Last week, we issued the first draft of a Climate Action Plan for the Town of Fairfax. It is up on our website now, together with a mechanism to make comments. This report is the result of hours of volunteer time, trying to respond to the Town Council goal for getting the Town of Fairfax to Zero emissions by 2030. Over the last 18 months we have had a survey of all Town Residents, and a number of public Town Hall meetings to try to provide opportunities for all people of this Town to have their voices heard. Now, we are taking comments on the draft plan.
We are now starting to get comments, for which we are very grateful. I am going to try to post some of them up on this blog, together with some thoughts about them.
The first comment I want to address was a suggestion that we include some kind of response to the issue of electricity infrastructure. That is, we all know that, to eliminate our emissions, we are going to need to eliminate our combustion of natural gas. That is going to make us more dependent on the electrical grid, and that grid is currently subject to public safety events due to wildfire threats.
I think this is a good idea. It is true that increasing electrical reliability is going to be important to the future. It is also true that the Town of Fairfax, by ourselves, has little ability to influence the utility companies. However, one thing we are working on is reaching out to the other Towns in Marin, and to Marin County, to align our efforts to try to have a bigger impact on topics like this. So, we will see about adding this element to the CAP and to our thinking. THANK YOU for this suggestion.
I also want to reiterate that one thing we can d more directly in our Town is to build our own damn resilience solutions (to paraphrase Jerry Brown on the topic of Climate Satellites). We want to focus on this too. One thing I wrote about a couple of weeks ago was the development of a solar co-op. This is going to be a mechanism to allow us to start pooling our assets to start to build more local generation capacity to improve the equitable distribution of these local generation assets.
So, do three things:
1. Join the Climate Action Committee!
2. Keep sending us your thinking on how to make the Climate Action Plan better.
3. Sign up for the Fairfax Solar Coop (form below).
Together, we can get this done.
We are now starting to get comments, for which we are very grateful. I am going to try to post some of them up on this blog, together with some thoughts about them.
The first comment I want to address was a suggestion that we include some kind of response to the issue of electricity infrastructure. That is, we all know that, to eliminate our emissions, we are going to need to eliminate our combustion of natural gas. That is going to make us more dependent on the electrical grid, and that grid is currently subject to public safety events due to wildfire threats.
I think this is a good idea. It is true that increasing electrical reliability is going to be important to the future. It is also true that the Town of Fairfax, by ourselves, has little ability to influence the utility companies. However, one thing we are working on is reaching out to the other Towns in Marin, and to Marin County, to align our efforts to try to have a bigger impact on topics like this. So, we will see about adding this element to the CAP and to our thinking. THANK YOU for this suggestion.
I also want to reiterate that one thing we can d more directly in our Town is to build our own damn resilience solutions (to paraphrase Jerry Brown on the topic of Climate Satellites). We want to focus on this too. One thing I wrote about a couple of weeks ago was the development of a solar co-op. This is going to be a mechanism to allow us to start pooling our assets to start to build more local generation capacity to improve the equitable distribution of these local generation assets.
So, do three things:
1. Join the Climate Action Committee!
2. Keep sending us your thinking on how to make the Climate Action Plan better.
3. Sign up for the Fairfax Solar Coop (form below).
Together, we can get this done.