Berkeley CM Kate Harrison has done more to set back city's progress on climate change than any elected official in the city.
Berkeley's climate plan, adopted in 2009, called for dense, infill housing, especially downtown in Kate's district, to reduce VMT. cityofberkeley.info/uploadedFiles/…
Kate Harrison led a fight to overturn the voter-approved downtown plan for dense housing.
She consistently votes to block efforts to legalize multi-family homes, & supports bogus efforts to landmark "views" & dilapidated shacks to block infill. berkeleyside.com/2017/03/01/op-…
In large part due to Kate's NIMBYism, transportation emissions in Berkeley have been rising in both absolute & relative terms. 59% of city's climate pollution comes from cars.
For Kate to now call on state leaders to mandate 100% zero-emission vehicles is pure theatrics. Nancy Skinner and Buffy Wicks understand climate change, which is why they're our most strident champions of infill housing -- and don't buy what Kate is selling.
In fact, if Kate had attended our public forum on this topic, led by a top climate researcher at the University of California - Berkeley, along with Skinner and Wicks themselves, maybe she would have learned something!
It's good that Kate talks about her concern about climate.
It's bad that she actively blocks progress on climate.
Thankfully, in Berkeley, we know the difference.
True in 2009, true in 2021:
"While options to improve vehicle efficiency limited at local level, cities like Berkeley have significant power to direct new residential/commercial development toward locations close to transit & other services within walking/bicycling distance."
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Someone on here posted an amazing piece a few weeks ago about how US environmental movement would find itself increasingly hog-tied by the rules it helped establish.
On one hand, you have a massive push from environmental movement to electrify cars; this faction is doing little to promote transit and land use reform.
On the other hand, you have a massive push from environmental movement to protect sensitive habitat; this faction is ... same
Gordian Knot: "An intractable problem (untying an impossibly tangled knot) solved easily by finding an approach to the problem that renders the perceived constraints of the problem moot"
The biggest trick the car industry ever pulled was convincing the world “freeways” means they are “free.”
Second biggest trick was convincing Americans its normal to spend $10,000 a year to provide the vehicle you have to have in order to use the highway you already paid for.
One reason I love trains is, the transparency of it all: It costs x to build, then you pay a small user fee, and here is the schedule.
With cars: “Oh who knows what it costs, and who cares?!? Vroom vroom! That SUV makes you look skinny!!”
The thing about the "cars versus homes" debate is, housing and transportation aren't separate issues. They're one issue. You can't talk about them as though they had distinct solutions that can be pursued in silos.
So, if you say "affordable housing," inherent in the phrase ...
... is "affordable transit" and then you have to admit if the housing is not transit-accessible, it is not actually affordable.
This is very difficult for people who've never been poor to understand: The cost of car ownership breaks people, all the time. Daily. Broke me, once.
You can try to subsidize car ownership, if you like, but that comes at expense of housing, because for one thing, cars suck 25% of the money out of the economy, but more importantly, cars are most useful for mobility when housing is in a sprawl pattern, which is ...
America's largest source of climate pollution is cars, and it's set to worsen for ~ a decade as carmakers wind down Giant Truck SUV-palooza.
Carmakers have set up situation where it's already too late to address car pollution w/ EVs alone.
So, a significant & growing share of the things we need to do to solve cars for climate requires less driving: Literally, we have to reduce the absolute number of miles people drive, regardless of drivetrain.
AND every car sold has to be an EV, ASAP. But ASAP is, like 2035.
The deep challenge in transport decarbonization: The car industry is like the defense industry. It has established manufacturing centers in states that look like a map of states we all hate to watch for electoral college: Ohio. Michigan. Pennsylvania. North Carolina. Wisconsin.
Count the number of lies the CEO of Virgin Hyperloop tells in this video
My brain broke at "on demand" and "high capacity" and "flexible the way you want to live your lives" and I puked at "first new transportation technology in 100 years"