(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Fix Your Priorities -- Strike for the Planet week 133 [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-11-16 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 133 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 Is your money where your mouth is? Or should I say OUR money? This week’s topic: Fix Your Priorities SF has a worldwide rep as an environmental city but is that rep justified? A quick peek at some data should help us answer the question. How much time does the Board spend on environmental issues? Of the 72 separate items on the 26 October Board Meeting Minutes1, slightly over 1% addressed the environmental issues that are killing us and will destroy SF. But maybe, you say, the 26 October meeting was an outlier, what about other meetings? The 19 October meeting had 5 out of 70 items slightly peripheral to dealing with environmental issues, 5 October had 5 out of 95 items (though only 2 were the real deal), and of 32 separate items on the 2 November 2021 Board of Supervisors Meeting Minutes2, only 1 item dealt in any way with what needs to be done environmentally. But, you protest, maybe the number of agenda items isn’t a good measure of your work. Let’s look at budget I can find NOTHING in the mayor’s 2 year budget cycle document about the environment. Even though the board meeting minutes have SF paying off flood damage claims and repairing fencing burnt in climate change driven wildfires and doing emergency repairs to landslides caused by extreme weather events, climate change is ignored in planning and budgeting. In fact, for 2020-2021 SF’s entire environment budget is ⅓ of one-percent of the total budget. In the budget proposals for 21-22 and 22-23 the environment gets ⅕ of a percent.3 For comparison purposes, one-fifth of a percent for a household spending $100,000 a year4 comes out to $200, or less than ½ the cost of buying a cup of the cheapest Starbucks coffee every work day. Chevron, spending 1/10 of a percent on environmental issues, is only slightly worse than SF. The planetary environmental crisis is already impacting SF, so why is it nowhere in the budget? What about the Climate Action Plan? What about it? No money, no teeth, no support, too slow, too limited, inadequate to the massive needs even if it was fully enacted…. If it looks like greenwashing and acts like greenwashing and talks like greenwashing, it’s greenwashing. What are you waiting for? Act now! Dear Editor, We’re at planetary Code Red, yet the Board of Supervisors spends almost no time on climate matters, and both the mayor’s priorities and budget documents completely ignore the environmental imperatives facing us. SF likes to talk big on climate change and the environment, but hasn’t even started to act in ways that will make any difference for the city’s survival. This is not rocket science! We know what needs to be done, we have the technology, and the cost of acting is so much less than the cost of not acting. So when are San Francisco’s leaders going to lead? When are they finally going to stop ignoring climate change and act? FOOTNOTES 1. “Board of Supervisors City and County of San Francisco Meeting Minutes - Draft”. City and County of San Francisco. 26 October 2021. https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/bag102621_minutes.pdf . 2. “Board of Supervisors City and County of San Francisco Meeting Minutes - Draft”. City and County of San Francisco. 2 November 2021. https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/bag110221_minutes.pdf . 3. Mayor London Breed. “Proposed Budget”. City and County of San Francisco. Accessed 8 November 2021. https://sfmayor.org/sites/default/files/FY22%20and%20FY23%20Budget%20Book%20Final%20for%20Web.pdf . [END] --- [1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/16/2205188/-Fix-Your-Priorities-Strike-for-the-Planet-week-133?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web 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/