On May 27, the Encinitas City Council held a special meeting to update the city’s Climate Action Plan.
One year ago, the council voted to postpone the update, citing the need for “measurable economic benefits to the residents.” In addition to an implementation cost analysis costing $138,000, it commissioned a $143,000 benefit-cost analysis to determine the economic value of each measure.
Now armed with the analysis ranking the most cost-efficient measures, Councilmember Joy Lyndes and Councilmember Luke Shaffer were ready to implement all 32, but Mayor Bruce Ehlers, Deputy Mayor Jim O’Hara and Councilmember Marco San Antonio objected and delayed once again. Why?
In their words:
Ehlers:
“I’ll just go back to the beginning [the 2011 CAP], and it serves as our guide. I quote: ‘It [the CAP] serves as our guiding document and outlines a course of action for community and municipal operations to reduce greenhouse gases.’
“So it’s about greenhouse gases. It’s not about putting in habitat. It’s not about directly solving ocean rise. It is about greenhouse gas reduction.”
If a Climate Action Plan is not about taking action to slow global warming, which causes, among other harms, sea-level rise and destruction of habitat, then what is it?
When Lyndes — along with many public speakers — tried to make her colleagues aware of co-benefits, such as more efficient buildings being more comfortable, streets designed for safe biking, reducing traffic and pollution and trees not only sequestering carbon but cooling neighborhoods, the mayor said this:
“I just want to make sure we don’t lose track of what the CAP’s goal is. And you’re putting in something much more like the environmental element that I talked about.”
It feels like the Chevy Chase film “The Groove Tube.” An announcer interrupts the film and says with straight-faced candor:
“The popcorn you are eating has been pissed in. Film at 11.”
We’re all pissing into our atmosphere. Here is something we can do about it, but we can’t work together to implement it.
It seems O’Hara hasn’t seen the film either:
“I don’t know where to go with it … I know it’s a politically driven document. It’s driven by political purpose. So I really just wish we had an environmental plan for the city ….”
In other words, we are forced to do this by Sacramento, and we do not like it. Anything we do not like is “political.” We want to do this ourselves through an environmental plan.
O’Hara and Ehlers have not advanced any such plan during their two- and four-year tenures.
Meanwhile, global warming chugs right along, with CO2 concentrations now at 432.34 parts per million. Since I was born in 1957, the Earth has warmed by 1.1 degrees Celsius. Unless we cut carbon pollution, our warming trajectory will reach 2.5 to 3.0 degrees Celsius by 2100.
By all estimates, this is catastrophic for coastal infrastructure, water supplies and wildfire severity.
As I write this, Interstate 5 northbound is closed due to a fire in Carmel Valley. Yesterday, a wildfire in Oceanside burned 560 acres and was 50% contained. The Tusil Fire burned 820 acres in Campo, forcing residential evacuations.
Over the last 50 years, the area burned by wildfires in California has increased fivefold, a shift driven primarily by global warming.
Here’s what a warmer climate has already cost us:
Fire prevention, wildland equipment leasing and brush-clearing contracts since 2020: $5 million to $8 million.
Due to more intense rainfall, the city has installed stormwater and flood-mitigation drainage along Highway 101 in Leucadia at a cost of $12 million.
Can implementing these 32 CAP measures prevent future fires and flooding? Of course not. It’s going to take not just our city but many cities around the world acting with leadership. What if those other city councils acted like ours?
Let’s take our lead from “The Three Musketeers” instead: “All for one and one for all.”
Dadla Ponizil
Encinitas
