Public Comment

“The appropriate response to an exponentially growing problem will seem disproportionate to the state of the problem at the moment.” – Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

It’s very easy to get depressed when studying the climate emergency.

I woke up this morning to social media posts from scientists showing the debris plume from one of the massive tornadoes that struck at least six states last night. Some of the detritus of people’s blown-apart lives was sent 30,000 feet into the air.

Imagine flying over in a passenger jet, looking out the window, and seeing someone’s grandfather’s love letters flutter by. And, say, doesn’t that look like the new insulation Mary installed last year. At 30,000 feet in the air.

And imagine knowing, unambiguously, that this isn’t the new normal because it is only getting worse with each new day of fossil-fuel-burning-as-usual.

And imagine knowing that even if all fossil fuel use stops tomorrow, it’ll be centuries before any of this damage starts to fade, and some of the damage can never be undone. 

And imagine knowing that on this path, we start counting the directly predictable deaths in hundreds of millions, but note that these projections ignore deaths from war and intra-state violence and economic collapse within the lifetimes of people now living. 

But what really puts the cherry on top of the dread and misery is when people you might have otherwise believed were serious, and capable of treating an emergency seriously, turn out to be batty lunatics. 

On Tuesday’s agenda, District 2 Councilmember Terry Taplin has put forth some noteworthy battiness: his redundant and incompetent call for a Just Transition. (I’m not sure why he capitalizes this common phrase but, sure, let’s give it some Emphasis I Suppose.) Mainly this item seems to be about ensuring “good paying jobs” for Black people as the economy collapses for want of fossil fuel. 

Such a measure may be rightly criticized for its emphasis on jobs – some might call it an empasis on a wage slave role in capital accumulation – rather than emphasizing prosperity directly. After all, the kind of rapid cut-off of fossil fuels now required implies a vast economic disaster resulting from supply shocks in energy and transport. 

The hard but perhaps inspiring reality of our time is that here in 2021, we must look well beyond jobs for security and prosperity, concepts whose very meaning we are compelled now to take a long hard look at to examine what is important to human well-being and what is not. Jobs? Surely not – better not be – or things are even worse than we think. 

But why even go there? The memo Taplin submitted for the item is a stunning display both of total ignorance about the climate emergency, and a lack of competence to examine the published scientific and other academic literature on the topic. 

For example, Taplin relies on extremely outdated 20-year-old estimates of the amount of heating in 2100. He displays zero awareness that without drastic change, we will lock in 1.5 degrees of warming in the blink of an eye – likely in what remains of this decade and no later than the next. Call it 8 or 16 years before the first major failure of our global response becomes official. 

Per Taplin, we might not even hit 1.5°C warming by 2100. In reality, today we know with certainty that without massive shut-offs of fossil fuel supply starting immediately (think, “tomorrow morning”), the only chance of 1.4°C in 2100 involves inventing miraculous technology that can be deployed at extremely large scale starting immediately to suck carbon from the atmosphere and convert it into a vast physical storage problem for billions of tons of carbon. The existing technology along these lines can, so far, remove a grand total of no more than 3 seconds worth of global emissions per year. 

There are other big blunders in the memo – Taplin calling one estimate of quite small amounts of GDP loss over a long period of time evidence of major economic disasters is one example. 

We can mock Taplin’s extensive footnoting of all the sources he has so badly misrepresented. 

But it gets worse. 

First, Taplin’s notions of climate justice somehow don’t extend to the rest of the world. Billions of lives are at stake in the global south and many millions are today under imminent threat of death (with many already actually dying). Climate justice is a vast global problem, not merely a local one, and if the United States – including Berkeley – does not radically curtail fossil fuel use immediately, we are contributing to an already underway genocide by the rich against the global poor. 

That’d probably deserve a mention, Councilmember Taplin. 

All of this would be a depressing account of the complete lunacy of one council member if that’s all there were to it. 

But it gets worse. 

The item sits on the Consent Calendar for December 14, 2021. 

The council will not allow much time for comment on it. 

And all nine of our esteemed leaders will endorse this crap. 

There is nothing on Tuesday’s agenda that shows council is even aware of what the climate emergency really is, and plenty to show they intend to bluff and bluster until the problem magically goes away. 

Again.