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 153 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
You know there is money to pay for all this, right?
The physics won’t compromise, so you need to act fast if SF is going to survive.
Good thing there’s money out there if you act now.
This week’s topic: Finance for Climate Change 101
There are multiple ways to finance the work that must be done
- TAX BREAKS: Get rid of all city and county tax breaks for all businesses that spew carbon. Reserve tax breaks for businesses that work in SF to take carbon out of the atmosphere or otherwise mitigate local impacts of climate change.
- INCREASE TAXES: Tax the causes of climate change per impact. Uber? They need to be paying lots and lots of tax. Dolby Laboratories? A lot less. BNP Paribas? Pretty low for an international financial firm. Salesforce? The Cloud requires massive server farms to function so likely sky high. When the bad actors move out of SF because of this tax, we’ll be better off in every way; meanwhile, make them pay to stay.
- FINANCE NON-GLAMOROUS REDUCTION STRATEGIES: Cheaper and no- to low-tech solutions, like conservation, give massive returns on investment. Support them with immediate, upfront money, and continue to support them by putting expectations and financial support into municipal code and tax policies.
- DIVEST: Pull all money out of all investments that do harm. SF eventually sold off the oil well lease in Kern County and the SF pension fund is finally going to divest from fossil fuels; now is the time to go after SF’s less grotesquely obvious bad investments. DivestInvest (https://www.divestinvest.org) is a good starting place.
- GRANTS: Grants are available from state and fed governments. These include EPA Grants, Brownfields Grants especially for Hunters Point and Treasure Island, CalEPA grants, Volkswagen Environmental Mitigation Trust, School Bus Funding programs, Clean Beach Initiative Grant Program, Emergency, Abandoned and Recalcitrant Account, 319(h) NPS Grant Program, Orphan Site Cleanup Fund, Prop 84 Storm Water Grant Program, Water Recycling Funding Program, among others. This site — https://toolkit.climate.gov/content/funding-opportunities — is a good clearinghouse for grant information.
- LOW INTEREST LOANS: The longer you wait to act, the more expensive and difficult acting will be. If there aren’t enough funds readily available, then take out low interest loans. Taking out loans now means being able to pay for mitigation now while it is still somewhat affordable to do so; this is cheaper than the alternative. There are low interest loans available from numerous federal and state sources.
- OLD INSURANCE POLICIES: Any pre-1986 insurance policy must pay out for environmental investigation and remediation. One person working on finding old insurance policies for businesses or other entities that did environmental damage in SF would find enough to more than pay for their salary.
- WORK WITH NGOs: NGOs have expertise in different areas of mitigation, environmental justice, community building, environmental health, ecosystem restoration, and more. Seek them out and work with them. We’ve done so before in SF (Crissy Field, Sutro Heights headlands, Islais Creek, etc) with stunning results, so this is only a matter of upping the number of projects, speed, contributors, and scope.
- SHARE RESOURCES: Join or, if needed, create regional, state, national, and international coordination groups to share resources to do this work. Some coordination is already happening, but it is more often along the lines of an information dump than what is required. What is needed is something along the lines of how theatre companies share resources (see Theatre Bay Area for a local version — https://www.theatrebayarea.org/default.aspx). Again, one person working full-time on this would create more savings than the cost of their salary, healthcare, and retirement.
- FINANCIAL “EXPERTS”: While the financial industry as a whole wears blinders that promote environmental destruction, they still have a lot of expertise in the current financial system and can find ways to secure money for SF to fund mitigation efforts. Deloitte is a good example of this — https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/public-sector/articles/smart-cities-funding-and-financing-strategies.html.
If you do the work, SF can survive
Lay out the math, the numbers, the costs, the issues, and show businesses how we are dealing with problems already here and problems coming our way. Make SF the smart place to invest in, not the place it’s smarter to flee. Do this now, before the insurance industry is gutted and before the tax appeal process starts on damaged properties. Do this while it’s still possible to get funding and to act.
Spend the money now!
What needs to be funded first? Energy and water. Other things should happen at the same time if you’re smart, but SF absolutely won’t survive without clean, green, renewable, and local energy and water. This means the grid needs to be owned and controlled by SF, and all energy generation and storage must be local. This means we need massive changes in SF in water use, storage, and recycling, and we need to be shifting to local water sources (not Hetch Hetchy) for all uses.
The clock is ticking
If you’re depending on overshoot (https://grist.org/science/can-the-world-overshoot-its-climate-targets-and-then-fix-it-later/), don’t. The crisis is here and now. You must act now.
FOOTNOTES
1. This is a good place to start — Anderson Kill & Olick, P.C. A Guide to Insurance Coverage fofr Environmental Liability Claims. Accessed 30 March 2022. https://aapa.files.cms-plus.com/SeminarPresentations/2009Seminars/09AdminLegal/Anderson%20Kill%20A%20Guide%20to%20Insurance%20Coverage%20for%20Environmental%20Liability%20Claims.pdf.
