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 62 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
The vast majority of Americans want you to fight climate change!1
This week is about how to get a Carbon Added Fee (CAF) going in SF.
What does a CAF in SF look like?
- Set prices. Begin at $140/ton carbon emitted. Again, that’s a low price given the ecological devastation our carbon emissions are causing, but it’s a good price to start with, and should be adjusted upwards regularly.
- Pick the right metaphor. This is not a tax. It is an occupancy damage fee, akin to a hotel charging you for damage to the room caused by your smoking and other behaviors. This is, of course, an addition to the regular rates charged but it is needed to make the space occupiable again.2 In this case, the “hotel” is SF and the damage is destroying our ability to survive here.
- Advertise. Make the CAF public, make it clear, and make it obvious that this is right, fair, necessary, and long overdue.
- Implement while being open to participation and feedback. The CAF needs to be utterly transparent and as open-sourced as possible. The math isn’t hard (tedious, but not hard — high school chemistry is sufficient to do the most nitty-gritty of the work, and getting high school chem students involved in the calculations would build a lot of support.) If a good argument can be presented for changing aspects of the CAF to MAKE THE ENVIRONMENTAL SITUATION BETTER then the CAF should be adjusted to do just that.3
- Make CAF goals crystal clear: this fee is charged to repair damage caused by the activities being charged, and to eliminate such damages in the future. It is not charged to penalize people but to build infrastructure to make the need for damaging activities less likely. Instead of having bottle rockets as your hotel light, for example, this fee pays for acquiring LED lights. Taking it out of the hotel metaphor, this fee pays for San Francisco’s Green New Deal.
How do we do it?
Multiple examples offer regulatory and legal guidance. These include:
- Forty countries making polluters pay,4
- The Carbon Fee and Dividend,5
- The California state joint resolution for a carbon fee and dividend,6
- Resolutions from municipalities across the country, including Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Austin, Dekalb County, Portland, Dane County, Tucson, Kansas City, Boulder County, Durham County, Pittsburgh, Saint Paul, Greensboro, Toledo, Jersey City, Rochester, Salt Lake City, Santa Fe County, Syracuse, Stamford, Ann Arbor, Allentown, Boulder, Asheville, Bellingham, Duluth, Bloomington, Fayetteville, Iowa City, Flagstaff, Santa Fe, Portland, Lancaster, Hoboken, Oak Park, Charlottesville, Montclair, Brighton, Pullman, Bangor, Ithaca, Princeton, and Carbondale,7
- Resolutions from municipalities across CA, including San Mateo County, Sonoma County, Monterey County, Oakland, Santa Cruz County, Marin County, Modesto, Santa Rosa, San Mateo, Berkeley, Santa Monica, Alameda, Davis, Encinitas, Petaluma, San Luis Obispo, Claremont, West Hollywood, Burlingame, Los Altos, San Carlos, Monterey, El Cerrito, Marina, Albany, Oroville, Pacific Grove, Emeryville, Morro Bay, Capitola, Sebastopol, Cotati, Del Mar, and Carmel-by-the-Sea,8
- and San Francisco’s own revenue-neutral carbon tax resolution.9
Here are examples of what we can do right away
Start with gasoline, oil, methane, diesel fuel, propane, and any other hydrocarbons used for combustion. Each of these has a CAF of $140/ton CO2 emission. This works out to:
Gasoline
|
8,887 g CO2 per gallon or 0.0098 tons CO2 x $140/ ton CO2
= $1.37 per gallon CAF
|
Diesel
|
10,180 g CO2 per gallon or 0.0112 tons CO2 x $140/ ton CO2
= $1.57 per gallon CAF
|
Methane
|
2,016 g CO2 per therm or 0.0022 tons CO2 x $140/ ton CO2
= $0.31 per therm CAF
|
Fuel Oil
|
11,600 g CO2 per gallon or 0.0128 tons CO2 x $140/ ton CO2
= $1.79 per gallon CAF
|
Propane
|
5,780 g CO2 per gallon or 0.0064 tons CO2 x $140/ ton CO2
= $0.90 per gallon CAF
|
Next, we add fees to cars, motorcycles, trucks, buses, golf carts, and any fossil fuel propelled vehicles at sale and resale to make up for what the fuel fee misses. This fee includes carbon pollution produced by rubber from tires and brake pads, road building disruption and destruction of carbon sequestration in ecosystems, and replacement parts.
Then we add in all motors (including leaf blowers).
Then we keep going, looking at industrial, residential, and landfill sources of carbon pollution.
What does SF do with money raised by the CAF?
- Directly pay from CAF monies to carbon sequestration activities in SF: non-till and permaculture urban farms10, 11, urban forestry12, and CO2 utilization and storage.13
- Use CAF monies to begin SF’s Green New Deal.
- Use CAF monies to identify and eliminate any regressive impacts of SF’s CAF.14
- Make planet-destroying activities economically as costly as they are factually deadly.
So what are you waiting for? It’s past time to go, go, go, go, go! We need:
- Countywide blackwater recycling;
- An SF native urban forest with green pathways for plants and animals throughout the city;
- Immediate all electric and clean energy transportation that is free for those most in need;
- A majority of roads permanently closed to car traffic;
- Elimination of all single-use plastics in SF and aggressive movement toward eliminating all plastics that are not reusable, locally recyclable, and biologically safe;
- All local, carbon-neutral or carbon-negative energy — eliminating all methane heating and cooking and assisting in transitioning from fireplace-to-electric heating; and
- A resilient and self-sufficient SF.
When I started all this, there was a timeline for action based on the best science of the time.15, 16This letter would have said you have 26 weeks left in which to start the necessary big actions if we’re going to survive, but that’s not true anymore.17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 In a little over a year, we have lost 10 years in which to act. There is NO time left; you must act now.
FOOTNOTES
1. Brady Dennis. “Most Americans believe the government should do more to combat climate change, poll finds”. The Washington Post. 23 June 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/06/23/climate-change-poll-pew/.
2. BDB Pitmans LLP. “How should hospitality managers and property owners handle property damage caused by guests?” Lexology. 16 January 2014. https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=6b0a4eb0-2320-4d4e-a91b-99e5f9cc51c2.
3. Rob Hopkins. The Transition Handbook. Chelsea Green Publishing. 1 April 2014. www.transitionculture.org.
4. David Roberts. “40 countries are making polluters pay for carbon pollution. Guess who’s not.” Vox. 15 June 2017. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/6/15/15796202/map-carbon-pricing-across-the-globe. Make sure to click on the map of Carbon Pricing Around the World.
5. H.R. 763 and S. 3791, sponsored by Ted Deutch, Judy Chu, Charlie Crist, Anna Eshoo, Dan Lipinski, Francis Rooney, Scott Peters, and 74 other congresspeople. https://energyinnovationact.org.
6. Assembly Joint Resolution No. 43. Filed with the Secretary of State 1 September 2016. https://11bup83sxdss1xze1i3lpol4-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/20150AJR43_96.pdf.
7. “State, County and City Resolutions”. Citizens’ Climate Lobby. Accessed 1 July 2020. https://citizensclimatelobby.org/endorsements/municipal/.
8. “State, County and City Resolutions”. Citizens’ Climate Lobby. Accessed 1 July 2020. https://citizensclimatelobby.org/endorsements/municipal/.
9. File No. 140930. Resolution No. 336-14. Unanimously adopted 9 September 2014 by Avalos, Breed, Campos, Chiu, Cohen, Farrell, Kim, Mar, Tang, Wiener, and Yee. https://www.sfbos.org/ftp/uploadedfiles/bdsupvrs/resolutions14/r0336-14.pdf.
10. Muhammad Shafique, Xiaolong Xue, and Xiowei Luo. “An overview of carbon sequestration of green roofs in urban areas”. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, Vol 47. January 2020. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1618866719303668.
11. “San Francisco Urban Carbon Farming Project”. Matter of Trust. Accessed 24 June 2020. https://matteroftrust.org/sf-urban-carbon-farming-project/.
12. Chad Papa and Lauren Cooper. “How cities can lead the fight against climate change using urban forestry and trees (commentary)”. Mongabay. 27 November 2019. https://news.mongabay.com/2019/11/how-cities-can-lead-the-fight-against-climate-change-using-urban-forestry-and-trees-commentary/.
13. Ella Adlen and Cameron Hepburn. “Carbon Capture methods compared: costs, scalability, permanence, cleanness”. Energy Post. 11 November 2019. https://energypost.eu/10-carbon-capture-methods-compared-costs-scalability-permanence-cleanness/.
14. Jeremy Deaton. “Climate Change Is Regressive. A Carbon Tax Doesn’t Have To Be.” Think Progress. 13 October 2015. https://archive.thinkprogress.org/climate-change-is-regressive-a-carbon-tax-doesnt-have-to-be-baae3063a0e4/.
15. See the Action Timeline in the report in “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.
16. 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.
17. Matt McGrath. “Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months”. BBC News. 24 July 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48964736.
18. Heather Smith. “Climate Change: Even Worse Than We Thought”. Sierra. 8 October 2018. https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/climate-change-even-worse-we-thought-ipcc-report.
19. Michael Grose and Julie Arblaster. “Just how hot will it get this century? It’s worse than we thought”. Phys Org. 18 May 2020. https://phys.org/news/2020-05-hot-century-worse-thought.html.
20. Amelia Urry. “The scientist who first warned of climate change says it’s much worse than we thought”. Grist. 22 March 2016. https://grist.org/science/the-scientist-who-first-warned-of-climate-change-says-its-much-worse-than-we-thought/.
21. Rafi Letzter. “Today’s Climate Change Is Worse Than Anything Earth Has Experienced in the Past 2,000 Years”. Live Science. 25 July 2019. https://www.livescience.com/66027-climate-change-different.html.
22. John D. Sutter. “Vanishing”. CNN. Accessed 30 June 2020. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2016/12/specials/vanishing/.
23. Peter Castagno. “Biodiversity Loss Worst in Human History — 1 Million Animal Species Risk Extinction”. Citizen Truth. 6 May 2019. https://citizentruth.org/biodiversity-loss-worst-in-human-history-1-million-animal-species-risk-extinction/.
24.Kristen Callihan. “Earth’s Currently Ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction Is Worse Than We Thought”. OutwardOn. 7 August 2017. https://www.outwardon.com/article/earths-currently-ongoing-sixth-mass-extinction-event-is-worse-than-we-thought/.