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 72 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
What kills more people than storms, floods, and earthquakes?
This week’s topic is Heat.
Heat kills.
Already, over 700 people die each year from heat.1 The CDC predicts that by 2050 every year climate change will add between 2000 to 5000 people to that figure.2 Heat kills the old and the very young, but men and BIPOC men are disproportionately represented in the fatalities, as are the poor, homeless, and outdoor workers.3 And, as we’ve seen from the various COVID-19 count methods and statistics, we are both inconsistent in how we count deaths like this and strongly geared toward undercounting.4, 5
Heatstroke kills you by damaging the brain, kidneys, and other organs. Heat increases your rates of dying from heart conditions, stroke, or breathing issues.6 Heat makes overdosing more likely.7 Heat makes you stupid8, floods the intestines with endotoxins9, and triggers body-wide inflammation.10 It is both quick to get you and an ugly way to die.11
And cities make heat much worse.
How? Through:
- the Urban Heat Island Effect12, 13,
- environmental racism14, 15 and redlining16, 17,
- wasted energy18,
- low albedos19, 20, 21, 22,
- humidity23, and
- a lack of native, sustainable shade trees.24, 25, 26, 27, 28
But cities don’t have to be killers-by-heat.
Solutions abound for all of the above, and you’ve got weeks of prior strike letters that detail exactly what to do and how, who is already doing the work, who to contact, and more. So many of the solutions are obvious: installing insulation; producing energy locally from solar, wind, wave, and heat pumps with local battery storage; planting an urban forest of native and near-native trees; enacting reparations and restitution for racism; mass electrification; increasing our albedo, and so much more.29, 30 There’s nothing new to figure out to fix this problem.
That’s why we need to fix this in SF now!
Because it’s only going to get hotter. Temperature records are being broken daily31, 32, 33, the temperature predictions are dire34, and the timeline in which to do anything is short.35, 36, 37
And that’s why I’ve been striking for almost a year and a half now.
There are, at most, 17 weeks left in which to start acting if we’re going to survive.38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45 In a little over a year, we have lost 10 years time in which to act. The Guardian’s climate countdown gives us 56 days to save the earth.46 There is NO time left; you must, finally, act now.
FOOTNOTES
1. GE Luber, CA Sanchez, and LM Conklin. “Heat-Related Deaths —- United States, 1999—2003”. MMWR. 28 July 2006. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5529a2.htm.
2. Jonathan Purtle. “What kills more people than storms, floods and earthquakes? Heat.” The Philadelphia Inquirer. 21 June 2012. https://www.inquirer.com/philly/blogs/public_health/What-kills-more-people-than-storms-floods-and-earthquakes-Heat.html.
3. “Heat-Related Illness”. CDC. Accessed 8 September 2020. https://www.cdc.gov/pictureofamerica/pdfs/Picture_of_America_Heat-Related_Illness.pdf.
4. Lily Altavena. “The Arizona heat is killing people. Just how many? That’s in dispute”. azcentral. 23 May 2018. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2017/07/07/arizona-heat-killing-people-just-how-many-thats-dispute/453705001/.
5. Ronald D. Fricker Jr. “Opinion: The ‘excess deaths’ tally in the U.S. is 204,691 in 7 months — so COVID-19 deaths might be undercounted”. Market Watch. 15 August 2020. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-excess-deaths-tally-in-the-us-is-204691-in-7-months-so-covid-19-deaths-might-be-undercounted-2020-08-13.
6. Jian Cheng, Zhiwei Xu, Hilary Bambrick, Vanessa Prescott, Ning Wang, Yuzhou Zhang, Hong Su, Shilu Tong, and Wenbiao Hu. “Cardiorespiratory effects of heatwaves: A systematic review and meta-analysis of global epidemiological evidence”. Environmental Research. October 2019 Volume 177. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935119304074?utm_campaign=news&utm_medium=miragenews&utm_source=miragenews.
7. Amy S.B. Bohnert, Marta Prescott, David Vlahov, Kenneth J. Tardiff, and Sandro Galea. “Ambient temperature and risk of death from accidental drug overdose in New York City, 1990-2006”. PMC. 2 March 2010. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2898915/.
8. Christopher Ingraham. “Heat makes you dumb, in four charts”. The Washington Post. 17 July 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/07/17/heat-makes-you-dumb-four-charts/.
9. Stephanie Pappas. “Deadly Degrees: Why Heat Waves Kill So Quickly”. LiveScience. 20 June 2016. https://www.livescience.com/55129-how-heat-waves-kill-so-quickly.html.
10. Daniel Engber. “How Does Heat Kill You?” Slate. 4 August 2006. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2006/08/how-does-heat-kill-you.html.
11. Debra Utacia Krol. “In Phoenix, rising temperatures day and night kill more people each year”. azcentral. 27 August 2020. https://www.azcentral.com/in-depth/news/2020/08/26/heat-killing-more-people-cities-sizzle-hotter-temperatures/4553439002/.
12. “Urban Heat Island Effect”. ScienceDirect. Accessed 9 September 2020. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/urban-heat-island-effect.
13. “Learn About Heat Islands”. US Environmental Protection Agency. Last updated 30 July 2020. https://www.epa.gov/heatislands/learn-about-heat-islands.
14. Mustafa Santiago Ali. “Environmental racism is killing Americans of color. Climate change will make it worse”. The Guardian. 28 July 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/28/climate-change-enviromental-racism-america.
15. See Strike letters for weeks 15, 23, 58, 64, and 70.
16. “Extreme heat is worse in redlined neighborhoods”. Grist. 4 August 2020. https://grist.org/justice/extreme-heat-redlining-portland/.
17. Linda Poon. “Housing Discrimination Made Summers Even Hotter”. Bloomberg CityLab. 22 January 2020. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-22/the-link-between-redlining-and-extreme-urban-heat.
18. ACEEE. “What Cities Waste The Most Energy? The Least?” Gov1. 26 June 2015. https://www.gov1.com/energy/articles/what-cities-waste-the-most-energy-the-least-jVNfXNExAB1Scs8Y/. Note: at the time SF was listed as #4 in the U.S. for least energy waste, and that was mostly due to utilities and transportation — both areas we clearly are having problems with now. Buildings, community initiatives, and government operations are areas where we did less well.
19. Evyatar Erell, David Pearlmutter, Daniel Boneh, and Pua Bar Kutiel. “Effect of high-albedo materials on pedestrian heat stress in urban street canyons”. Urban Climate. December 2014 Vol 10, Part 2, Pages 367-386. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212095513000539.
20. Haider Taha. “Urban climates and heat islands: albedo, evapotranspiration, and anthropogenic heat”. Energy and Buildings. 1997, Vol 25, Issue 2, Pages 99-103. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378778896009991.
21. Hashem Akbari, H Damon Matthews, and Donny Seto. “The long-term effect of increasing the albedo of urban areas”. Environmental Research Letters. 12 April 2012. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/2/024004.
22. See Strike letters for weeks 12, 22, and 60.
23. Deanna Conners. “Humid cities are worse urban heat islands than dry cities”. EarthSky. 6 August 2014. https://earthsky.org/earth/humidity-makes-everything-worse-including-urban-heat-islands.
24. John Upton and Clarisa Diaz. “NYC’s Trees: A Natural Defense Against Heat, But Not Equally Shared”. Science Friday. 4 September 2020. https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/creating-urban-forest/.
25. “Why Native Plants Matter”. Audubon. Accessed 9 September 2020. https://www.audubon.org/content/why-native-plants-matter.
26. Cory Rosenberg. “How Trees Combat the Urban Heat Island Effect”. Treehugger. 3 July 2019. https://www.treehugger.com/how-trees-combat-urban-heat-island-effect-4862445.
27. Patrick Fitzgerald. “Native Plant Challenge: Calling All Cities to Plant Native”. National Wildlife Federation. 10 September 2019. https://blog.nwf.org/2019/09/native-plant-challenge-calling-all-cities-to-plant-native/.
28. See Strike letter for week 27: Trees.
29.
LIST OF STRIKE TOPICS (by week)
- Water – intro (recycling, Hetch Hetchy, delta tunnel, rain gardens, etc.)
- Ideas – how to and why to solicit ideas from everyone
- Carbon sequestration – how to do carbon sequestration and where
- Local recycling – includes cradle to cradle push
- Elevation – yup, old data on what’s going to be under water
- Planting – planting bio buffer zones
- Transportation – all electric, no private vehicles, etc.
- The planet – short timeline and big problems, need to plan now!
- Insects – how to fight the insect crash (including native plants)
- Money (divest-invest) – title sort of says it all, with specifics
- The coasts – plan to retreat from the coasts now
- Light – light pollution and increasing our albedo
- Early financial risks – focus on 30-year bond insurance, lawsuits, building codes
- Self-assessment – a test to see if they’ve done anything yet
- Environmental justice – who gets hit hardest, what that means for SF
- The ocean – it’s dying and what we have to do about it
- Numbers – deadlines, local issues, prior timelines, ways to get it done
- Now or never – the news keeps getting worse and what SF must do
- Municipal bonds – credit rating agencies are getting wise, assume very little time
- Access to water – no future snow = blackwater recycling now
- Priorities – dividing up what needs to be done by when it has to be done and how
- Examples pt 1 – albedo, bioswales, coasts, pavement, planting, insects, plastic, wildlife corridors
- Examples pt 2 – environmental justice, investment, light pollution, local recycling, ocean, blackwater recycling, transportation
- Science – how science works, what science says about current crises
- Climate strike – what for, why, what it will accomplish (this was the big gen strike)
- Why I strike – in title, my environmental bio
- Trees – focus on natives only
- Water recycling – the basics of blackwater recycling
- Transit -- % CO2 to transit, how to reduce, get rid of private vehicles, promote bikes
- Time – assessing time per potential tipping point, and what SF has to do to meet these
- Plastic — defining plastics and the problem they represent
- CH4 — chem of rxn
- Other GHGs — amts, greenhouse potential, actions
- CO2 pt 1 — where we produce CO2
- CO2 pt 2 — how do we get rid of it
- CO2 pt 3 — what does SF need to do
- Focus — there are no other issues
- Energy — how to get to 100% net-zero C emissions
- Energy details — details for each type of green energy for SF
- Climate emergency — act or get out of the way
- Scope of the plastic problem — it’s worse than we thought
- Resilience and self-sufficiency — how we can do it and why we have to
- Recap — cheat sheet on what to do and timeframes for SF
- Insects in SF — what we must do to preserve insects
- Bio highways — how to create these in SF and why
- Delta Tunnel — it will hurt SF, we need to stop supporting it
- Covid-19 — Covid-19 is bad, ecocide is much worse
- Green New Deal — SF needs a Green New Deal now
- Basic tenents — we must act to survive, and we must act right now
- Keep Your Eyes on the Prize — act now, focus, Covid-19 is a small part of the disaster on its way
- The Price Is Right — acting is much cheaper than not acting, with #s
- Build blackwater recycling — megadrought, we need to recycle our water
- Fiddling while home burns — what are you doing?!
- Taking action fast — why and how to act fast, Process For Action
- How SF is hurt by global changes — biosphere collapse directly endangers SF
- What have you done? — report card
- A livable world is still possible — SF needs to take charge and act, details on how
- Restorative Justice — how it works to fix harm, inc to the environment
- Start with the easy stuff — infrastructure, policy, and community list of projects
- Scope — the news just got a lot worse, very fast, because of clouds
- CAF — carbon added fee
- CAF — how to implement it
- Carmageddon — how to avoid it and make roads safe, and not for cars
- Environmental racism — it drives local and global environmental destruction
- How to take action — what may be stopping you and how to get past that
- The Big Goal — setting an overarching goal that focuses and drives action
- Art — how the arts are vital to fixing the current mess
- Electrification — on the need to electrify everything now, and how it saves money too
- The Streets of San Francisco — why we need to get cars off the streets
- Getting everyone involved — who, how, and why everyone needs a say and to be acting
- No Nukes in SF — clean it all up, already!!
- Heat — it kills, and it’s easy and obvious how to reduce it
30. The list of strike topics had to be split between 2 footnotes in the original formatting.
31. KRON4 Staff. “Historic heat records broken throughout the Bay Area”. KRON4. 6 September 2020. https://www.kron4.com/news/historic-heat-records-broken-throughout-the-bay-area/.
32. Rob Carlmark. “August 2020 was hottest ever for Sacramento”. ABC10. 3 Setpember 2020. https://www.abc10.com/article/weather/sacramento-record-heat-august/103-7fd00d32-05a5-4fe5-bf55-24900608c3ad.
33. Aris Folley. “Weather service records hottest temperature on record in LA County”. The Hill 6 September 2020. https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/515342-weather-service-records-hottest-temperature-on-record-in-la-county.
34. Stephen Leahy. “By 2050, many U.S. cities will have weather like they’ve never seen”. National Geographic. 10 July 2019. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/07/major-us-cities-will-face-unprecedente-climates-2050/.
35. Helen Regan. “Billions of people could live in areas too hot for humans by 2070, study says”. CNN. 5 May 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/05/world/global-warming-climate-niche-temperatures-intl-hnk/index.html.
36. Adam Withnall. “The countries that will be so hot by 2100 humans won’t be able to go outside”. Independent. 27 October 2015. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-countries-that-will-be-so-hot-by-2100-humans-won-t-be-able-to-go-outside-a6710121.html.
37. Brett Israel. “Earth Could Become Too Hot for Humans”. LiveScience. 4 May 2010. https://www.livescience.com/6428-earth-hot-humans.html.
38. 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.
39. 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.
40. 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.
41. 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/.
42. 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.
43. John D. Sutter. “Vanishing”. CNN. Accessed 30 June 2020. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2016/12/specials/vanishing/.
44. 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/.
45. 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/.
46. “Climate countdown”. The Guardian. Accessed most recently 8 September 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/climate-countdown.