(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Climate Strike -- A Livable World Is Still Possible (week 57) [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-08-19 This is the letter for week 57 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 see topics for all the strike letters, see this story . Meanwhile… 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. STRIKE FOR THE PLANET Think big and act now — it’s the only chance we have! That’s why this week’s topic is A Livable World Is Still Possible. The Old World Is Dead. If sowing salt into the soil of conquered cities was a ritual curse 3000 years ago, today it is actually happening worldwide; it is killing us (Kesterson, the Aral Sea, Owens Valley, the San Joaquin Valley, and at least 20% of all irrigated lands1). Capitalism is literally salting the planet. Don’t you get it yet? Life requires life to endure and continue; capitalism is an endgame that requires destruction and death.2 One way or another, the world we used to live on — a world that easily supported life — that world is dead.3 Capitalism, aka unrestrained greed exhibited in sociopathic activities, killed it.4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Continuing as we are is moral insanity and physical and societal suicide. What We Need To Survive Is Clear. We need clean, renewable power; A rich and diverse biosphere; Adequate on-going preparations for rising waters, drought, and heat; True equity; and An SF as self-sufficient and sustainable as possible. How Do We Make A New World? Let’s be clear: the process for doing so is not linear. If you have a singular, concrete goal in sight —“I get all the marbles in any way possible,” for example —you have a straight line of action — “I cheat, buy, lie, steal, or win the marbles until I have them all.” But if you want to build something that is sustainable, by definition, it can have no end goal; you need to keep the process fluid and eternally active. So what does SF need to do to survive? 1. Once and for all, decide who the city belongs to. Does it belong to big business and big money? Then stop pretending anything else matters and close the public schools and sell off the land they’re on, shut down transit, don’t build any affordable housing and sell off the stock already built, close neighborhood parks and facilities, ship the homeless out of the city, require money for access to government, price governmental services out of the reach of anyone earning below $500,000/yr, and force anyone earning below $500,000 a year to commute from out of town if they want to work here for minimum wage jobs or less (such as for Uber and Lyft). That is unrestrained capitalism’s smash-and-grab philosophy in action, and it sounds a lot like the current SF, doesn’t it: a city for sale. Or actually make a city that effectively meets the needs of the people, as stated in Preamble to the city charter.11 How do you determine the needs of the people of SF? You don’t. You instead quickly put together a set of ways to poll the people of SF on what we need, what we want, what we hope for, and what we fear. You listen to community organizations (not just those representing the rich) and help form more community organizations to represent the unrepresented. You listen to us by number, through an equity lens, not based on bank accounts, political donations, or stock portfolios. From these groups, you create a body that has the on-going goal of setting the agenda for the city. All of this must be transparent, accessible, and done insanely fast. Too bad you waited so long to get started; you don’t have time to put it off any longer. 2. Reorganize SF government so the agenda of the citizen committees gets done. The Board of Supervisors must take the work of the citizen committees and create policy from it. SFEnvironment and the Office of Resilience and Capital Planning are clearly the best leads in terms of implementing policy as they have done and continue to do the majority of the work on these issues in SF and they have the expertise (including the science expertise). Everything else — all other agencies and agendas — needs to be subordinated to this work; nothing is more important if SF is to survive. 3. Fund the work through environmental reparations, municipal bonds, and deficit spending. Get bonds while they are still available; the era of low-interest 30-year municipal bonds is rapidly ending. 12 Deficit spend. Any money spent now saves us much more money in the medium- and long-run. 13, 14, 15 We’re in an environmental hole that makes the economic hole caused by Covid-19 look tiny, and economists are saying over and over regarding the coming Covid crash, spend now. 16 We’re in an environmental hole that makes the economic hole caused by Covid-19 look tiny, and economists are saying over and over regarding the coming Covid crash, spend now. And demand reparations from the companies, groups, and individuals that have profited through the planet’s loss to fund some of the remediation and adaptation work. 4. Act for social and environmental justice. Everything must be driven through community involvement. Does community involvement take too long? Invest in figuring out processes to make it faster. Use the Process for Action to ensure that all decisions result in measurable permanent cuts in SF GHG emissions or environmental impact, make a positive countable change for environmental justice, net create jobs and/or save SF money, and are in line with the goals adopted in SF’s Climate Emergency Declaration. Ensure that all decisions derive both from true grassroots and real science, as opposed to astroturf or manipulated/false data. 5. Act now. You have 31 weeks to get to ground-breaking for major environmental projects if those projects are going to have a chance to make any difference. You have under 10 years to get everything on the list below operational. Utopia Doesn’t Have To Mean “No Place” If You Act. Actions count. You need to: Implement countywide blackwater recycling; Plant an SF native urban forest, and create green pathways for plants and animals throughout the city; Move immediately to all electric and clean energy transportation, and that means shutting down some roads to car traffic permanently now; Eliminate all single-use plastics in SF and move toward eliminating all plastics that are not reusable, locally recyclable, and biologically safe; Immediately require all local, carbon-neutral or carbon-negative energy — eliminating all methane heating and cooking and assisting fireplace-to-electric heating is a no-brainer; and Focus everything on making SF resilient and self-sufficient. Seriously. This is what the science says. This is what the youth are demanding.17, 18, 19, 20 This is what will allow us to possibly survive. What are you waiting for? We only have 31 weeks left.21, 22 FOOTNOTES 1. “World Losing 2,000 Hectares of Farm Soil Daily to Salt-Induced Degradation”. United Nations University. 28 October 2014. https://unu.edu/media-relations/releases/world-losing-2000-hectares-of-farm-soil-daily-to-salt-induced-degradation.html . 2. Belen Fernandez. “The Earth versus capitalism”. Al Jazeera. 22 April 2017. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/04/earth-capitalism-170420084034422.html . 3. Christian Sorensen. “We’ve Let Capitalism Kill the Planet”. counterpunch. 28 March 2017. https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/28/weve-let-capitalism-kill-the-planet/ . 4. Oliver Milman. “Rate of environmental degradations puts life on Earth at risk, say scientists”. The Guardian. 15 January 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/15/rate-of-environmental-degradation-puts-life-on-earth-at-risk-say-scientists . 5. Anna Pigott. “Capitalism is killing the world’s wildlife populations, not ‘humanity’”. The Conversation. 1 November 2018. https://theconversation.com/capitalism-is-killing-the-worlds-wildlife-populations-not-humanity-106125 . 6. George Buskell. “Capitalism Is Killing The Planet”. Incite. May 2019. https://incitejournal.com/opinion/capitalism-is-killing-the-planet/ . 7. Fred Imbert. “Capitalism is killing the planet and needs to change, says investor Jeremy Grantham”. CNBC. 13 June 2018. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/13/gmos-grantham-capitalists-need-to-wake-up-to-climate-change-reality.html . 8. George Monbiot. “Capitalism is destroying the Earth. We need a new human right for future generations”. The Guardian. 15 March 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/15/capitalism-destroying-earth-human-right-climate-strike-children . 9. Adam Vaughan. “Humans have destroyed a tenth of Earth’s wilderness in 25 years - study”. The Guardian. 8 September 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/08/humans-have-destroyed-a-tenth-of-earths-wilderness-in-25-years-study . 10. Damian Carrington. “Humans just 0.01% of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals - study”. The Guardian. 21 May 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study . 11. “Full text of ‘San Francisco Charter’”. Internet Archive. Accessed 27 May 2020. https://archive.org/stream/gov.ca.sf.charter/ca_sf_charter_djvu.txt . 12. See the letters from weeks 10, 13, and 19 for much more information on this. 13. Mark Paul, Susan R. Holmberg, and J. W. Mason. “The Economic Case For The Green New Deal”. Forbes. 20 February 2019. https://www.forbes.com/sites/washingtonbytes/2019/02/20/the-economic-case-for-the-green-new-deal/#241fb3ed4c84 . 14. Fiona Harvey. “Green stimulus can repair global economy and climate, study says”. The Guardian. 5 May 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/05/green-stimulus-can-repair-global-economy-and-climate-study-says . 15. Doug Ruhlin. “What is the price or cost of an Environmental Management System?” Resource Management Associates. Accessed 27 May 2020. https://www.rmagreen.com/rma-blog/what-is-the-price-or-cost-of-an-environmental-management-system . 16. Jim Puzzanghera. “Unlike with the Great Recession, the sky’s the limit on Washington spending to save the economy from coronavirus. Here’s why”. The Boston Globe. 19 April 2020. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/19/nation/unlike-with-great-recession-skys-limit-washington-spending-save-economy-coronavirus-heres-why/ . 17. Dana Nuccitelli. "The climate change generation gap”. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 21 April 2016. https://thebulletin.org/2016/04/the-climate-change-generation-gap/ . 18. Stella Mutuku. “The role of the youth in promoting climate justice and sustainable development”. Kenya Climate Innovation. 20 January 2018. https://www.kenyacic.org/news/role-youth-promoting-climate-justice-and-sustainable-development . 19. Youth vs Apocalypse. http://youthvsapocalypse.org . 20. Greta Thunberg - Home/Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/gretathunbergsweden/ . 21. See the Action Timeline in the report in “Only 11 Years Left to Prevent Irreversible Damage from Climate Change, Speakers Warn during General Assembly High-Level Meeting”. United Nations. 28 march 2019. https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/ga12131.doc.htm . [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/19/2186840/-Climate-Strike-A-Livable-World-Is-Still-Possible-week-57 Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/