We Can’t Wait!
City’s Inaction on Climate Change is Reckless
• • • • • • • • June 25, 2024 • • • • • • • •
O n the heels of the June 2024 UN Climate Meetings and lockstep with the November 2024 UN Climate Change Conference COP 29 in Azerbaijan, the City’s Civil Grand Jury released its report Hell or High Water to address the “triple threat” of sea level and groundwater rise along our contaminated shorelines, extreme storms and weather events that “dump unprecedented volumes of water into our already strained sewer systems, and saturated surface soils preventing timely seepage into aquifers.”
“I urge you: don’t leave the hardest work to the eleventh hour. Business-as-usual is a recipe for failure, on climate finance, and on many other fronts, in humanity’s climate fight. We must uphold the science.”
—UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell - Closing Speech.
In closing remarks to the UN Climate Meetings on June 13, 2024, Executive Secretary Simon Stiell implored the world, “Don’t leave the hardest work to the eleventh hour.” He urged all governments to “step up efforts on stronger national climate plans…National Adaptation Plans that protect everyone - especially the most vulnerable.”
Inadequate Response to Climate Change
A city surrounded on three sides by coastline deserves bold and courageous leadership. Examiner staff writer Adam Shanks highlighted the sad fact that “candidates on the mayoral campaign trail have dedicated little bandwidth to discussing climate change.”
Based on candidate questionnaire responses, Shanks wrote in his June 11, 2024 article that “whoever wins this tightly contested race for mayor will be tasked with shepherding the City towards its ambitious…and expensive - climate goals.”
Each candidate was asked to respond to a set of questions. Mayor London Breed claimed to have “one of the strongest environmental track records in San Francisco’s history” while falsely claiming the 2021 San Francisco Climate Action Plan to be a product of her administration. In bold print on the front page of the document, the San Francisco Climate Action Plan acknowledges:
“The 2021 San Francisco Climate Action Plan (CAP) is the result of a multi-year process developed by the San Francisco Department of the Environment with support and collaboration from many individuals and institution. We would like to sincerely thank all of our colleagues, organizations, and residents who were generous with their time and ideas.”
According to the San Francisco Environment Department, the first Climate Action Plan was released in 2004 under Mayor Gavin Newsom. It was expanded in 2023 to cover seven sectors and a Water Supply Addendum.
No doubt contributing to disapproval ratings ranging from 71% to 61% in polling from February to June are lingering “wet dreams” of the Mayor partying down during the horrendous 2023 New Year’s storm, in a cobalt blue feather boa with the City Attorney at her side, while San Francisco was deluged by an atmospheric river.
CleanPowerSF is San Francisco’s Community Choice Aggregation program offering renewable, affordable and accessible energy to 385,000 customers in San Francisco. It was formed on May 27, 2004, and adopted in 2016 by Mayor Ed Lee.
Following years of activism by a coalition of Bayview Hunters Point leaders and progressive Supervisors Ross Mirkarimi and John Avalos, District 10 became the first neighborhood in San Francisco included in Phase 1 of the CleanPowerSF program.
London Breed benefited from the hard work of progressive environmental activists and elected officials when she was appointed Mayor in 2018.
Marie Harrison, “Mother of the Environmental Justice Movement in BVHP,” died on May 05, 2019, following a cardiopulmonary arrest due to chronic damage to her lungs by caused by toxic air contaminants. She is credited with sparking the nascent movement that led to the shutdown of the PG&E Hunters Point Power Plant and Mirants Potrero Plant.
According to reporting by the San Francisco Chronicle and an Associated Press report, global warning is accelerating at a record rate.
The slow pace of climate action and the continued disinformation that catalyzes it has never been about lack of science or even lack of solutions; it has always been, and remains, about lack of political will.”
A study published in Earth System Science Data on June 5, 2024, determined that the Earth is warming at a record rate of 0.26 C per decade in 2023, an increase from the previous year’s 0.25 C. The study was conducted by 59 scientists from 44 institutions using United Nations-approved methods.
Scientists calculated 92% of the record-breaking heat in 2023 was due to human activity.
Warming air and water are leading to deadly and costly heat waves, floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires. Heat-related deaths in the US reached a high in 2023, and researchers found 4,019 cities with climate change “fingerprints” in July 2023. According to climatereacalyzer.org, the hottest day globally was July 7, 2023.
“The slow pace of climate action and the continued disinformation that catalyzes it has never been about lack of science or even lack of solutions; it has always been, and remains, about lack of political will.”
—Katharine Hayhoe - Chief Scientist, Nature Conservancy
The World Meteorological Organization combined the measurements released in Earth System Science Data in June with calculations made by Japanese and European climate scientists and found 2023 to be 1.45 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial temperatures. NASA and NOAA have determined that the ten-year period from 2014 to 2023 was the hottest year measured.
The debate centers on why global warming is accelerating. Traditional methods center on CO2 emissions as the primary cause of global warming. Between 1980 and 2020, unmitigated emissions of nitrous oxide—a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide or methane—released over 10 million metric tons into the atmosphere in 2020 alone, predominantly due to agriculture, according to a new report by the Global Carbon Project.
Nitrous oxide emissions have surged by 40%, and the Earth’s atmosphere is trapping twice as much heat as it did in 1993. Over four decades, nitrous oxide emissions have risen sharply, driven mainly by industrial agriculture. New theories propose global warming is accelerating as the result of the Earth’s atmosphere trapping excess heat as an energy imbalance.
Many climate scientists see little hope of stopping global warming at the 1.5-degree goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Not because it is technically impossible but because it is politically impossible.
Climate Resilience: Adaptation and Mitigation
The 2023-2024 Report of the Civil Grand Jury identifies adaptation as “anticipating the adverse effects of climate change and taking appropriate action to prevent or minimize the damage of these effects.”
Adaption measures include large-scale infrastructure projects to protect against sea level rise and groundwater rise. Mitigation means making the impacts of climate change less severe by preventing or reducing greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. Mitigation is achieved by increasing the use of renewable energies or by expanding the forest footprint to capture these gases.
“Mitigation—as human intervention that reduces greenhouse gas emissions—is a responsibility we must all assume for the 92% of the record-breaking heat recorded in 2023 due to human activity.”
—Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, MD, Heading the Clarion Call for Climate Reparations - Westside Observer November 22, 2022
In 2013, San Francisco became one of the first 100 Resilient Cities to receive funding and support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the first to hire a Chief Resilience Officer in 2014. The Climate Resilience Program — ClimateSF — is a partnership of city agencies and departments, including Planning, Environment, Port, Public Utilities, Public Works, MTA and Rec & Park.
ClimateSF’s objectives are to align communications and engagement and coordinate planning and performance for climate-resilient buildings and infrastructure across current projects.
The Ocean Beach Climate Change Adaptation Project was the first major project in San Francisco. SF Public Utilities Commission was the lead agency on a project designed to construct a buried wall to protect wastewater infrastructure and recycled water facilities from shoreline erosion. Recommended by the 2012 Ocean Beach Master Plan, a collaborative vision for San Francisco’s western coastline.
The Civil Grand Jury panel analyzed elements of the plan, including the ordinance passed by the Board of Supervisors in May 2024 to close the Great Highway Extension by 2926.
Additional elements are the implementation of the 20-year, citywide investment to upgrade aging infrastructure and address seismic vulnerability, climate change, localized flooding, and water quality in the Sewer System Improvement Program. The program focuses on the dynamics of stormwater flooding and its physical damage to buildings and infrastructure, disrupting economic activity, and impairing public health. [Environmental Protection Agency, 2023,” Climate Change Indicators in Coastal Flooding.]
In January of 2024, the US Army Corps of Engineers and the Port issued a draft feasibility study of a program designed to reduce risk of flooding along approximately seven miles of the City’s northeastern waterfront. In 2018 the Embarcadero Seawall Earthquake Safety Bond was approved by voters.
Figure 5: Seawall Resilience Project -Civil Grand Jury
The 2020 Hazards and Climate Resilience Plan, an interagency effort to mitigate and address natural disasters in San Francisco, includes a risk assessment evaluation that identifies the City’s flooding risks. In its citywide hazard exposure analysis, it identifies 23,7000 residents at risk of inland stormwater flooding.
The Civil Grand Jury Report’s weight focuses on the single most grappling question: Who the hell is going to pay for this? Its Findings and Recommendations throw hard and heavy punches at ClimateSF’s lack of interdepartmental coordination while offering utterly brilliant recommendations on how to streamline and improve it.
Finding 4 identifies the critical need for flood management as “an increasing environmental extremity that requires planning and implementation between multiple city departments.”
Finding 6 identifies the City’s failure in communicating the impacts of climate change to residents most effected. This certainly comes as no news to me!
The Jury recommends in Recommendations 6.2 through 6.5 that the Board of Supervisors, Department of the Environment and Human Rights Commission hold joint public hearings on the differential harms of climate change resilience projects within impacted communities.
Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai is a climate activist living on the Westside.
June 25, 2024
