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 49 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. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
We have to multitask now, because both the speed of planetary collapse and the greed of the planet’s looters are raging on multiple fronts now.
This week’s topic is BASIC TENETS.
Basic Tenet One: San Francisco must act to survive.
According to the Preamble of the Charter of San Francisco, this city exists:
- to improve the quality of urban life,
- to enable municipal government to meet the needs of the people effectively and efficiently,
- to foster social harmony and cohesion, and
- to assure equality of opportunity for every resident.1
Climate chaos and mass extinction are:
- degrading and destroying the quality of urban life on this peninsula,2, 3, 4, 5
- negating the ability of municipal government to meet the needs of the people in any way whatsoever,6, 7, 8, 9, 10
- fostering social strife and breakdown,11, 12, 13, 14
- and assuring ever increasing amounts of inequality for all residents.15, 16, 17
Clearly, climate chaos and mass extinction threaten to destroy San Francisco. Not acting is assisting in the guaranteed destruction of the city.
Basic Tenent Two: San Francisco must act right now.
We are increasingly learning the timelines for the disasters that are already happening18, 19, 20 and those that are coming21, and we’re learning that our predictions are often far, far more optimistic than the realities we face.22, 23 If we don’t:
- Get to zero emissions by 2050 at the latest24
- Cap out at a maximum 1.5°C temperature increase25 period
- Speed up the transition to green energy
- Increase investment in green initiatives on a massive scale26
- Rewild SF as much as possible, and green every square centimeter that can’t be rewilded27, 28
- Fight for the bay and delta29
then we will lose San Francisco.
As we should have learned from COVID-19, putting off acting just makes things much worse (do you really need citations for this? I hope not!), and the rich and powerful are not to be trusted with our future because they don’t care.30, 31, 32
And COVID-19 is only a taste of what’s to come — it was caused by climate chaos and mass extinction33, 34 and if we don’t do anything to stop climate chaos and mass extinction we will be hit by an increasing number of these events.35
What can we do right now? It’s the middle of the case surge in a pandemic!
Even though your instincts are screaming at you to ignore these problems-to-come and focus on the pandemic at hand that’s killing “the economy”36, 37, you have to realize by now that doing so is akin to dealing with the piece of glass you stepped on and ignoring the tree that’s falling on you because of the tornado that’s bearing down on you.
Also, please understand, “the economy” isn’t our real lifeblood. It’s an oligarchic fiction that’s both stolen necessities for life away from the vast majority of people and other species, and caused and sped the destruction of life on this planet. Remember, the Preamble talks about the needs of “the people”. It’s time to remember that corporations are not people, and that meeting the needs of corporations actually hurts people. If SF is about the people of SF — prove it. How?
- Make sure that hoarding of capital is NEVER allowed to supersede human rights, dignity, and need ever again in SF.
- Put the primacy of the needs of life above all else into the charter, and create bulwarks against corporations exploiting the courts or other levels of government to rape the city.
- And, at long last, finally, take action!
How to act? You know what to do; you, yourselves, laid it out on paper and passed the resolution listing the specifics of the first steps.38 Don’t use the pandemic — a shot across the bow from Nature — to recreate the horrific, anti-bio mistakes of the past. See this as a new beginning, or it will indeed be our end.
You know the timeline.
You know why you have to act.
You know the corporate looters are using the pandemic to destroy whatever is left as quickly as possible.39
All that’s left is for you to finally act!
And, as I keep reminding you, we need to already be starting on: massive native tree plantings, black water recycling for the entire county, all electric and clean energy transportation, getting rid of plastics, switching to all local carbon-neutral or carbon-negative energy, and resilience and self-sufficiency. They all tie together, and make a huge difference in SF’s ability to weather this pandemic and everything else that we’re going to face from now on.
There are 39 weeks left.40, 41 Knock Trump out of the headlines here. Act for SF.
FOOTNOTES
1. San Francisco Charter; Preamble. https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/sf_charter/0-0-0-15#JD_Preamble.
2. John King. “Rising seas threaten Bay Area economy, infrastructure, environment, says most detailed study yet”. San Francisco Chronicle. 31 March 2020. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Rising-seas-threaten-Bay-Area-economy-15170317.php.
3. Sejal Choksi-Chugh. “Global Climate Change Is Already Affecting San Francisco Bay”. Bay Crossings. November 2015. https://baykeeper.org/news/column/global-climate-change-already-affecting-san-francisco-bay.
4. James Temple. “Projecting warming’s impact on Bay Area”. SFGate. 5 January 2013. https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Projecting-warming-s-impact-on-Bay-Area-4170481.php.
5. Manoochehr Shirzaei and Roland Bürgmann. “Global climate change and local land subsidence exacerbate inundation risk to the San Francisco Bay Area”. Science Advances. 7 March 2018. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/3/eaap9234.full.
6. Max Fisher. “Map: These are the cities that climate change will hit first”. The Washington Post. 9 October 2013. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/10/09/map-these-are-the-cities-that-climate-change-will-hit-first/. Please note that three cities mapped have already or will in the next 3 years, hit climate departure.
7. Catie Leary. “5 ancient civilizations that were destroyed by climate change”. Mother Nature Network. 12 May 2016. https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/climate-weather/blogs/5-ancient-civilizations-were-destroyed-climate-change.
8. Newtok. “Climate Change Is Making This Alaskan Town Fall Into The Ocean”. HBO. 16 November 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G40ooKzI664.
9. “Places around the world already affected by climate change”. MSN. 29 January 2018. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/weather/places-around-the-world-already-affected-by-climate-change/ss-AAv4t0u#image=1.
10. Kurtis Alexander. “Global warming will increase suicides, researchers say”. San Francisco Chronicle. 24 July 2018. https://www.sfchronicle.com/science/article/Global-warming-will-increase-suicides-Stanford-13097245.php.
11. Joe McCarthy. “These Are 5 Conflicts That Were Made Worse By Climate Change”. Global Citizen. 17 November 2017. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/conflicts-affected-by-climate-change/.
12. John O’Loughlin and Cullen Hendrix. “Will climate change lead to more world conflict?” The Washington Post. 11 July 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/07/11/how-does-climate-change-impact-conflict-world/.
13. David Biello. “Can Climate Change Cause conflict? Recent History Suggests So”. Scientific American. 23 November 2009. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-climate-change-cause-conflict/.
14. Craig Welch. “Climate Change Helped Spark Syrian War, Study Says”. National Geographic. 2 March 2015. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/3/150302-syria-war-climate-change-drought/.
15. Justin Worland. “Climate Change Has Already Increased Global Inequality. It Will Only Get Worse”. Time. 22 April 2019. https://time.com/5575523/climate-change-inequality/.
16. Sliya Dossa, Mikael Omstedt, Paige Olmsted, Nicole Iaci, Shahab Zareyan, and Scott McKenzie. “Inequality Explained: 7 ways climate change and inequality are connected”. OpenCanada. 14 January 2016. https://www.opencanada.org/features/inequality-explained-7-ways-climate-change-and-inequality-are-connected/.
17. “Climate change and inequality”. The Economist. 13 July 2017. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2017/07/13/climate-change-and-inequality.
18. Doc Snow. Climate Change: How Much Time Do We Have? Soapboxie. 26 February 2020. https://soapboxie.com/social-issues/Climate-Change-How-Much-Time-Do-We-Have.
19. Chelsea Harvey. “Here’s How Little Time We Have Until Global Warming Is Out Of Control”. Business Insider Australia. https://www.businessinsider.com.au/when-will-climate-change-be-out-of-control-2014-9/.
20. Damian Carrington. “Polar ice caps melting six times faster than in 1990s”. The Guardian. 11 March 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/11/polar-ice-caps-melting-six-times-faster-than-in-1990s.
21. Candace Butera. “Flooding, Heat Waves, and Destabilized Ecosystems: Here’s What the Next 100 Years of Climate Change Could Bring”. Pacific Standard. 9 March 2018. https://psmag.com/environment/climate-change-timeline.
22. Andrea Thompson. “Timeline: Earth’s Precarious Future”. LiveScience. 11 January 2008. https://www.livescience.com/1433-timeline-earth-precarious-future.html.
23. Damian Carrington. “Climate emergency: global action is ‘way off track’ says UN head”. The Guardian. 10 March 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/10/climate-emergency-global-action-way-off-track-says-un-head-coronavirus.
24. Adele Peters. “The future of the world is on the line, and our chance to fix it is now”. Fast Company. 8 October 2018. https://www.fastcompany.com/90243693/the-future-of-the-world-is-on-the-line-and-our-chance-to-fix-it-is-now.
25. Jonathan Watts. “We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN”. The Guardian 8 October 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-warming-must-not-exceed-15c-warns-landmark-un-report.
26. Jocelyn Timperley. “Seven things that need to happen to keep global temperature rise below 2C”. Carbon Brief. 21 March 2017. https://www.carbonbrief.org/seven-things-that-need-happen-keep-global-temperature-two-celcius.
27. Robert Coburn. “Can We Stop the Sixth Mass Extinction?” National Geographic. 23 June 2015. https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2015/06/23/can-we-stop-the-sixth-mass-extinction/.
28. John D. Sutter. “How to stop the sixth mass extinction”. CNN. 12 December 2016. https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/12/world/sutter-vanishing-help/index.html.
29. Dan Bacher. “As Delta smelt nears extinction, CDFW issues take permit to Department of Water Resources”. DailyKos. 31 March 2020. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/31/1933233/-Breaking-CDFW-issues-permit-to-DWR-for-long-term-operations-of-the-State-Water-Project.
30. Ben Mathis-Lilley. “Republican Senators Sold Stock After Closed-Door Coronavirus Meetings in Apparent Insider Trading”. Slate. 20 March 2020. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/republican-senators-insider-trading-accusations-coronavirus.html.
31. Jon Christian. “As Coronavirus Rages, Elon Musk Refuses To Close Tesla Factory”. 17 March 2020. Futurism. https://futurism.com/the-byte/coronavirus-rages-elon-musk-refuses-close-tesla-factory.
32. Jason Easley. “Trump Sent 17.8 Tons Of US Supplies To China Then Blames Obama For PPE Shortage”. 29 March 2020. PoliticusUSA. https://www.politicususa.com/2020/03/29/trump-sends-17-8-tons-of-us-supplies-to-china-then-blames-obama-for-ppe-shortage.html.
33. Justin Worland. “The Wuhan Coronavirus, Climate Change, and Future Epidemics”. Time. 6 February 2020. https://time.com/5779156/wuhan-coronavirus-climate-change/.
34. Neela Banerjee. “Q&A: A Harvard Expert on Environment and Health Discusses Possible Ties Between COVID and Climate”. Inside Climate News. 12 March 2020. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11032020/coronavirus-harvard-doctor-climate-change-public-health.
35. Shannon Osaka. “‘A common germ pool’: The frightening origins of the coronavirus. 18 March 2020. Grist. https://grist.org/climate/a-common-germ-pool-the-frightening-environmental-origins-of-covid-19/.
36. Joshua Sabatini. “SF sees ‘stark and immediate’ revenue losses over coronavirus pandemic”. Examiner. 31 March 2020. https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/sf-sees-stark-and-immediate-revenue-losses-over-coronavirus-pandemic/.
37. Phil Matier. “During the coronavirus shutdown, SF’s Union Square takes on new look — boarded-up ghost town”. San Francisco Chronicle. 1 April 2020. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/During-the-coronavirus-shutdown-SF-s-Union-15170213.php.
38. Richard Procter. “San Francisco Knows How to Stop Global Warming — Will It?” SFWeekly. 11 September 2019. https://www.sfweekly.com/news/san-francisco-climate-change-emissions/.
39. Alexander C. Kaufman and Chris D’Angelo. “Trump Goes Full ‘Shock Doctrine’ As Pandemic Rages”. HuffPost. 27 March 2020. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-epa-coronavirus-environment-deregulation_n_5e7e3227c5b6cb9dc19f6728.
40. “Only 11 Years Left to Prevent Irreversible Damage from Climate Change, Speakers Warn during General Assembly High-Level Meeting”. United Nations. 28 March 2019. https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/ga12131.doc.htm. See the action timeline in the report.
41. Paula Murray. “We’ve 10 years to save the seas or life on earth will become impossible”. Express. 23 December 2018. https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1062990/environment-plastic-pollution-Sir-David-Attenborough-seas-earth.