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.
This is the letter for week 36 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 to see topics for all the strike letters, see this story.
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
Every second you don’t act hurts our chances to survive.1, 2, 3, 4
This week’s topic is CO2, part 3 — How SF must kick the habit.
WHY SHOULD WE ACT?
- Today’s forecast is for 48°C in Australia5, where ecosystems are burning that don’t burn.6
- Wildfire smoke is re-aerosolizing lead into the air.7
- Ocean acidification is stronger off the CA coast and is already severely impacting fisheries.8
- COP25 solved nothing, produced nothing, and did nothing9, even though doing nothing is not an option.10
Notice what all the above have in common? CO2. Human-produced CO2 causes climate change. Climate change produces more and bigger wildfires that burn trees that store lead deposited by car exhaust from decades ago. CO2 dissolves into seawater, forming carbonic acid that causes ocean acidification. And companies that profit from CO2 production bought and destroyed COP25.11
But isn’t this all a misunderstanding by the fossil fuel industry? They’re human, too, right? They live here, too. If they understood the damage they’re doing of course they’d stop. So it’s just a matter of informing them of the science and the economic danger. Right? Nope.
- They’ve known carbon pollution causes climate catastrophe for a long time.12
- They don’t believe that you can’t take it with you. “The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours.”13
Possession of the entire biosphere’s resources through destruction, which is exactly what these corporations are doing, is murder-suicide. Will you continue to aid them? Is that what you want for your families? Because, be clear on this, doing nothing is helping these companies destroy the ability of the planet to support life just as surely as if you were poisoning the bay or torching a forest.
HOW DO WE, THE CITY AND COUNTY OF SF, TAKE ACTION?
1. Get industry onboard. Involving industry is vital given the very short timeline we have for action. And we know industry can answer. The Sputnik crisis involved a wide swath of industries, used up less than 1% of our GDP, and resulted in enormous technological advancements.14 It also led to increased educational equity15, a substantial increase in American educational attainment16, and huge investments in science and R&D.17 Industry geared up even more, and more quickly, in transforming to a war economy involving 30% of our GDP after Pearl Harbor.18, 19 We can and must do the same thing here, now.20
2. Charge the true costs of carbon generation.21, 22 Create a table that lays out the cost to SF of every X amount of CO2 produced, and add that cost to everything that comes into SF that produces CO2 on the way and everything done in SF that produces CO2 here. The cost needs to include effects of climate change on health and health care, mortality, job loss, land loss, storm destruction, bond ratings losses, other economic losses, and biosphere loss as it impacts SF. The U.S. government regularly subsidizes destructive practices by industry (Walmart23, McDonald’s24, fossil fuel companies25, etc.) Until we require payment for carbon pollution, SF is doing the exact same thing — directly subsidizing the fossil fuel industry in the destruction of the biosphere.
3. Work on a scale needed to meet this crisis. This is not a small problem (and it is only one of two biosphere-destroying problems humans are causing). So, while every little bit helps, acting only in little ways will do as much to solve the problem as a magnitude 2 earthquake does to relieve fault stress that’s built up to a magnitude 7 level — in other words, not much. SF needs to be acting to its fullest capacity. For an example, take a look at the numbers involved in carbon sequestration.26 We have to plant a LOT of trees, and create a LOT of green in SF to make a dent in the amount of carbon we are responsible for. We need to be operating at a war economy level.
4. Put teeth in it. Industry doesn’t want to change. Oh well, change is coming no matter what, so make it not a matter of what they want but of what they have to do; make it so if they come along they will do fine, and if they lag behind they will do very poorly. Good government means taking a stand and acting now. Appropriate teeth include, but are not limited to, carbon rationing, criminal consequences and liability, financial consequences and liability, loss of access to infrastructure, and more. As the circumstances are so dire, the consequences need to be dire.
5. Get serious. You passed a Climate Emergency Declaration, finally, on 2 April of this year. That’s not enough. You don’t declare a fire emergency then sit in your living room as your house burns down. You don’t declare a tsunami emergency and then go to the beach. Declaring a medical emergency won’t cure you of anything. You have to DO SOMETHING to solve the problem. And doing something about this for the city and county of San Francisco is your job! There is a Climate Emergency so take action. Don’t know what to do? You have 35 weeks of specific tasks for SF, with links to places doing similar things, relevant legislation, and costs and benefits listed. Not sure where to start? Start with the longterm projects and a few of the shorter or midrange ones. Need more information? There is a TON of information out there and loads of local and national and international expertise to draw upon.
There is no excuse for failing to act.
There’s a saying in Germany that if you have a Nazi sitting at a table with 10 people who aren’t saying anything, you have 11 Nazis at the table.
We have 55 weeks left.
FOOTNOTES
1. The Cost Of Delaying Action To Stem Climate Change. Executive Office of the President of the United States. July 2014. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/stock/files/cost_of_delaying_action.pdf.
2. Alan Marshall. “Climate Change: The 40 Year Delay Between Cause and Effect”. SkepticalScience. 22 September 2010. https://skepticalscience.com/Climate-Change-The-40-Year-Delay-Between-Cause-and-Effect.html.
3. Climate Lags. Climatevictory350. http://www.climatevictory.org/lags.html.
4. University of East Anglia. Big increase in economic costs if cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are delayed. PhysOrg. 26 September 2018. https://phys.org/news/2018-09-big-economic-greenhouse-gas-emissions.html.
5. Calla Wahlquist. “Australia weather: records forecast to be broken as heatwave temperatures surge past 40C”. The Guardian. 17 December 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/17/australian-heatwave-records-forecast-to-be-broken-as-temperatures-surge-past-40c.
6. Joëlle Gergis. “I never thought I’d see the Australian rainforest burning. What will it take for us to wake up to the climate crisis?” The Guardian. 10 September 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/10/i-never-thought-id-see-the-australian-rainforest-burning-what-will-it-take-for-us-to-wake-up-to-the-climate-crisis.
7. Yvette Cabrera. “Wildfires are getting worse, and so is the deadly smoke they bring with them”. Grist. 16 December 2019. https://grist.org/justice/wildfires-are-getting-worse-and-so-is-the-deadly-smoke-they-bring-with-them/.
8. Rosanna Xia. “California coastal waters rising in acidity at alarming rate, study finds.” SFGate. 16 December 2019. https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/California-coastal-waters-rising-in-acidity-at-14910751.php.
9. Rebecca Leber. “The UN Climate Negotiations Are Officially a Disaster and the US Helped Screw It Up”. Mother Jones. 14 December 2019. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/12/the-un-climate-negotiations-are-officially-a-disaster-and-the-us-helped-bomb-it/.
10. Agence France-Presse. “Global warming: What happens if we do nothing?” PRI. 30 November 2015. https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-11-30/global-warming-what-happens-if-we-do-nothing.
11. “New Research: The Big Polluters Bankrolling COP25”. Corporate Accountability. 6 December 2019. https://www.corporateaccountability.org/media/new-research-the-big-polluters-bankrolling-cop25/.
12. Ucilia Wang. “What Oil Companies Knew About Climate Change and When: A Timeline”. Climate Liability News. 5 April 2018. https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/04/05/climate-change-oil-companies-knew-shell-exxon/.
13. Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Schocken Books. 1951.
14. Jerome Schnee. The Economic Impacts of the U.S. Space Program. NASA. https://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/economics.html.
15. Cornelia Dean. “When Science Suddenly Mattered, in Space and in Class”. The New York Times. 25 September 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/science/space/25educ.html.
16. Michael Totten. The Effects of the Cold War on US Education. EducationSpace. 26 September 2013. https://archive.ph/20131110195751/http://www.educationspace360.com/index.php/the-effects-of-the-cold-war-on-us-education-39/.
17. Kyle Daley. The Decline of U.S. R&D Funding. Huffpost. 31 July 2013. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-decline-of-us-rd-fund_b_3367625.
18. War Production. PBS. September 2007. https://www.pbs.org/thewar/at_home_war_production.htm.
19. Doris Goodwin. “The Way We Won: America’s Economic Breakthrough During World War II. The American Prospect”. 19 December 2001. https://prospect.org/health/way-won-america-s-economic-breakthrough-world-war-ii/.
20. Kevin Drum. “We Need a Massive Climate War Effort—Now”. Mother Jones. January/February 2020. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/12/kevin-drum-climate-change-reseach/.
21. Effects of a Carbon Tax on the Economy and the Environment. Congressional Budget Office. May 2013. https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/44223_Carbon_0.pdf.
22. Simon Dietz and Frank Venmans. Cumulative carbon emissions and economic policy: In search of general principles. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Vol 96. July 2019. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095069618302122.
23. Ned Resnikoff. “Walmart benefits from billions in government subsidies: Study”. MSNBC. 15 April 2014. https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/walmart-government-subsidies-study.
24. Aimee Picchi. “How low-wage employers cost taxpayers $153B a year”. CBS News. 13 April 2015. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-low-wage-employers-cost-taxpayers-153-billion-a-year/.
25. Wal van Lierop. “Fossil Fuel Subsidies And Impact Greenwashing Are Stalling The Energy Transition”. Forbes. 14 November 2019. https://www.forbes.com/sites/walvanlierop/2019/11/14/fossil-fuel-subsidies-and-impact-greenwashing-are-stalling-the-energy-transition/#3921153046b3.
26. David Roberts. “Pulling CO2 out of the air and using it could be a trillion-dollar business”. Vox. 22 November 2019. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/9/4/20829431/climate-change-carbon-capture-utilization-sequestration-ccu-ccs.