HomeMy WebLinkAbout12/5/2023 Item 7a, Schmidt
Richard Schmidt <
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Subject:Comment -- Item 7a
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Dear Council,
I went downtown one night and honestly, I wondered if I was approaching the Flaming Gates of Hell, given all the flames
to the right of me and left and straight ahead. All this flaming ambiance, and heat, was courtesy of natural gas flaring and
flaming propane atmospheric carbon disposal for which the city issues permits in the interest of increasing city sales tax
and TOT receipts. The penultimate display of climate indifference is the natural gas flaming operation inside the front
window of Hotel SLO, poisoning that hotel’s indoor air as it helps kill the earth by increasing carbon emissions. All for
ambience. And it’s not just downtown; upper Monterey Street has a variety of natural gas flaring operations, for which the
city issues permits, also for ambience.
Then there are the petro-fueled heaters at outdoor dining establishments, heating the great out of doors, pumping even
more carbon into the atmosphere for the benefit of city sales tax receipts – receipts that are no doubt helping to fund the
proposals before you tonight to stick it to homeowners for climate conservation.
The city allows all this frivolous carbon emission even as it insists homeowners get off gas.
It seems to me the city has the cart before the horse in forcing upon homeowners carbon improvements that will have
minor global benefit but very costly prices, especially before it gets its own carbon-spewing hypocrisies corrected. Here
are some of those hypocrisies you could fix:
1. The Flaming Gates of Hell. Are you serious about carbon, or are you just talking like you’re serious? This is an obvious
suggestion of the latter for it’s no secret how gas/propane carbon is being frivolously dumped into the atmosphere to
increase city tax revenues.
2. Failure of the city to track, and thus minimize, its own emissions of atmospheric carbon from public works projects.
Such emissions are huge – much larger than any carbon emissions that would result from your proposed homeowner
impositions. And they are on-going as maintenance emits still more carbon, year after year. I was surprised to learn that
unless a public works project falls under CEQA the current city regime does no carbon analysis, and no environmental
analysis at all of comparative impacts of differing project material and design choices. For example, last year the city
resurfaced about a quarter of its streets, and no analysis or comparative analysis was done; a spec was simply selected
and executed. And you call this a “green” city operation? I don’t think so. It’s environmentally antediluvian.
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3. City ignorance of the importance of tracking “embodied carbon” that goes into public and private construction, and the
need to conserve what we’ve already expended. New embodied construction carbon has a huge impact, right now; it’s
“today’s carbon,” which climate scientists tell us we must seek to radically and quickly reduce, not “tomorrow’s carbon”
that your proposed residential impositions may assist in controlling. And thus we have ridiculous and amateurish pseudo-
green propaganda from the city and various vested interests touting the greenness of improvements when they actually
represent dumping huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere with no conceivable carbon payback. A few examples:
• The city’s permitting a 10,000 square foot “house” that’s obviously a winery event center (which would violate zoning if
labeled such) on the pretext somebody’s going to be living there, the embodied carbon of such a house being so vast that
it will exceed the assumed operational carbon savings from retrofitting several dozen existing houses. Why do our new
rich arrivals merit such carbon excess when the city wants to clamp down on common homeowners’ lesser climate sins?
Do we owe them unlimited resource consumption and embodied carbon emissions?
• Projects touted as saving carbon when their embodied carbon is so great it will exceed any conceivable long-term
savings. The constructed bike lanes/tracks with their profligate use of concrete (carbon villain #1 among building
materials) come to mind here. The carbon cost of building and maintaining those is so huge there will never be any
carbon savings from the likely number of vehicular trips re-moded into bike trips. But the city doesn’t know that because
its simple-minded analysis (1 bike = 1 vehicular trip avoided, end of calculation) leaves out of the equation embodied
carbon’s very presence.
• The importance of building conservation because of existing buildings’ embodied carbon. In terms of carbon, the
greenest building is almost always the one already built, no matter what its deficiencies. The notion we’re better off tearing
down existing buildings and replacing them with “energy efficient” new buildings is carbon bunk because it ignores
embodied carbon. Yet this is the pretext upon which our planning programs operate, and thus we have continuing cycling
of 40-year-old buildings coming down (instead of being thoughtfully rehabbed and incorporated into new things) and new
ones going up. A 40-year building cycle is not a sustainable building cycle. And it’s a carbon catastrophe. (It’s also a
resource catastrophe.)
4. Failure to recognize the carbon sequestration benefits of standing trees within the city. The city no longer makes much
effort to conserve this huge quantity of sequestered carbon, but allows trees to come down by the thousand, and be
chipped which means their sequestered carbon is rapidly released into the atmosphere. The notion that replacing big
trees with new little trees at a 2/1 or 3/1 ratio is more carbon bunk. The sequestered carbon’s loss is “today’s carbon”
being released into the atmosphere right now; any significant carbon sequestration benefit of new trees is decades down
the road – if the new trees even survive that long. The city brags its 10,000 new trees slogan, but the truth is you’re closer
to 10,000 stumps than 10,000 new trees. (There appears no sense of urgency about getting 10,000 trees into the ground
either.) Again, the city ignores good climate science which tells us we must do the things that have the greatest impact
today, and allows more and more trees to come down. How hard would it be to have a total moratorium on tree removals
absent clear safety issues?
So that, to me is the context in which staff’s current proposal lands. While as “the most radical environmentalist in the
world” (according to Metropolis), and a building professional whose career focused on minimizing buildings’ impacts on
the earth, I fully support well-thought-through efforts to reign in carbon, but I find the current staff proposals both
misdirected and ill-timed, and unlikely to have any significant impact. You could accomplish far more by cleaning up the
city’s own act and its development policies.
Richard Schmidt
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PS. Since the council is sure to endorse whatever staff brings you, I assume my writing you – as usual – is of no impact.
So you really need to think through what you do decide to do. Using a 250 SF addition or remodel as a kickoff for
extensive energy retrofit? That hardly seems like a fair number as 250 SF is next to nothing. Does size matter otherwise?
You bet since the larger a project the larger its carbon impact, both embodied and operational carbons. Should conversion
of existing enclosed space (e.g. garage conversion) be treated the same way as an addition? I don’t think so since the
embodied carbon of the building envelope is already there whereas for an addition one is starting from scratch with both
greater immediate “today’s carbon” impact (embodied carbon expenditure) and greater flexibility (potential for reduction of
future operational carbon). It doesn’t appear from staff’s report staff has thought much about such issues, but is
developing a one size fits all approach.
Also, to date it appears public input into formulating policy is quite lacking. Staff lists its public inputs, almost all of which
are meetings with special interest groups, but none with the public at large. Nor is there evidence of broad public
outreach. This city’s growing inability to solicit and receive wide-ranging public input and the resulting buy-in that enables
has become phenomenal. You’d be well off relearning how to do legitimate public input and get past the idea the way to
cover that up is to deploy your public communications channel noise machine, whose tiresome propaganda just annoys
most of those to whom it’s directed.
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