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 204 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
Why don’t we do it in the road?
This week: TRANSPORTATION
What are SF’s transportation issues?
- SF is a small city with far too many cars on the roads, including cars endlessly circling with no passengers and no driver.
- SF does not have a flexible, dependable transportation system that covers the entire city, is equitable, or that is accessible to all.
- Cars in SF are, at every step of the way, actively contributing to climate chaos.
- Cars kill in multiple ways: directly, by destroying health, by destroying ecosystems, and by pouring CO2 into the atmosphere (and copper and hydrocarbons into the hydrosphere, among other biome-killing pollutants).
BOTTOM LINE:
SF has enormous transportation issues, and those issues cause climate chaos.
What are SF’s transportation solutions?
They’re not hard to figure out.
- Electric bikes are an excellent, immediate climate investment.1 We need to be promoting and building for electric bikes.
- Outlaw all privately owned internal combustion engines in San Francisco. Hard? Yes. But we won’t survive otherwise.2
- Require all vehicles owned or operated by the city and county of San Francisco to be electric, beginning immediately.
- All autonomous vehicles must be multi-passenger, electric, and in lanes of control (fenced in, in some fashion).
- Bike infrastructure must be prioritized. Pedestrian infrastructure must be prioritized. Car infrastructure must be decommissioned and repurposed.
- Intercity transit connections must be created, maintained, prioritized, and sped up.
BOTTOM LINE:
You have a huge set of actions to take to deal with SF’s transportation problems.
Why must SF take action immediately?
Let’s get a quick update on our favorite glacier: Thwaites. Thwaites, PIG, and Crossen are all in the Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica. Turns out, according to a Stanford study recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, there’s yet another accelerant that hasn’t been accounted for before in this system. These three glaciers hold 4 ft of sea level rise. The Thwaites anchor points are all already failing. And Thwaites, you remember, is the cork holding the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet in place.
It’s all happening now, faster than you thought, it’s worst than you thought, the impacts will be way worse than anyone has said aloud (but get a few scientists in a bar and they’ll tell you stuff that will freeze your soul), and the chance to make any difference at all is rapidly vanishing.
Do you want SF to survive?
As actions speak louder than words, this is an honest question. We’re at the end of the line in terms of a livable planet with very little time for our actions to make any difference at all, but you continue to do nothing. Please take a look at what summer was like in the southern hemisphere this year. Look at what’s going on in the Mediterranean. Look at the wars and migrations already caused by climate chaos. Europe is running out of water. And the CO2 level at Mauna Loa is now, today, at 418.6 ppm.
Climate change is already battering SF and there is so much worse to come. The longer you delay, the worse it will get. ACT NOW!
FOOTNOTES
1. Michael McQueen, John MacArthur, and Christopher Cherry. “The E’Bike Potential: Estimating regional e-bike impacts on greenhouse gas emissions”. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment. October 2020. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1361920920306696?via=ihub.
2. Reminder, you can’t negotiate with physics. There is no compromise.