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 143 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
At last, at looooooong last, you’ve started taking action! Don’t stop now.
This week’s topic: Baby Steps pt. 3, Divestment
Hooray!
You’ve finally just started on electrification, blackwater recycling,1 and divestment from organizations actively destroying the planet — yay! But you’re far behind where we need to be if these efforts are going to do any good. This week, let’s finish off this series and look at how SF is doing on divestment.
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GOOD
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ISSUES TO SOLVE
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WAYS TO SOLVE THEM
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fiduciary responsibility
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The board of supervisors, as far back as 2013, has been calling on SFERS to divest from fossil fuels.
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SFERS is slow walking actually fully divesting, while murmuring “fiduciary responsibility” as a possible excuse.
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Because fossil fuel companies are costing SF real money,2 actual fiduciary responsibility requires immediate divestment.
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selling stock
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Selling stock doesn’t stop fossil fuel companies polluting, it just passes the responsibility for the pollution onto someone else.
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All departments in SF must reduce to net zero carbon asap (not by 2030 or 2050 as current timelines state)
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hidden fossil fuels
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There are hidden fossil fuels in multiple other types of investments, such as tech (server farms), construction (concrete), and agriculture (transportation and artificial fertilizers).
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Require a complete CO2 disclosure for all future SF investments, and for all investments SF currently holds. If not provided, SF sells the investment asap.
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liability
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In 2018, SF sued The Big 5 oil companies for damages caused by climate change.
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SF is still in the fossil fuel business (the Twin Peaks gas station, for ex) and therefore also legally liable.
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DIVEST NOW — across the board. Clean the stables utterly and completely.
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replacement energy sources
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SF is pushing for electrification.
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But not for electrifying everything. And not with knowing all the sources of all the energy making all SF’s electricity.
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We need to be producing energy in SF and the bay area. We have a plethora of local, clean energy sources. We need to be investing in developing these now.
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institutional inertia
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SF says we’re green.
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SF’s declaration of green-ness is mostly greenwashing. With little to no funding for environmental action in the SF budget 4 and a lack of timely action, SF remains both invested in causing and unprepared for the consequences of climate change.
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Every city plan, financial decision, and action must be decided in terms of environmental impact. No lobby or inertia can be allowed more importance than the environment.
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See, SF is still at divestment square one
The gangrene of fossil fuel money has filaments threaded throughout SF, poisoning the body politic and undermining the city’s ability to act against fossil fuels, even though doing so is in our own best interests. Like gangrene, fossil fuel money is killing us. Treat fossil fuel entanglement like gangrene — with debridement followed by a sharp focus on fixing the underlying causes. We need to get rid of fossil fuels now, then fix our mistaken ideas that the planet’s resources are infinite and belong to those with enough capital to lay claim to them. Because this is what’s killing us.
Everything is different now. Act like it.
Dear Editor
How long will it take for SF’s actions to match its words? In the case of fossil fuel divestment, the answer is “too long.” It’s not only pension funds, like the SF Employee Retirement System with their holdings in Exxon and Chevron, but gas stations on publicly-owned land, carbon-spewing attractions in public parks, and a fleet of fossil fuel-dependent vehicles and equipment that make SF’s green declarations hollow. If fossil fuel companies are legally liable for climate change damage to SF, as SF alleges in our lawsuit against them, then isn’t SF also legally liable for climate change damage to its citizens that is caused by not divesting? SF must divest now. Not doing so puts SF in jeopardy.
FOOTNOTES
1 See Strike letter for week 139 Baby Steps pt. 1, Electrification and pt 2, Blackwater Recycling.
2 The costs of climate catastrophe far outweigh the profits from investments in fossil fuel companies. See Sylvia Chi. “Why Are More Cities Divesting From Big Oil? It’s Moral — and Practical”. Yes Magazine. 15 February 2018. https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2018/02/15/why-more-cities-are-divesting-from-big-oil-its-moral-and-practical.
3 Kate J. Neville. “Shadows of Divestment: The Complications of Diverting Fossil Fuel Finance”. MIT Press Direct, Vol 20, Issue 2. May 2020. https://direct.mit.edu/glep/article/20/2/3/95047/Shadows-of-Divestment-The-Complications-of.
4 See Strike letter for week 13 Fix Your Priorities for the numbers.