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Climate Action Planning - TOGETHER

8/1/2020

2 Comments

 
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The Town Council for the Town of Fairfax has, rightly, recognized, and declared that we are in a Climate Emergency. Bernie Sanders famously reminded us that the Climate Crisis - and crisis it is - is an Existential Crisis. 

The Town Council has declared that we should come together and find ways to drive our collective greenhouse gas emissions to zero, over the next ten years. 

I am writing this as the chair of the Town's Climate Action Committee; the group charged by the Town Council with helping to develop strategies that can get us there. 

Obviously, changing our collective way of life, dependent as it is on the addictive opiod of fossil fuels, will be difficult. But, it can be done, and if ever there were one community of people who could come together to make it happen, it is Fairfax. 

The CAC is working, now, on an update of our Climate Action Plan. We want to do this in a way that involves as many people from our community as we can. Ours is not an easy task, and it is going to take us all - working, thinking, brainstorming, debating - to find the right path forward. As a CAC we have a great team of volunteers who have been working to create drafts of what we can do, based on our successes to date, and thinking about what other Towns are doing, and what the state and country are doing (or not doing). 

We are considering creating a series of Virtual "Town Halls" to bring us all together to talk about the challenges, and to brainstorm ways we can remind the rest of Marin, the rest of California, the rest of the world, who we are, and what we are capable of. 

We are living through a kind of plague time, so we will have to do this with some kind of virtual, zoom conversation. I am trying to figure out how large a Zoom event we would need to prepare for, so please give us feedback on your interest to participate in something like this. Would you prefer one meeting with virtual break-out rooms, each focused on different topics? One long meeting that talked through different topics? Several short meetings, weekly, maybe, each focused on a different topic? 

Please give us feedback, so we can plan appropriate logistics. This is a critical issue, and the efforts to deal with it will affect every one of us. And so, we believe strongly that we need to bring us all together to listen to one another and to find the best path forward. So, send us your thoughts. 

​And, by the way, SIGN UP FOR MCE DEEP GREEN!
2 Comments
Mark Bell
8/1/2020 05:35:20 pm

I think a longer meeting to get an overall picture of what you think some beginning steps are. From the presentation given a few months ago, it seemed to me that you seemed to think people had tens of thousands of dollars to drop on solar systems, new appliances and accessory items like pots and pans. I like to get some clarification on your proposals.

Reply
Walt Vernon
8/2/2020 11:11:30 am

Thank you, Mark. I take your comment seriously. I regret the mis-understanding. In no way is the CAC implying that everyone in the Town needs to go out and invest tens of thousands of dollars on solar systems, etc. It is true that, over the next decade, we will need to move towards electrification of our buildings, both residential and commercial. But, the California Electrical grid is becoming rapidly more renewable in its supply, so it is quite easy today to become 100% renewable by switching to MCE Deep Green for instance. The cost difference is very small, and should be affordable to most. And, we anticipate that the costs of renewables will continue to decline.

The challenge we will have is to reduce our consumption of natural gas. There are many ways to do this, including weatherizing our buildings, simply reducing our consumption (my wife and I hang our clothes to dry, rather than using our gas dryer (we cant afford solar panels either), etc. But, we want to find ways to help people migrate away from fossil fuels and towards the increasingly accessible renewable electricity.

Having said all of that, the climate is, we think, the ultimate in social equity issues. The pain of climate change will hit the poor hardest, and the costs of transition are hardest for them to bear. We will have to consider all of these issues as we frame a plan.

We deeply appreciate your interest, and we will find the right forum to figure out how we can move forward together.

Thank you for your response!!!

Reply



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