Climate
If you’ve ever wondered what your city actually spends on climate — and whether it’s working — same. Let’s compare notes.
D8 has the voters and the density to lead on this.
District 8 voted 69% for the Great Highway closure, fifteen points above the citywide average, and CleanPowerSF has already cut electricity-sector emissions by 98%. The constituency for serious climate policy isn’t something we need to build. It’s here.
What I keep finding as I dig into the city’s climate infrastructure is that it’s unexpectedly thin relative to the interest voters consistently demonstrate with their ballots. The Environment Department just lost 80% of its General Fund allocation and eight staff positions; the Climate Equity Hub, which funded green building retrofits for low-income households, got zeroed out entirely; and we still don’t have a plan to sufficiently address smoke season impacts on residents.
The good news is most of this is solvable with things that already exist. A $50 Corsi-Rosenthal box is 10x more cost-effective than commercial units, and fire departments in other cities already hand them out. Other cities also finance seismic retrofits, so seniors on fixed incomes aren’t staring at a $60,000 bill they have to cover themselves. Building codes that add $100 per unit during construction save landlords and homeowners $10,000 in retrofit costs later. D8 has the political will and the density to pilot all of this. The full report will lay out the specifics — smoke readiness, retrofit financing, building standards — but the short version is: we have the voters, we have the models, and we’re leaving them on the table.
In the meantime, if you know something I should know, tell me. I personally read every submission.
Prefer to talk about this in person? I hold regular office hours and am also happy to meet one-on-one.