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. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference!
This is the letter for week 191 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 of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
This week: BACK TO BASICS
SF’s chances of surviving decrease daily
How are we failing? Let’s count the ways:
- We’re still producing lots of CO2,
- we’re not planning for sea level rise and building housing in areas that will be underwater soon (see Thwaites),
- we have insufficient water supplies coupled with an on-going megadrought,
- our industrial base is limited and fossil-fuel-dependent,
- our sewage system is indefensible and at sea level,
- we continue to have gross environmental racism and inequities as seen in shade, housing, health, food, and pollution exposure,
- we lack self-sufficiency
- and we have little local control over our energy.
Each failure has a solution
- Outlaw non-biological CO2 production.
- Retreat from the coast and stop building on or allowing building on lowlands.
- Recycle all water and greatly reduce water use and plant trees (cause they capture water).
- Diversify our economic base; focus it on climate change and environmental disaster.
- Shut down the sewage treatment plants and build blackwater recycling facilities uphill.
- Plant trees — natives.
- Build dense housing uphill on non-polluted lands.
- Invest in the city — in healthcare and food access.
- Farm rooftops and walls.
- Produce energy locally, from wind, waves, tides, solar, heat differential, and more.
Each solution has a time limit
- Putting a bandaid on a cut does no good when the body is already in septic shock, and we’re at the stage where little actions will have almost no impact. Yet everything SF has done so far and is considering doing in response to climate chaos is a little action.
- Acting early is cheaper, easier, and more effective than acting later. We are past the acting early stage. We are rapidly approaching the “nothing you can do will make any difference” stage. We have a very very limited time in which to act right now.
- All of these basic actions need to happen in the next 2-5 years, tops. Quicker would be better in every way, especially when considering bond availability, insurance, and legal liabilities.
FOCUS!
Nothing else matters. There are no other problems of any import compared to these issues. This is an extinction event unfolding and it can easily take SF, and the entire human race, with it.
This is your reality
Right now, we’re working toward 10°F average global temperature increase. That is not survivable. “It’s like changing the limit on the freeway from 55 miles an hour to 550 miles an hour. These changes are staggering.” Dr. Eric Rignot, Glaciologist, UC Irvine.
Focus on the priorities
Energy and water — with those we have a chance. Without them, there is no SF. Do them first. Do them now.
And work on everything else at the same time
You should be on a war footing. We should be planting victory gardens. This is basic. This is about survival. And right now the odds are not in our favor.
So are you going to save SF?
You can act, you just have to choose to.1 You’ve taken oaths to act for the good of SF. You say you are bound by the Precautionary Principle. The costs of climate change are huge2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and your not acting will destroy SF. Why aren’t you acting? This is not a rhetorical question; I expect an answer.
FOOTNOTES
1. Richard Procter. “San Francisco Knows How to Stop Global Warming — Will It?” SF Weekly. 11 September 2019. https://www.sfweekly.com/news/san-francisco-climate-change-emissions/.
2. Harper’s Index. March 2021. https://harpers.org/archive/2021/03/.
3. Harper’s Index. March 2021. https://harpers.org/archive/2021/03/.
4. Dana Nuccitelli. “New report finds costs of climate change impacts often underestimated”. Yale Climate Connections. 18 November 2019. https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/11/new-report-finds-costs-of-climate-change-impacts-often-underestimated/.
5. Rebecca Hersher and Nathan Rott. “What Are The Costs Of Climate Change?” NPR. 16 September 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913693655/what-are-the-costs-of-climate-change.
6. Samantha Fields. “Insurance increasingly unaffordable as climate change brings more disasters”. Marketplace. 31 August 2020. https://www.marketplace.org/2020/08/31/insurance-increasingly-unaffordable-as-climate-change-brings-more-disasters/.
