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 201 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
For it’s the end of history1
This week: HEAT
Here’s where SF is on heat
TREE SHADE
San Francisco has inadequate and unequally distributed tree shade compared with other large US cities, covering just 15% of the city’s total area, with the majority of SF’s neighborhoods having less than 10% tree shade coverage. Tree shade is the major way cities mitigate neighborhood heat.
COOLING CENTERS
San Francisco’s available cooling centers are few in number, unevenly distributed, and lack space to accommodate SF’s residents during a heat emergency. Additionally, none of the official or unofficial cooling centers are open nights.
AIR CONDITIONING
Most San Francisco residences do not have AC. Many SF workplaces don’t have AC. SFUSD’s schools do not have AC.
ENERGY
During heat events, SF’s energy use exceeds the energy supply, causing brownouts, rolling blackouts, and blackouts. SF has a limited number of generators (multiply polluting and only good for short term use if access to fuel is compromised).
MEDICAL FACILITIES
SF doesn’t have medical facilities sufficient for a prolonged heat event. According to data.sfgov (2021) SF’s south and west have few facilities, while the east and north edges of the city have no medical facilities. And one of our large facilities for at-risk populations is the endangered Laguna Honda.
WATER INFRASTRUCTURE
SF doesn’t have water infrastructure (fountains, play areas, creeks, rivers, lakes, open fire hydrants) for informal neighborhood cooling. Cooling via saltwater and brackish water (canals and inlets) is available in a few places in SF, mostly on the eastern shoreline in industrial areas, and at the beaches on the north and west sides of the city. The beaches, though, lack shade.
BOTTOM LINE:
SF does not have the capacity to respond equitably or adequately to heat events.
Here’s what SF needs to do about heat
SF has allowed the city’s situation vis-a-vis climate chaos to deteriorate to the point where our responses must be everything everywhere all at once.2 So, in no particular order:
- WATER: We need to surface water features (such as rivers and lakes) that have been paved over and diverted to sewage. We need to plan for sea level rise by creating canals and inlets that can also function as cooling features. Downtown will be underwater, so getting a start on making this area functional, navigable, and cooler is a good use of money and resources.
- URBAN FOREST: We need to plant a robust and equitably distributed native forest and then support the trees instead of abandoning them to homeowners and businesses to care for. We need to do massive outreach to prevent trees from being destroyed when property ownership changes. We need to incentivize tree planting and tree care, and penalize tree destruction.
- TINY FORESTS: We need to plant tiny forests throughout SF. Tiny forests are tennis-court sized, native, quick growing forest habitats. In 10 years, you can grow a forest that has 600 trees in a self-sustaining ecosystem, evolved for the region, with the benefits of a 100-year old forest (including significant water absorption, groundwater replenishment, carbon sequestration, reduction in urban heat island effect, health benefits, habitat for endangered species, reduction of light pollution, reduction of urban noise, and scrubbing of fine particulates from the air).3
- COOLING CENTERS: Identify, establish, and maintain cooling centers that are adequate in number to allow the entire population of the city to access cooling all at once, including night times. Do this now, before the killer heat events start.
- ENERGY: SF needs reliable, local, sustainable energy. See the Strike letter for week 198 (and for weeks 38, 39, 68, 81, 94, 139, 151, 168, and 169) for details. SF needs battery banks to store energy for emergencies, and these need to be maintained by and distributed throughout the city.
- MEDICAL: SF needs to create neighborhood medical centers so that everyone has easy physical access to medical care. These can be as basic as triage and transport locations, to start with.
- ALBEDO: SF needs to increase the albedo of all non-living surfaces in the city.
BOTTOM LINE:
We can do a lot to reduce coming heat deaths and damage if we act now.
Here’s why we have to take care of this now
- We’re going to hit the 1.5°C increase in average global temperature threshold within the next 5 years. If we swing into an El Niño this summer or fall as is forecast, we’ll hit 1.5°C within 2 years.
- The rate of global and local temperature change is increasing.
- Right now, the southern hemisphere summer is producing record breaking temperatures, ice melts, storms, and weather pattern changes; we will be experiencing the same in a few months.
- As ice melts, global albedo is falling rapidly, increasing the negative temperature feedback loop.
- Because of temperature increases, we’re seeing rapid increases in atmospheric water content, which is causing our weather systems to break across the globe.
- We already have devastating heat events. These are going to increase in number, duration, temperature, and geographic area as average global temperature increases.
BOTTOM LINE:
It’s hot now, and it’s going to get much hotter very very soon. The heat will be growing our entire lifetimes.
Do you want SF to survive?
Then ACT NOW! The situation will never be better than now.
FOOTNOTES
1. From “Sleep Now In The Fire” by Rage Against The Machine. “Crawl with me into tomorrow” is another line worth considering.
2.
3. Afforest. Accessed 11 January 2022. https://www.afforestt.com.