Dear friends of life on Earth:
Climatologist-Geographer Dr. José Javier Hernandez Ayala and our campaign have submitted today a legally binding Climate Change Emergency Declaration draft to Supervisors and Council Members in Sonoma County, California, urging them to issue these legally binding Declarations at the County and Cities level, in order to fully commit to Climate Change Mitigation and Climate Change Regional Adaptation.
Here is the text of the draft that you can adapt to your region to move your governments to commit to meaningful massive and immediate Climate Change Action:
CITY/COUNTY CLIMATE CHANGE EMERGENCY DECLARATION (DRAFT)
The science is clear, there is no remaining carbon left to burn and business as usual is unacceptable in order to have a livable planet for us and our future generations. Our State and Federal governments have been remiss in their duty to the people by not acting with the extreme urgency that the Climate Change crisis demands. The very little time left to avoid the worst impacts of Climate Change, requires that Sonoma County's County and City governments enter into a state of Climate Change Emergency by issuing legally binding Climate Change Emergency Declarations.
Climate Change exacerbated events like wildfires and their hazardous air quality implications, longer duration heatwaves, exceptional drought periods and extreme floods associated with heavy rainfall are already impacting our Sonoma County communities and if we don’t act powerfully, those events will cause even more loss of life and property in the near future. More recently, the Kinkade Fire reinforced our knowledge that expecting extreme events like the Tubbs Fire not to happen more frequently than every 60 years is completely erroneous since Climate Change accelerated processes are operating outside of natural fluctuations and intensities.
By this legally binding Climate Change Emergency Declaration, the City/County commits all its resources, manpower and organization to Emergency Climate Change Adaptation and to Emergency Mitigation of Climate Change, the greatest existential threat our City/County has ever faced. Through this Declaration, we also activate the emergency and disaster assistance system of the State of California and request emergency funding and other resources to implement all the necessary changes to our economy, society and infrastructure to save life, environment and infrastructure from the ravages of Climate Change, and avoid societal collapse.
Our own investigation and analysis, in collaboration with Sonoma State University’s Climate Research Center and other Climate scientific institutions and individuals, and with local and national Climate Change Action organizations, have found major understatements and misinformation in the published reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regarding the state of Climate Change and on the necessary actions to deal with it.
The conclusions from that investigation and analysis have uncovered a truly dire state of Climate Change and the extremely urgent need for local, state and national emergency action on all fronts of Climate Change.
Regarding the state of Climate Change we have concluded that:
The Climate Change that has already occurred is already irreversible (Officially confirmed by the IPCC latest report in September 2019). This means that the established climatic conditions will produce more destructive Climate Change-related events (like wildfires and floods) with increasing frequency and greater intensity for hundreds of years or more.
There is no Carbon Budget left. All new Greenhouse Gases Emissions (GHH) worsen Climate Change. Efforts to reduce GHG emissions and of GHG sequestration will only have a mitigating effect on future Climate Change if done at emergency speed and at a global scale.
The Self-Reinforcing, Amplifying Climate Change Feedbacks (Also known as Slow Feedbacks: such as, rapid ice sheet disintegration, melting of permafrost on land and on the bottom of oceans, ocean carbon and heat saturation, and the slowing of the Gulf Stream) have significantly been activated by human GHG emissions and are now leading the change of the Climate to a greater extent than the anthropogenic GHG emissions, threatening with a proximate unstoppable Climate Change.
Reinforcing our findings, Sonoma County has already experienced being Ground Zero for Climate Change with the disastrous, deadly and costly fire storms of October 2017, the floods of February 2019 and the recent Kincade Fire in October 2019, which became the largest fire ever in our County.
The Kincade Fire has been the final event to convince us that business as usual will assure the ruin of our communities. We now know for sure that the new climatic patterns will continue to produce frequent extreme environmental events and that radical transformation is not just necessary but indispensable. Preparing for coming environmental threats is imperative. Patch up solutions like the fire-prevention blackouts by PG&E are unsustainable because of the cost and suffering they inflict on our residents and because they are insufficiently effective, as the Kincade Fire proved it.
Regarding Climate Change Adaptation, we have determined that, locally, to protect our communities through direct actions of resilience, relinquishment and recovery, has become the top priority. Wildfires, floods, extreme drought, water shortages, hurricane force winds and even earthquakes, powered by Climate Change, can destroy us in the not-too-distant future if we do not do all the necessary transformations proactively.
Heroism, community good will and insurance will not be sufficient to remediate the Climate Change disasters waiting in the pipeline. We are entering a Climate Change State of Emergency where we need to act now, while we are still an organized society and have resources. By doing that, we will greatly increase our chances of being a viable City/County that contributes to the well-being of local residents and of the rest of California, and becomes an example on how to respond to the New Normal (As Governor Jerry Brown called Climate Change in 2017).
The survival and progress of our local economy is also a motivating factor to issue this proactive Climate Change Emergency Declaration. The estimated costs of some of the recent Climate Change-related catastrophic events are mind-blowing and frightening: the 2017 Tubbs Fire (Sonoma County) estimated insured losses were $9.7 billion; the 2018 Camp Fire (Butte County) damage cost was estimated at $16.5 billion; the 2018 Hurricane Michael (mainly Florida and Georgia) damage cost was estimated at $16 billion and Hurricane Florence (mainly North and South Carolina) damage cost was estimated at $14 billion.
Since 2017 we have lost the lives of too many Sonoma County residents because of Climate Change-related events (possibly hundreds when indirect causes of death from those events are added) and thousands have migrated from Sonoma County to find safer and less expensive places to live. Those lives that were lost can not be recovered, but future deaths can be prevented by immediately acting on the Climate Change State of Emergency, and, simultaneously, population can be regained and grown by providing a safer and healthier territory, resilient housing and economic opportunities.
We reiterate that we include in this Declaration both main aspects of Climate Change: Climate Change Mitigation and Climate Change Adaptation, giving initial emphasis to Climate Change Adaptation actions particular to the major vulnerabilities of out City/County.
Initial emergency priorities are:
1.Fire-hardening all private and public properties and landscape.
2. Relocation of vulnerable communities to safer areas and relocating structures if they are deemed as an extreme fire/flood risk to its dwellers and to others in the community.
3. Take control of the generation and transmission of electricity systems in order to eliminate GHG emissions, eliminate fire risks, and achieve electrical power independence, which would include the deployment of photovoltaic panels, solar batteries and other forms of electricity storage, of micro-grids powered with sustainable energy (wind, solar, geothermal, etc.), and of underground electrical transmission lines.
4. Rapid transition to carbon free public transit, free at the point of use and with an expanded network of routes based on user/potential user analysis.
5. Acquire state of the art fire-fighting equipment and implementation of best practices.
6. Subsidize the acquisition of electric vehicles for private and public use.
7. Flood mitigation (where pertinent) by managing rivers, creeks and drainage systems and relocating very high risk structures.
8. Expand earthquake damage mitigation programs, like Earthquake Brace and Bolt, to all buildings.
9. Greatly improve access roads and procedures for emergency evacuations.
10. Restoration and conservation of forest, wetland and riparian ecosystems for carbon sequestration.
11. Transformation of agriculture to promote Climate Change Mitigation and Climate Change Adaptation, including saving fertile soil and transforming vineyards and wine-making facilities, vital to Sonoma County’s economy, to survive and function with Climate Change.
12. Adaptation of the public health system to minimize diseases and death from factors such as toxic fire smoke, mold infestation and new pathogens.
13. Creation of an Environmental Disaster Victim Fund, to be swift at reintegrating into our community those that have suffered severe losses in environmental disaster events, by providing housing, health services, transportation, financial assistance, etc., as needed.
To further support the Climate Change Emergency effective and fast deployment, a Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Council will be formed with experts and Climate Change Action community leaders, to advise our government on the best and more urgent actions to implement. A Climate Change Hazard Mitigation Corps will also be formed with staff, volunteers and salaried under-privileged members of our community, to participate in the large amount of work needed to materialize the Climate Change Emergency project.
The Emergency and Disaster Assistance legal system for California and the United States was created to deal with occasional, extraordinary, environmental local events. We are pioneering a new use of the existing body of law to deal with the ongoing and growing Climate Change Emergency/Disaster that is affecting and impacting our territory and all of the United States.
Particularly since 2017, the existing Federal, State and Local systems to address emergencies and disasters have been, ineffective, tremendously expensive, deadly, and disruptive. With this Climate Change Emergency Declaration we are empowering our community to take control over its own destiny, before damage is irremediable.
We publicly declare that Climate Change is the cause of major disasters like the Tubbs Fire and the Camp Fire and commit to informing our residents of such truth. We reject becoming a devastated and, likely, irrecoverable community like the town of Paradise in Butte County, California. We embrace the inspiration coming from Indonesia where the Indonesian people have committed to moving their capital, Jakarta, and its 30,000,000 inhabitants, from its current compromised location in Java, to Borneo, where much safer conditions exist, and, therefore, rejecting destruction and death from a inevitable Climate Change-related rising sea level and the rapidly sinking lithosphere under Jakarta.
Given the scope of the work ahead of us to protect our community from Climate Change, we issue this legally binding Climate Change Emergency Declaration for a period of 2 (two) years, that will be extended if necessary.
Our initial estimate of the funds needed is …$ millions.
We request that the Governor of California issue a Climate Change Emergency Declaration for City/County, in order to partner with us financially and in all other ways that the California Emergency and Disaster System prescribes.
The future of California lies in treating Climate Change and its catastrophic consequences as an Emergency. We issue this Climate Change Emergency Declaration with the hope that it will inspire other communities in California, in the U.S.A. and in the rest of the world to act appropriately and immediately before it is too late.
We continue demanding legally binding Declarations from Governors, so keep on getting more signers for this petition.
We found a sign of sanity coming from the North Carolina government that we are sharing with you in the attached article.
Never give up.