Extra

This Tuesday, Berkeley City Council will commit to ending essentially all gasoline use in Berkeley, all flights taken by Berkeleyans, and a significant chunk of natural gas use in residences and commercial buildings – all within just the next few years. Remarkable! Long overdue! Isn’t it? Well…

In particular, with the passage of item 14 from the City Manager, City Council will commit to something like an 11% annual reduction in community-wide emissions (year over year), every year, for at least the next eight years, starting with 2022.

While this will be Berkeley’s most aggressive commitment on emissions reduction ever, it isn’t adequate to limit warming to 1.5°C or below. Even if the whole world sang in harmony and reduced global emissions by 11% per year from here on out, the world will have long passed the 1.5°C target sometime in the 2030s.

The more serious problem is that any observer of Council knows they have no plans, no proposals, and evidently no actual intention of living up to this commitment. The commitment is not legally binding. They are passing the commitment on the Consent Calendar, in an item from the City Manager, with no fanfare. 

Why slink in with this ambitious yet empty commitment and not even try to grab the spotlight? Because formally announcing the empty commitment is the last step in gaining Berkeley membership in “C40”, a coalition of cities, founded almost in 2005. C40 is led by many of the world’s great “mega-cities”. Membership in C40, according to one recent examination at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, has no statistical association with whether or to what degree a city’s emissions fall. 

On the other hand, there are benefits of a sort, at least for the Mayor. Had Berkeley completed its C40 application in time for the recent U.N. Conference of Parties meeting on the climate emergency, perhaps the Mayor or a designate could have flown to Copenhagen to attend the C40 Mayor’s Conference. Between time spent enjoying the local sites, they might have had a chance to be photographed with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or the Mayor London. Perhaps they might have even been mentioned in the New York Times which has never seen a business-friendly greenwashing effort it didn’t like. 

In summary: in order to join a prestigious coalition with no actual success, Berkeley will make an empty promise to lower emissions very quickly, yet still somehow not enough for trying to limit heating to 1.5°C. 

Could there be a more concise summary of Berkeley and our nation’s entire response to the climate emergency so far? 

There is nothing on Tuesday’s City Council agenda that suggests any member of City Council is aware of, and takes seriously, the real existing climate emergency. 

Again.