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Climate Strike -- Now or Never (week 18) [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-07-05
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!
This is the letter for week 18 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 to all the strike letters, see this story.
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
because we have 18 months, not 10 years!
If you’re not panicked, you haven’t been paying attention. Please pay attention.
This week’s topic is ACTING NOW BECAUSE IT’S NOW OR NEVER.
From the AAAS, 24 July 2019, Walter Beckwith reporting:
Alaska’s LeConte glacier is melting underwater at rates nearly a hundred times greater than what is currently estimated, according to a detailed sonar survey of the glacier’s submerged surfaces. The newly observed melt rates are up to two orders of magnitude greater than those calculated by some current predictive models. The findings, published in the July 26 issue of Science, are the first based on direct subsurface measurements of a tidewater glacier and suggest that similar glaciers worldwide may be in far “hotter water” than previously known.
From WCAI, 29 July 2019, Heather Goldstone and Elsa Partan reporting:
A team of scientists and students with Woods Hole Research Center’s Polaris Project are just back from a trip to the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta to study climate impacts. Lead scientist Sue Natali [warns] “I would say we’re being quite conservative when we make our estimates about how much carbon will be released from thawing permafrost [.]” In terms of numbers, Natali estimates that about 150 billion tons of carbon will be released from thawing permafrost by the end of the century if we continue to [emit] at our current rate. That’s on-par with the U.S. emission rate.
Everyday, every new study, every report confirms that not only is it bad, it’s much worse than we’d previously thought. Glaciers are melting 100 times faster than predicted, the permafrost is literally collapsing and bellowing out huge amounts of methane, and so much more. This makes our time deadlines even more important than before, and it turns out they also are coming sooner than we’d thought.
From the BBC, 24 July 2019, Matt McGrath reporting:
One of the understated headlines in last year’s IPCC report was that global emissions of carbon dioxide must peak by 2020 to keep the planet below 1.5°C. Current plans are nowhere near strong enough to keep temperatures below the so-called safe limit. Right now, we are heading towards 3C of heating by 2100 not 1.5. As countries usually scope out their plans over five and 10 year timeframes, if the 45% carbon cut target by 2030 is to be met then the plans really need to be on the table by the end of 2020.
We only have 18 months to turn policy into action here in San Francisco.
That means policies need to be created here, now, funded now, and put into action now.
What policies?
The two biosphere killers that threaten to do in life on earth are:
carbon in the atmosphere,
and biological annihilation.
How do we in San Francisco deal with our contributions to these two issues? What do we need to do? Each of these problems has city-specific components we must address. They are:
For carbon
Fossil fuels
Deforestation / Land use / Agriculture
Transportation
Manufacturing and construction
For extinction
Deforestation / Land use / Agriculture
Overconsumption
Toxic pollution
Climate chaos
Note the overlaps. Acting on one of these items will impact the others, making actions very cost-effective by providing multiple bangs for the same buck. So let’s look at needed SF actions.
Deforestation / Land use / Agriculture
To deal with our contribution to deforestation / land use / agriculture, SF needs to abide by a simple mantra: Keep it local. The following would give us a good start:
Plant only natives and near-natives in an urban forest, and plant them everywhere.
Buy all food from local, permaculture farms.
Require and help build permaculture farms on all rooftops, yards, medians, and parking lots, and require native plants be in the mix.
Aggressively institute more farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture cooperatives working in SF.
Create car-free greenbelt pathways for insects and animals throughout the city.
Stop all use of pesticides, herbicides, rodenticides, etc in SF.
Institute an SF housing authority to build mixed income housing, instead of depending on developers who build for profit and ignore both the environmental costs of their work and middle and low income housing needs.
Vastly increase the amount of permeable surfaces in SF.
Turn off the lights at night.
Calculate the carbon cost of distance traveled for all goods and tax retailers accordingly.
Fossil fuels
SF needs to be carbon neutral by 2020 and carbon negative by 2022.
Take Hetch-Hetchy and our powerlines back from PG&E. We need community power now.
Electric only: for all new purchases, for all repairs, for all replacements, for all vehicles coming into SF, for all construction, and for all purposes, from leaf-blowers to construction cranes and everything in between.
Build municipal solar panels and wind turbines and tide wave energy now.
Update building codes to require passive heating and cooling, solar or other alternative energy production on-site, water recycling, grey water use, and to encourage composting toilets.
Require all taxis and ride share cars to be medallioned in SF and to be all-electric.
Require cradle-to-cradle product purchases for all city and county departments, and place a carbon fee on all recycling and “trash” to fund in-city recycling and reuse.
Institute use fees where the large users of energy pay for the energy at much higher rates. This includes congestion pricing of vehicular traffic.
Put a carbon tax on all non-electric air travel. Tickets need to cost a lot more, because the airport will be underwater soon yet air travel continues to be cheap at the cost of the planet. Ban non-electric air travel for all city and county business.
No dredging to allow oil tankers to use the bay, especially not for increasing the refining of tar sands here.
Toxic pollution
No plastic. No purchases of plastics, no use of plastics, no plastic packaging, no throwing away of plastics. The only exception to this would be for cradle-to-cradle products. Institute an emergency initiative to move hospitals and medical providers off non-cradle-to-cradle plastics immediately.
Begin testing our water for everything, including pharmaceuticals and their metabolites, PFAS, radioactive isotopes, caffeine, drugs and their metabolites, endrocrine disruptors and birth control metabolites, heavy metals, fracking fluids, rocket fuel (really), pesticides and pesticide metabolites, plastics, fertilizers, and so much more.
Outlaw all diesel engine or motor operation in SF or in areas owned by SF.
Establish strict indoor air quality standards and test rental properties and public properties on a regular basis to make sure they meet those standards.
All items that come into SF must be dealt with by SF. Don’t let toxics in and we don’t have to deal with them here. Institute in-city recycling, composting, and reuse centers (like Berkeley’s Urban Ore, only bigger and more inclusive.)
No ozone production. This means quickly moving to eliminate all non-electric traffic, and updating the electric rail systems so they stop producing ozone.
No dumping of waste or ballast water by commercial or cruise ships.
Clean up all our hazardous waste sites and sue (the military in most cases) for the cost.
Transportation
This one is easy and by now should be obvious:
No fossil fuel engines in SF in any type of vehicle or piece of equipment, including airplanes, either temporarily or permanently.
No air travel except on electric planes (still in development, but coming along.)
The ferry fleet, fishing fleet harbored in SF or using SF berths, and the tugboat fleet all need to be electric or wind, or a combination of both.
Manufacturing and construction are folded up into the items above: cradle-to-cradle, in-city, electric, permeable, passive, with the addition of no concrete or only recycled concrete. Overconsumption can be taken care of using carbon pricing combined with heavy consumption pricing. All of these address climate chaos, with the addition of free birth control given to anyone and everyone; because humans are well past the carrying capacity of the planet, birth control should be more readily available than candy.
Of course there’s more that can and must be done, but these need to immediately become policy and then actualities in order for us to have any chance of surviving and having a habitable planet to live on.
For more specifics about some of these topics, there are 17 other letters I’ve delivered by hand to you this year, dealing with:
water
the urgency of the situation
how to elicit workable ideas
insects
carbon sequestration
divestment and investment
local recycling
where not to build
elevation
light pollution
planting
financial risks
transportation
self-assessment
environmental justice
protecting the ocean
and a ton of data.
And, please, contact the Ramaytush Ohlone. They lived here for tens of thousands of years without destroying the area. There were so many birds that early Europeans described the sky as darkening as massive flocks took hours to pass by. We’re called the Golden State because the hills were gold with flowers and grains. Our state flag has a grizzly bear on it, but those bears have been crowded and hunted off the land. The Ramaytush Ohlone knew how to live on the land without killing it, so they absolutely need to be in leadership positions now. They are the adults in the room
Ask them to help us. And build a Ramaytush Ohlone cultural center immediately, recognize the tribe, and give them a say in the fate of their homeland. It’s long past due.
www.ramaytush.org
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