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 74 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’re already past multiple tipping points, real devastation is fast approaching,
and you’re STILL not acting!
So this week’s topic is Good, Cheap, Fast: You Only Get Two Out Of Three.
How does this work?
In every manufacturing or repair shop, it’s axiomatic: if you want something to be done fast and cheap, it won’t be good. If you want something to be fast and good, it can’t be cheap. If you want cheap and good, it isn’t fast. Simple. And obvious.
How does this relate to you and SF and the environment?
Well, SF has pretty much blown it on cheap on almost every front; that’s what happens when you wait and wait and fail to act. You are doing what the smoker, the online shopper, and the Good German do — ignoring the obvious for far too long.
See, smokers know about lung cancer but they keep smoking even though lung cancer is expensive in so many ways.1 Online shoppers know about the enormous problems with Amazon2 but they still buy from them, even though doing so produces huge amounts of pollution, and hurts small businesses, communities, human rights, freedom of information, and workers. Average Germans knew about the concentration camps3 but they still went along with the Nazi program and helped murder 6 million people. You know about the environmental ruin facing us — I’ve made sure of that, if nothing else — and you still aren’t acting.
The only difference between the impacts of climate change and the examples above is that what’s facing us is WORSE.4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Much9, much10, much11 worse. In its impacts, climate change dwarfs everything else humans have ever faced.12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18
So what are SF’s options?
You have a set of big things that must be done fast. These include:
- Blackwater recycling19,
- Planting an SF native urban forest20,
- Switching to all-electric, local, carbon-neutral or carbon-negative, clean energy (including for all transportation)21,
- Banning all plastics in SF22,
- Permitting only green building practices in SF23, and
- Making SF resilient and self-sufficient.24
The longer you wait on doing these projects, the more costly in every sense these projects become, and the more likely catastrophic system failure results before you act.
For example, without blackwater recycling, SF will run out of water. The Sierras are drying up25, 26 and are not going to be dependable. Blackwater recycling is vital to both reduce our water usage and to help get us through until we can find another source of water (such as aluminum-solar filtration27 in conjunction with forest-produced increases in groundwater28). The longer you wait to build our blackwater recycling infrastructure and plant the native urban forest we need to survive, the more difficult and more expensive it becomes to do so, and the more damage is caused by your delaying.
So, if it has to happen fast, why not go cheap?
Any action at this point would be welcome. But cheap and fast isn't good; it breaks, it fails, it results in net losses. We’re at the point where even the least expensive of SF’s necessary projects — increasing the city’s albedo29 and building a network of bio-pathways30 — is ramping up in price because you keep not acting. Isn't it clear yet? You have to act, and you have to act now!
Why?
- Because there are 15 weeks left to start the big actions needed for survival.31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38
- Because, in a little over a year, we have lost 10 years time in which to act.
- Because the climate countdown gives us 42 days to save the earth.39
Because there is no time left, you must do your job and act now.
FOOTNOTES
1. Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie. “Cancer” Our World in Data. Revised November 2019. https://ourworldindata.org/cancer.
2. egreene. “10 Reasons Not to Shop Amazon Prime”. Green America. 11 July 2019. https://www.greenamerica.org/blog/10-reasons-not-shop-amazon-prime.
3. John Ezard. “Germans knew of Holocaust horror about death camps”. The Guardian. 16 February 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/17/johnezard.
4. Jonathan Amos. “Climate change: Warmth shatters section of Greenland ice shelf”. BBC. 14 September 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54127279?fbclid=IwAR2H2BbHTOKTBMesBPpt0-fICiUx_Hc1eOCFtKxbEQ8PZDpG-8I-1ERH6cQ.
5. Louis Genot. “Why are Brazil’s wetlands engulfed in flames?” PhysOrg. 11 September 2020. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-brazil-wetlands-engulfed-flames.html.
6. Naoki Namba. “Japanese expedition identifies East Antarctic melting hotspot”. PhysOrg. 24 August 2020. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-japanese-east-antarctic-hotspot.html.
7. Anna Liesowska. “Giant new 50-metre deep ‘crater’ opens up in Arctic tundra”. The Siberian Times. 29 August 2020. https://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/giant-new-50-metre-deep-crater-opens-up-in-arctic-tundra/.
8. Scott Waldman. “Denial expands on Facebook as scientists face restrictions”. E&E News. 6 July 2020. https://www.eenews.net/stories/1063511857.
9. Sheikh Hasina. “A third of my country was just underwater. The world must act on climate”. The Guardian. 22 September 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2020/sep/22/climate-change-action-bangladesh-paris-agreemen.
10. Juliet Eilperin. “In secret tapes, mine executives detail their sway over leaders from Juneau to the White House”. The Washington Post. 22 September 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/09/22/pebble-mine-secret-tapes/.
11. Naveena Sadasivam. “Law and Disorder” Grist. 17 September 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa-IF-JupCE.
12. “Climate change impacts”. NOAA. “Updated” February 2019, accessed 23 September 2020. https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/climate/climate-change-impacts.
13. “The Effects of Climate Change”. NASA. Last updated September 2020. https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/.
14. Renee Cho. “10 climate Change Impacts That Will Affect Us All”. Earth Institute/Columbia University. 27 December 2019. https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2019/12/27/climate-change-impacts-everyone/.
15. Robert Hunziker. “Top Ten Dreadful Effects of Climate Change”. Dissident Voice. 6 April 2013. https://dissidentvoice.org/2013/04/top-ten-dreadful-effects-of-climate-change/.
16. Aylin Woodward. “18 signs we’re in the middle of a 6th mass extinction”. Business Insider. 18 June 2019. https://www.businessinsider.com/signs-of-6th-mass-extinction-2019-3?op=1.
17. Jen Christensen. “250,000 deaths a year from climate change is a ‘conservative estimate,’ research says”. CNN. 16 January 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/16/health/climate-change-health-emergency-study/index.html.
18. Abrahm Lustgarten. “The Great Climate Migration”. New York Times. 23 July 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/climate-migration.html.
19. Strike letters weeks 20, 23, 28, and 52.
20. Strike letters weeks 6, 22, 27, and 64.
21. Strike letters weeks 7, 23, 24, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 61, 62, 63, 68, and 69.
22. Strike letters weeks 16, 22, 23, 31, and 41.
23. Strike letters weeks 4, 10, 13, 17, 19, 48, and 59.
24. Strike letters weeks 2, 6, 8, 13, 42, 49, 55, 58, and 70.
25. Kevin Stark. “Megadrought Conditions Not Seen for 400+ Years Have Returned to the West, Scientists Say”. KQED. 16 April 2020. https://www.kqed.org/science/1962273/megadrought-conditions-not-seen-for-400-years-have-returned-to-the-west-scientists-say.
26. Bobby Magill. “Is the West’s Dry Spell Really a Megadrought?” Climate Central. 12 December 2013. https://www.climatecentral.org/news/is-the-wests-dry-spell-really-a-megadrought-16824.
27. Subhash C. Singh, Mohamed ElKabbash, Zilong Li, Xiaohan Li, Bhabesh Regmi, Matthew Madsen, Sohail A. Jalil, Zhibing Zhan, Jihua Zhang, and Chunlei Guo. “Solar-trackable super-wicking black metal panel for photothermal water sanitation”. Nature Sustainability. 13 July 2020. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0566-x.
28. Kate Langford. “Trees shown to increase groundwater recharge”. Agroforestry World. 25 February 2016. http://blog.worldagroforestry.org/index.php/2016/02/25/trees-shown-to-increase-groundwater-recharge/.
29. Strike letters weeks 12, 22, 59, and 72.
30. Strike letters weeks 6, 9, 11, 22, 27, 45, 46, and 72.
31. 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.
32. 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.
33. 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.
34. 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/.
35. 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.
36. John D. Sutter. “Vanishing”. CNN. Accessed 30 June 2020. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2016/12/specials/vanishing/.
37. 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/.
38. 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/.
39. “Climate countdown”. The Guardian. Accessed most recently 29 July 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/climate-countdown.