CityofSantaBarbaraSource: City of Santa Barbara
The City of Santa Barbara announces the “Together to Zero” climate campaign with the launch of a climate action video and community survey. This outreach initiative will engage and partner with the public in imagining, developing, and implementing strategies to achieve the City’s carbon neutrality goal.
In November City Council unanimously approved an aspiration goal of achieving carbon neutrality – or net zero emissions – by 2035. Net zero emissions means that all greenhouse gas emissions are balanced by an equal amount removed from the atmosphere. To reach this goal, the City is building upon the work of its 2012 Climate Action Plan by developing a dynamic roadmap with bold and innovative strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase carbon removal.
Through the “Together to Zero” engagement plan, the City will draft a Climate Action Plan that reflects the values and vision of the community. The campaign kicks off with a background video and community survey. The video provides important context for the Climate Action Plan update and carbon neutrality initiative. The anonymous survey asks the community to share their vision for a carbon neutral Santa Barbara and to consider potential climate actions.
“The communities input is invaluable and we hope to gain creative climate solutions from this survey and the subsequent opportunities for partnership,” said Alelia Parenteau, the City’s Energy and Climate Manager. “We want to make sure that there is community ownership and pride in the City’s pursuit of carbon neutrality”.
To access the video, survey, and to learn about future “Together to Zero” events visit: https://sustainability.santabarbaraca.gov/together-to-zero/.
Oh brother.
5 paragraphs and 250+ words later and I still didn’t learn one single detail about their strategy/plan. Just a bunch of focus-tested jargon and empty rhetoric. Guess I need to watch the video now?
Wow, another ridiculous waste of money from the City of SB. Climate change policy is critical, but the City cannot even handle its own 20 square miles. Start simple Cathy, you gotta work on our local problems. But…if you want to help with climate change, and I get that, here’s the #1 goal – less cars on the freeways. Solution you ask? Trains. Commuter trains, especially from the south. Hard to accomplish? Yeah. But you asked. Plenty of others have done it. We’re WAY behind the curve around here for this. Can’t handle it? Coming up with a bunch of bs reasons why? Yeah, I thought so. And that’s why I didn’t even consider voting for you.
As long as China is building a new coal-fired power plant every day nothing we do here is going to make a squib of difference. We’ll pay double for gasoline soon, new construction will be denied natural gas hookups, and all the locally-owned non-chain restaurants will be out of business. Oh, but let’s draw a blue line that shows a mythical demarcation where water might someday reach as the sea rises.
That’s just whataboutism. Because someone else is misbehaving, you should, too?
Sea level rise is accelerating far faster than even the most pessimistic models.
To offset its deleterious effects, gasoline should cost at least $10 dollars per gallon, and electrical heating is much more efficient than natural gas.
It’s time to look to the future, not the past.
Perhaps these climate activists would be happier when there was less CO2 in the atmosphere and temperatures were cooler, like 25,000 years ago during the Wisconsin glaciation. They’d be nice and snug under the Cordilleran ice sheet, which was so massive it pushed down the Pacific Northwest and actually caused sea levels to be many times higher than they are today. Oops, I forgot, rising sea levels are bad. Well, it wouldn’t matter much since combination of the ice and the minimal precipitation caused people to starve because they couldn’t grow anything, and thus they had to migrate down towards Mexico. Wait, that’s like deportation or something, so that’s no good either. Oh well, I tried.
728pm – This is a humorously ridiculous statement! Sea level is obviously not rising “faster than even the most pessimistic models”. The most pessimistic models are, well… by definition, quite pessimistic!
A complete non sequitur, but par for your course.
I guess you don’t understand what acceleration is.
1015pm – no! You used a wildly broad and all encompassing statement claiming it was rising faster than even the most pessimistic models. That statement just doesn’t make sense in and of itself… models are constantly being updated and refined. Perhaps you were keyed in on a certain model or two and are saying it’s “rising faster than this model (and note a research article here), which was a seemingly pessimistic one”. But you went all encompassing and as such your statement is ridiculous… acceleration or not!
Duke, I agree with the “pessimistic” statement because the published results by the scientists amalgamate the model results, throw out the optimistic and pessimistic ones, and then publish the “average” model results. So current actual results are worse than the worst average results that get published in the big studies. But if you want to say that this point is invalid because it wasn’t precise, that is your right. Won’t help you to make decisions about your future, however.
This isn’t whataboutism anonymous poster on an anonymous comment board. We all live on the same earth and the carbon emissions from other countries do impact us. Electricity is not the answer until the source of that electricity is carbon neutral.
These spittle-flecked ravings of the climate deniers reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with someone who resolutely insisted that the US refused to drop the atomic bomb on Germany in WWII because they were white guys. There’s nothing like a firmly held belief totally unfettered by facts which contradict that belief.
How?
I am all for planting trees! Trees are beautiful and greatly enhance our lives. However, trees are carbon neutral. When they grow, they absorb carbon from the air and turn it into wood and leaves. When the leaves fall, they decompose and release the carbon back into the air. When the tree dies, the wood decomposes and releases the carbon back into the air. Unless you harvest the wood and use it to build things that last forever, dying trees release carbon as fast as living ones absorb it. If that were not the case, the trees would have consumed all the carbon on our planet long before there were any humans.
“Sea level rise is accelerating far faster than even the most pessimistic models.”
evidence of this? How is sea level rise measured and determined? The scientific models for this turn our to be fake; then there is one of commentators that does the condescending thing about the “deniers.” It is always the same belittling. Fossil Fuel is finite, need to move in the direction of nuclear power, not to the quixotic world of wind farms and solar. The world is not coming to an end. The Climate crisis fanatics are fake scientists.
Back in the day, the official narrative said the earth was the center of the universe. When Copernicus pointed out some reasons why that was not the case, someone like you said “that’s just whataboutism!”
Alma, sea levels are absolutely rising. For proof, just look to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. SCIENCE. The fossil fuel industry and its political lobbyists have spent the past 30 years sowing doubt about the reality of climate change – where none exists. The latest estimate is that the world’s five largest publicly-owned oil and gas companies spend about US$200 million a year on lobbying to control, delay or block binding climate policy. Public belief in their lies is waning, though, and lobbying has changed, now employing more subtle and vicious approaches – what has been termed as “climate sadism”. It is used to mock young people going on climate protests and to ridicule Greta Thunberg, a young woman with Asperger’s, who is simply telling the scientific truth. I’m really sick of hearing that climate change “isn’t real” or that “the climate crisis fanatics are fake scientists”. It reeks of trumpism and it’s a grim selfish narrow minded view of reality. Wake up.
I don’t know what “science” shows a dramatic increase in sea level rise. Tide gages, the data we have on the sea level in the past, show no change in their long term trends. For example, the gage at the battery in new York city shows a consistent linear trend going back to the 19th century. If there was some cataclysmic change in the long term sea level trend, why doesn’t the tide gage data show it? If those fear mongering cartoons showing manhattan underwater are going to become a reality, then the tide gage data should show it happening right?
Alma, Chip, very good, accurate points. It’s the same band here that immediately call othesr science deniers, trumpers, covididiots, or some other condescending name rather than discuss the topic with fact based reasoning.
I haven’t read a single post here that denies climate change or that humans don’t impact climate change. What is up for debate and FAR from settled is how much humans impact has had on climate change.