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 203 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
It’s really simple
This week: THE SIMPLE SOLUTIONS
What are SF’s simple solutions?
Indirect taxes, land use decisions, purchasing, investment, and public works are all things you can do now, with the laws, regulations, ordinances, codes, and money available or with slight variations on these, that will make living through increasingly dire climate change potentially possible for the people of San Francisco.
Indirect taxes
SF has multiple barriers to increasing taxes (because the U.S. loves poverty and inequality), but SF also has multiple ways to achieve sustainability goals through indirect taxation. Examples include:
- requiring planting and ongoing care for living, native trees per sq ft of property, for residential, commercial, and undeveloped land;
- requiring carbon neutrality for all property in the city and county;
- continually decreasing the amount of plastic that can be disposed of in SF in any fashion;
- requiring halving of food waste by supermarkets within 2 years;
- substantially increasing water use fees for excessive usages (and define “excessive” so that we can survive a megadrought);
And more. Your only limits here are your imagination. Lose in one area, hit back in another. Push the little things over and over until they add up to bigger things.
BOTTOM LINE:
We have ways of getting substantive work done that don’t require new taxes.
Land use decisions
You don’t have to make land use decisions in favor of cars and climate chaos. You don’t have to decide for flooding and environmental injustice. You can, for example, include worst-case climate change forecasts into coastal and low-lying land use issues, making it too expensive to build on what is de facto sacrificial land, making it cheaper to build uphill where we’ll be able to stay above sea level. You can start working with the reality of the world we’ve got instead of the world that existed decades ago.
BOTTOM LINE:
SF can save a lot of people and a lot of money by centering all land use decisions around climate change.
Purchasing
Don’t buy anything that destroys the planet. Buy locally. Buy much, much less. Push your suppliers to do the same. Actively look for alternatives at all times. Make arrangements with other local counties and cities so that you are a big enough purchaser to have clout. Make this loudly and broadly known. Refuse, reduce, reuse, repurpose, recycle, repair, rot.
BOTTOM LINE:
Use the power of the purse, and make the purse as big as possible while keeping it local.
Investment
Divest. This isn’t hard. If you love your spouse and children, you don’t contribute to the salary of someone who is actively killing them. Invest in what will keep us alive. Hint: it’s not only big banks that love fossil fuel companies.
BOTTOM LINE:
Get SF’s money out of dirty funds.
Public works
Change the focus of our public works. Examples of ways to do this include:
- Composting toilets for humans and composting digesters for dog waste. Use the methane produced to run neighboring utilities (traffic lights, street lights, the digesters themselves, bus shelter signage and lights, etc.) and the fertilizer produced on rebuilding soil in parks.
- Require all hard surfaces be permeable, from streets to parking lots to living roofs.
- Put in battery banks everywhere in SF, using multiple different types of batteries, and make that electricity available for e-cars and e-scooters and e-bikes.
And so much more. Again, you’re only limited by your imagination here.
BOTTOM LINE:
SF can change the environment via public works solutions.
More direct actions
Tax the rich. There are 60 billionaires in SF. There are 47 mi2 of land in SF. There are more than 1 billionaire per mi2 in SF. Why is the SF government making everyone in SF support billionaires and their end-stage capitalist dreams? They are taking from SF, they must give back to SF. Tax the rich.
BOTTOM LINE:
There is a way to raise taxes. If the billionaires move out as a result, we no longer have to support them. If they stay, they pay to stay. This is a win-win situation.
Do you want SF to survive?
Climate change is already battering SF: intense winds batter down drought-stressed and flood-weakened trees all over the city as barges ram bridges and the electricity goes out yet again and people are killed, and this is just one storm, not even a particularly bad one. There is much worse to come. The longer you delay, the worse it will get. ACT NOW!