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Climate Strike -- Start With The Easy Stuff (week 59) [1]

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

Date: 2023-08-22  

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 59 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…

STRIKE FOR THE PLANET

Because it’s now or never, and if not you then what are you doing in that job?

This week’s topic is START WITH THE EASY STUFF.

What is the easy stuff?

The easy stuff costs little to nothing; many easy things save money and a few even make money for the city (those that immediately save or make money are marked with a $ below). They can be quickly implemented. And they make a big impact. For SF, the fast, easy stuff includes:

INFRASTRUCTURE

Increasing our albedo. Cutting light pollution. ( $ ) Forbidding any new methane infrastructure, period. Requiring native planting for all developments. Outlawing leaf blowers and gas-powered lawn mowers, yielding multiple benefits by reducing CO 2 pollution, reducing noise pollution, and increasing composting. ( $ ) Getting cars out of bike lanes. ( $ ) Connecting up our green spaces. Requiring all new buildings and renovations to include specific green mitigations (insect gardens, blackwater recycling, native plants, living roofs, and high albedo). Closing streets to cars permanently. ( $ ) Promoting and building more bikeshare infrastructure. Setting up farmers markets everywhere. Setting up urban farms everywhere (and making growing on roofs a strong green option).

POLICY

Reinstating the plastic bag ban. ( $ ) Enacting Restorative Justice since it works better and is cheaper. This involves freeing up money for the city’s survival by moving away from policing, paying settlements for bad policing, overcrowded jails, and other very expensive, punitive institutions. Doing so helps the environment as well. ( $ ) Implementing the Process For Action to enable rapid action. Divesting from all environmentally destructive corporations. ( $ ) Fighting against the Delta Tunnel and all biosphere water thefts. Making the SF adaptation and mitigation process clear, with timelines, and regular progress reports accessible to all. Revamping the building codes for low- to no-GHG production and blackwater recycling. Instituting and collecting environmental damage fees. These fees need to be progressive and used to help fund environmental activities in SF. ( $ )

COMMUNITY

Focusing on reparations owed to Native Americans, African-Americans, Pacific Islanders, LGBTQIA community members, and women by San Francisco. Doing so helps the environment in addition to being the right thing to do. Unleashing the neighborhoods to compete, collaborate, and push SF into sustainability — but with guidance so that the usual suspects work with people who haven’t previously felt welcome or involved. Having people helping who speak multiple languages and work in multiple communities is vital. Involving and giving power in decision making to the communities with knowledge of the land and waters — specifically the Ramaytush Ohlone. Calling for detailed suggestions from all who work in SF on how to increase our sustainability, cut our GHG production, and/or increase environmental justice for everyone.

But you have to start NOW! Not doing so is government failure.

Are you waiting for disaster before you act? It’s here. General agreement on action? Hasn’t your enlightened self-interest kicked in yet? Because we’re well past tipping points and on our way to unlivable by 2070, and presumably you’ve got some skin in the game.

And this is just the easy stuff. We also need you to:

Implement countywide blackwater recycling;

Plant an SF native urban forest with green pathways for plants and animals throughout the city;

Move immediately to all electric and clean energy transportation, and permanently shut down some roads to car traffic 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.

JFK said the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. There is no neutral position, there are no “two sides” to this.

We have 29 weeks. Act now!

FOOTNOTES

1. see letter from strike week 49

2. see letter from strike week 56

3. see letter from strike week 12

4. see letter from strike week 32

5. see letters from strike week 6 and week 27

6. “Green Cities: Good Health”. Urban Forestry/Urban Greening Research. 16 August 2018. https://depts.washington.edu/hhwb/Thm_SafeStreets.html .

7. Brain Palmer. “How bad for the environment are gas-powered leaf blowers?” The Washington Post. 16 September 2013. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/how-bad-for-the-environment-are-gas-powered-leaf-blowers/2013/09/16/8eed7b9a-18bb-11e3-a628-7e6dde8f889d_story.html .

8. “The Environmental Impact of Leaf Blowers”. Outdoor Ideas. 1 November 2019. https://www.outdoorideas.net/environmental-impact-leaf-blowers/ .

9. Alexandru Micu. “Leaf blowers are not only annoying but also bad for you (and the environment)”. ZME Science. 17 November 2019. https://www.zmescience.com/science/leaf-blowers-health-noise-hazards/ .

10. “The Environmental Impact of Lawn Mowers”. Outdoor Ideas. 1 November 2019. https://www.outdoorideas.net/environmental-impact-lawn-mowers/ .

11. Inga Saffron. “Seven ways that bike lanes benefit motorists and pedestrians”. The Philadelphia Inquirer. 5 October 2017. https://www.inquirer.com/philly/columnists/inga_saffron/seven-ways-that-bike-lanes-benefit-motorists-and-pedestrians-20171005.html .

12. see letter from strike week 45

13. see letters from strike week 9, 28, 6, 27, 44, 45, and 52

14. Marcela Guerrero Casas. “This is what happens when cities ban cars from the roads”. World Economic Forum. 28 October 2019. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/10/car-free-streets-benefits-around-the-world/ .

15. “Closing Streets to Cars - for Good”. Copenhagenize. 12 March 2013. http://www.copenhagenize.com/2013/03/closing-streets-to-cars-for-good.html .

16. “The economic benefits of car-free streets”. Copenhagenize. 14 March 2019. https://copenhagenize.eu/news-archive/2019/3/14/the-benefits-of-car-free-streets .

17. see letters from week 31, 41, 53, and 56

18. see letter from strike week 58

19. see letter from strike week 58

20. Femke Wijdekop. “Restorative approaches to ecological harms”. Earth Restorative Justice. Accessed 10 June 2020. https://earthrestorativejustice.org/articles/rj-and-rights-of-nature .

21.

The Process For Action is a framework for decision making. Every proposed action must:

Result in a measurable permanent cut in SF greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (as per City Environment Code Chapter 9),

Make a positive countable change for environmental justice,

Net create job/s and/or save money for SF,

And be in line with the goals adopted in SF’s Climate Emergency Declaration that include:

planning and acting jointly with groups and cities, GHG reduction numbers, setting and revisiting science-driven priorities, training and retraining, investments in disenfranchised communities, and investments overall.



For more on this, see the letter from Week 54: Taking Action Fast.

22. see letter from strike week 10

23. MoneyShow. “Socially-Responsible Investing: Earn Better Returns From Good Companies”. Forbes. 16 August 2017. https://www.forbes.com/sites/moneyshow/2017/08/16/socially-responsible-investing-earn-better-returns-from-good-companies/#a070dc623d09 .

24. see letter from strike week 46

25. see letters from strike week 30 and 54

26. see letter from strike week 58

27. Annalisa Merelli and Youyou Zhou. “This calculator puts a dollar value on the invisible, unpaid work done by women”. Quartz. 28 February 2018. https://qz.com/work/1083411/this-calculator-makes-the-unpaid-work-women-do-visible/ .

28. Ruth Rubio-Marín and Pablo de Greiff. “Women and Reparations”. The International Journal of Transitional Justice. 14 December 2007. https://academic.oup.com/ijtj/article-abstract/1/3/318/2356926 .

29. Emily Atkin. “The Green New Deal Should Include Reparations”. The New Republic. 1 April 2019. https://newrepublic.com/article/153422/green-new-deal-include-reparations .

30. Ta-Nehisi Coates. “The Case for Reparations”. The Atlantic. June 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ .

31. see letters from strike week 15 and 58

32. see letter from strike week 42

33. see letter from strike week 2

34. “What can governments do? Good governance for good environments”. DANIDA Workshop Papers: Improving the Urban Environment and Reducing Poverty. 5 December 2000. http://web.mit.edu/urbanupgrading/urbanenvironment/issues/good-governance.html .

35. Santa Fe Institute. “Re-thinking ‘tipping points’ in ecosystems and beyond”. Science News. 2 March 2020. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200302122534.htm .

36. Stephen Leahy. “climate change driving entire planet to dangerous ‘tipping point’”. National Geographic. 27 November 2019. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/11/earth-tipping-point/ .

37. Harry Cockburn. “Earth may have already hit climate change ‘tipping point’ leading to catastrophic domino effect that threatens civilisation’s existence”. The Independent. 28 November 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-tipping-point-amazon-antarctica-melt-forests-glaciers-latest-a9221461.html .

38. Julia Conley. “A Life of Heat ‘Near Unlivable’ for More than 3 Billion People in Just Decades, Climate Report Warns”. Common Dreams. 5 May 2020. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/05/life-heat-near-unlivable-more-3-billion-people-just-decades-climate-report-warns .

39. 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 .

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