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Baby Steps pt. 1, Electrification -- Strike for the Planet week 139 [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-11-23

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 139 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

At last, at looooooong last, you’ve started taking action!

This week’s topic: Baby Steps

Hooray!

You’ve started on electrification, blackwater recycling, and divestment from organizations actively destroying the planet — finally. Let’s look at your route, because you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

Electrification in SF 101

In which we consider where SF’s push for electrification works and where it comes up short.

GOOD ISSUES TO SOLVE WAYS TO SOLVE THEM CO 2 Electrical power produces less carbon than fossil fuels If the energy source to make the electricity is fossil fuels, pollution is displaced, not eliminated, and large and small hydro will be less available Wind, solar, and wave/tide are readily available locally cars Electric cars produce far less local pollution than gas cars Where are the widely available charging stations?? or the financial assistance for low income people who depend on having a car? or the readily available transit? Gas cars need to be off the city’s roads now; all car infrastructure needs to be electric only, and fund transit cooking It’s easy to learn to cook with electricity and much safer There are too many exemptions to SF’s electrical cooking code, and it doesn’t cover nearly enough Induction cooking is fastest and safest, and produces the least CO 2 so provide info and financial assistance to help people switch HVAC Heat pumps are efficient, effective, and in the state’s revised construction codes SF’s building codes, regulations, permits, costs, timelines, and enforcement are a confusing nightmare; there are not enough people in construction and design familiar with heat pumps Transparency, clarity, and getting rid of graft will help SF’s building issues; working with CCSF and arranging guaranteed employment upon credential completion will increase availability of skilled workers water Electric water heaters are quiet, safe, and come in multiple sizes, speeds, and configurations Electric heaters are cheaper than gas heaters, but currently cost a little more to operate per month Tax carbon — the fossil fuel industry is using subsidies to pollute and damage, so even the playing field storage Battery technology is getting better Mining for needed minerals, toxic electrolytes, and end of life disposal are big problems Salt water batteries,1 gravity batteries,2 and even sodium ion batteries 3 are all better, and mine our garbage! source Green energy is available in SF But few people know about it or think it’s affordable Require it, subsidize it, and publicize it more

SF can do a lot better, and must — fast

Ithaca, NY announced in November that they’re planning to decarbonize all local buildings by 2030. Lots of cities announce things like this but Ithaca is actually doing it because they know that time is running out.4 You can’t afford baby steps when you need to be sprinting a marathon right now.

Dear Editor

San Francisco just began running in a race where the starting gun fired decades ago. As you might imagine, we’re way behind where we need to be, though the teams we’re running against aren’t doing a lot better. Many of them are just standing around, some haven’t even gotten to the starting line, and some are pretending there is no race. And us? We’ve taken a few baby steps forward; we’ve finally started. But in this race for survival, the race to mitigate and adapt to climate change while we can still have an impact, San Francisco’s final standing will have more to do with running now than with waiting for everyone else to start, too. San Francisco has taken a few baby steps, and that’s good. This race is an ultramarathon; we need to be sprinting flat out right now.

It’s a race.

FOOTNOTES

1. August Ash. “All You Need to Know About Saltwater Batteries”. Dynamic SLR. Accessed 21 December 2021. https://www.dynamicslr.com/all-you-need-to-know-about-saltwater-batteries/ .

2. Cathleen O’Grady. “Gravity powers batteries for renewable energy”. Science. 30 April 2021. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.372.6541.446 .

3. Prachi Patel. “Sodium-Ion Batteries Poised to Pick Off Large-Scale Lithium-Ion Applications”. IEEE Spectrum. 10 March 2021. https://spectrum.ieee.org/sodium-ion-battery .

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