University says:
When we excavate the remains of past civilizations, we rarely find any evidence that they made any attempts to adapt in the face of a changing climate. I view this inflexibility as the real reason for collapse.14
ACT like your ass is on fire
Because it is. We are all burning.
Get the picture?
FOOTNOTES
1. Jessica Wolfrom. “In San Francisco’s $14 billion budget, zero dollars to fund Dept. of Environment”. San Francisco Examiner. 3 June 2022. https://www.sfexaminer.com/our_sections/findings/in-san-franciscos-14-billion-budget-zero-dollars-to-fund-dept-of-environment/article_ec6594fc-e35e-11ec-83b7-637eaa135d86.html.
2. Dan Bacher. “Cost to Californians $10 Trillion by 2045 From Oil And Gas, Consumer Watchdog Reveals in New Report”. DailyKos. 2 June 2022. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/6/2/2101860/-Cost-to-Californians-10-Trillion-by-2045-From-Oil-And-Gas-Consumer-Watchdog-Reveals-in-New-Report?utm_campaign=recent#comment_83720772.
3. Evan Bush. “U.S. sea level rise accelerating, NOAA says”. NBC News. 16 February 2022. https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/us-sea-level-rise-accelerating-noaa-says-rcna16205.
4. See the large number of Strike letters on blackwater recycling for specifics.
5. PG&E. “2019 Power Mix”.
6. As documented in numerous Strike letters, usually based on studies done by prior SF administrations.
7. See Strike letter for week 146.
8. Benjamin Schneider. “The Bay Area has twice as many parking spots as people—and there’s a hidden toll”. San Francisco Examiner. 26 May 2022. https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/the-bay-area-has-twice-as-many-parking-spots-than-people-and-theres-a-hidden-toll/.
9. Christian Brand. “Study: Cycling is 10x More Important Than Electric Cars For Reaching Net Zero”. Streetsblog. 3 June 2022. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/06/03/study-cycling-is-10x-more-important-than-electric-cars-for-reaching-net-zero/#new_tab.
10. Lakis Polycarpou. “No More Pavement! The Problem of Impervious Surfaces”. State of the Planet. 13 July 2010. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2010/07/13/no-more-pavement-the-problem-of-impervious-surfaces/.
11. Gabrielle Canon. “US west ‘megadrought’ is worst in at least 1,200 years, new study says”. The Guardian. 15 February 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/15/us-west-megadrought-worst-1200-years-study.
12. See Strike letters from weeks 82 and 52, and Kurtis Alexander. “California orders thousands of farms and cities, including San Francisco, to stop pumping water during drought”. San Francisco Chronicle. 7 June 2022. https://www.sfchronicle.com/climate/article/California-orders-thousands-of-farms-and-cities-17225970.php.
13. Owens Valley. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owens_Valley for a primer.
14. Emily Sohn. “Climate change and the rise and fall of civilizations”. NASA. 20 January 2014. https://climate.nasa.gov/news/1010/climate-change-and-the-rise-and-fall-of-civilizations/.