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 149 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
It’s about survival
This week’s topic: The Course Is Clear
There are things you can and must do to save SF
- WATER — SF must secure a sustainable, clean, and biosphere-enhancing water supply. From past megadrought information, we know our water source cannot be distant and that water cannot be wasted. Blackwater recycling, water conservation, composting toilets, increased permeable surface areas, and planting a true native urban forest to assist precipitation (as well as cool the city) all help get us to a sustainable, clean water supply. These are all relatively cheap and quickly implemented actions.
- ENERGY — SF must have a clean, local, renewable power supply and a locally controlled grid. We have multiple sources of local clean energy that we are not tapping: wind, solar, geothermal, temperature differential, and tidal to start with. We are ideally situated to generate all the power we need in SF; you just have to make sure it gets done. And you need to get our grid back from PG&E.
Those two are vital and must happen first. Without both of those, SF will collapse, just like a host of other civilizations have collapsed in the face of changing climate and megadrought.
But these aren’t the only necessary actions. Securing our water and energy provide a base level of survival, but that’s all. If SF is going to function and not just be a refugee camp, then the following must also be done:
- Retreat from and plant the coasts with native, spongy ecosystems.
- Move infrastructure uphill as far as possible.
- Build native bio-highways connecting every part of the city and connecting the city to surrounding ecosystems.
- Increase our albedo and our organic native shade cover.
- Build environmental justice and reparations into every project.
- Get cars off the roads, give roads over to housing, transit, and people.
- Electrify everything.
- Stop producing, using, or accepting plastics in any form.
- Stop aligning SF with bad environmental acts and actors (like the Delta Tunnel or the lawsuits to increase water flow to SF at the expense of endangered ecosystems.)
- Only allow green building practices and green buildings. Building in flood zones is not green. Building affordable housing in flood zones is criminal.
- Follow the science. Loud and/or rich doesn’t change physics.
- Listen to and involve everyone, and put in place processes to do so and to act rapidly.
- Plant SF with natives for shade and bio-highways, and with food crops for survival.
These are the start of a survivable future for SF. They are vital. They are extremely time-sensitive.
There are loads of other places doing each of these things
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. California law, municipal codes, and practical experience as well as vendors, sources, and cost information are all available for all of these. Much of it is detailed in prior Strike letters, in fact. I am happy to provide contacts, phone numbers, names, emails, experts, locations, and whatever other information you need in order to act. Because you must act.
There’s a time limit and time’s just about run out
The latest?
“Climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly, many of the impacts will be more severe than predicted and there is only a narrow chance left of avoiding its worst ravages, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said.”
I can link the actual science if you need convincing. The data and analyses are much grimmer than what’s being said in general interest reporting.
You act, we all win; you wait, we all lose
It’s about survival. In this war we’re waging against the planet, we’re losing. So, while battles rage on elsewhere, we need to make SF into a place of refuge and more livable than a refugee camp.
Dear Editor
Climate change compels San Francisco to act if the city is to survive. SF must create a green, sustainable, local water supply through conservation, blackwater recycling, and ecosystem restoration, and establish a green, local, renewable, and locally controlled energy supply by utilizing all the myriad energy sources available here and establishing a locally controlled grid. In the face of climate change, these two changes provide us with bare survival, like life in a refugee camp. If SF wants better, we have to do more. We can still make a difference to our futures, but the time in which this is true is rapidly running out. If we want SF to survive, we must act now.
FOOTNOTES
1. Catie Leary. “8 Ancient Civilizations That Were Destroyed By Climate Change”. Treehugger. 21 October 2021. https://www.treehugger.com/ancient-civilizations-were-destroyed-climate-change-4869712.
2. Fiona Harvey. “IPCC issues ‘bleakest warning yet’ on impacts of climate breakdown”. The Guardian. 28 February 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/28/ipcc-issues-bleakest-warning-yet-impacts-climate-breakdown.
