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 205 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
Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air1
This week: POLLUTION
What are SF’s pollution issues?
- Radioactive waste: multiple types, in multiple places
- Plastic: artificial turf, packaging, waste (from equipment, devices, industry, and medicine)
- Chemical: hydrocarbons, endocrine disruptors, medical and industrial waste, leachate, PFASs, POPs, biocides, agricultural runoff, DDT (still), chlorinated hyrdocarbons, MTBE, benzene, arsenic, dioxins, etc
- Atmospheric: CO2, soot, PM 10 - 2.5, wood fire smoke, methane, NOx, plastic, ozone
- Heavy metals: Pb, Cu, Hg, Fe, Zn, Mn, Ti, Cr, Co, Ni, Cd
- Ocean acidification
- Light and sound
There are more, but these are the local pollution issues with the greatest health and ecosystem impacts.
BOTTOM LINE:
SF has multiple major pollution issues, with pollution sources that sicken and kill residents now, have been doing so for years, and are getting worse.
What is SF doing about these problems?
In two words — mostly nothing. The radioactive waste problem has veered between headlines and sweeping it under the rug, but nothing substantive has been accomplished while the health impacts continue. The city has been lax on cleaning up or reducing our chemical pollution problem, while adding to the range and number of the pollutants being dumped via new industries that have few to no regulations (such as Uber, biotech, etc.) SF has actively increased the plastic problem (see parks and school yards), taken some very small actions that have done very little to reduce most types of atmospheric pollution, mostly ignored heavy metal pollution as the amount of exposure has increased, increased both light and sound pollution, and seems to not think about ocean acidification at all even though we’re on a peninsula and its impacting local fishing.
BOTTOM LINE:
SF is doing little to nothing to address the multiple pollution problems sickening the city.
What are SF’s pollution solutions?
They’re not hard to figure out, and many of them are the same as the solutions to other big issues, listed in previous weeks (such as electric bikes, requiring carbon neutrality for all properties in SF, building up SF’s native urban forest, producing green energy in SF for our locally controlled grid, blackwater recycling and mandated grey water use in addition to water use reduction, batteries, etc.) They include:
- Cleaning up, finally, the various small (ex. former gas stations and small shop industry) and large (ex. Hunters Point) places that house and spread pollution. We need to start with the lowest elevations as they will be the first to spread the waste as groundwater and sea level rise.
- Stop producing all types and amounts of pollution. Humans have lived without producing these pollutants before, so it’s not rocket science to figure out how to do it again. The most ancient pollutant, in fact, is probably CO2 and we already know how to eliminate that (see the multiple prior strike letters on energy).
- Stop importing pollutants into SF. Begin with eliminating all plastics and non-biodegradable in our waste system pollutants. If it can’t biodegrade in SF, it can’t come into SF.
- Start dealing with bigger picture issues, like ocean acidification, because they aren’t going to go away and, in most cases, are going to get worse.
BOTTOM LINE:
There are many actions at various tax and political price points you can take to deal with SF’s pollution problems now.
Why must SF act immediately?
Time for a quick update on some of our sister Mediterranean climates for a glimpse of what’s to come.
Tunisia is now turning off the taps at night, in its 4th year of extreme drought; their water shortages are caused by climate crisis. After a winter of little to no rainfall (again), Europe is bracing for a hotter summer (as all summers will be) and the return of El Niño. Europe is already in a multi-year drought. There are ongoing extreme drought situations in France, Spain, and northern Italy. In northeastern Spain, drought has reached “extraordinary proportions”2 Several municipalities are already trucking in water to regions without any. Last summer, many in these regions had only 4 hours of water a day. And drought everywhere is increased by what the UN calls our “vampiric overconsumption” of water.
And the fire season has yet to start.
SF must act immediately, as we can make a difference in both SF and the world. After all, the US is less than 5% of the world’s population and generates 30% of the world’s waste. SF still has a big world profile so we must act. NOW!
FOOTNOTES
1. Tom Lehrer, of course. From “Pollution”.
2. Rosie Frost, Laura Llach, and Rebecca Ann Hughes. “‘More of the same’: These European villages are preparing for another year of extreme drought”. Eruonews.green. 3 April 2023. https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/04/03/more-of-the-same-these-european-villages-are-preparing-for-another-year-of-extreme-drought.