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 163 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
Clearly you’re not going to act until it’s too late.
That’s why you’ll need information on: How To React
You’re a brick house
Not in a good way, more in a “trying to get you to act is akin to banging against the side of a brick house over and over and over again”1 way. You don’t change no matter how much the planet changes and how dangerous those changes are to San Francisco and her citizens.
It’s obvious you aren’t going to act in time
You’re not going to prepare San Francisco and you’re never going to be proactive about climate chaos because, for whatever reasons, you won’t acknowledge the need and do the work.
Fine
That means you’ll need the resources to react once a climate-caused disaster that you can’t ignore hits us, when you are publicly made responsible for a response, and things are very bad for the city. You need reaction guides. Such guides will be, at best, a message in a bottle after you’ve shipwrecked, but they’re better than nothing, which is what you’ve currently got. You have guidelines for earthquakes, you can have guidelines for climate chaos. And you’re going to need them as you’re choosing tons of pounds of cure over an ounce of prevention.
What kind of guides?
These are instruction manuals for in some way mitigating the crises that are coming hot and heavy (literally in some cases) down on us. Think of them as Climate Chaos Governance for Dummies.
Let’s look at the coming disasters and then construct a “Break Glass In Case of Emergency” tool kit specific to each one. These guides won’t be nearly enough, not a fraction as good as dealing with problems before they spin out of control, but they may be sufficient to save some of us who live in SF from the consequences of you having chosen inaction.
The areas of greatest importance for survival and most heavily impacted by climate chaos are:
- water
- energy
- food
- heat
- shade
- die-offs
- refugees
- storms and flooding
- sea level rise
- saltwater intrusion
- fires
- retreat from the coasts
- health
- communication
- transportation
Many more things will go wrong in big ways from climate chaos, and we’re only talking about things that will happen in your lifetimes but, even so, this is a good list to start with.
It feels nice to have given up, doesn’t it?
Reacting is so much easier to justify than acting. And, if you react well enough, maybe people won’t notice that timely action by you could have saved a lot of pain, suffering and the need for heroic reaction. Because, 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.2
Your first Reaction Guideline will come next week
It will be about water. You may have noticed that we’re running out of water, and that water is necessary for survival. Yeah. It’s an emergency.
FOOTNOTES
1. There’s an apt Dr. Who parallel possible (Heaven Sent, 9th series), if the world had enough time. It doesn’t and we don’t.
2. 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/.