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 193 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
The second hand unwinds
This week: STATE AFTER STATE AFTER STATE OF EMERGENCY
Climate chaos means more and bigger disasters
“The number of weather-related disasters to hit the world has increased five-fold over the past 50 years, says the World Meteorological Organization.” (Matt McGrath, 2021, BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58396975)
“Weather records are being broken thanks to climate change turning previously impossible occurrences into startling realities.” (Sharon Pruitt-Young, 2021, NPR, https://www.npr.org/2021/09/11/1035241392/climate-change-disasters-mental-health-anxiety-eco-grief)
“The year 2022 brought disaster after disaster across the planet with scientists increasingly able to point to the climate crisis as the root cause.” (Louise Boyle, 2023, Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/worst-climate-disasters-2022-hurricane-wildfires-heatwave-b2255198.html)
How is SF going to pay for this…
SF’s Climate Action Plan price tag is $14 - 22 billion and that plan includes some serious handwaving and wishful thinking (for example, 8000 new homes, ~50% low income or affordable, built in a flood zone ) so it’s a safe bet that the actual price is much higher.
With less and less time in which to reset, …
It’s hard to clean up from one disaster when in the middle of a second, or third. The rate of disasters has increased (see above), and this substantially decreases our ability to rebound.
An economy in turmoil, …
Budget reductions forced by a changing/dying local economic base, compounded by a storied history of governmental graft and cronyism resulting in extreme inefficiencies and theft of civic resources, all lead to a lack of ready funds for fundamentals such as dealing with climate change. Add to this tectonic shifts happening in the insurance industry and municipal bonds, and you’ve got less and less money to pay for a problem that grows more and more expensive.
Climate migrants flooding in, …
Anecdotally, climate migration is already happening, with mass migration, probably in multiple waves, to come. This doesn’t include migration from a desertifying Central America into the US, which is also happening.
And no end in sight?
Every new study, every new avenue of research, every report shows that everything is getting worse faster than predicted and the outcomes are more extreme than originally thought.
There’s a hot, dangerous summer coming…
Take a look at the forecast for 2023, then consider the impact on the Arctic where there are enormous masses of meltable ice. This ice, when it melts, will substantially raise sea levels and disrupt or collapse the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, causing enormous global impacts. And it’s coming soon, to a shore near you.
And SF is unready for all of it.
Because so much worse is coming. Actions speak so much louder than words. So why aren’t you acting? For the third week in a row, this is not a rhetorical question; I expect an answer.
