Extra

Some highlights from the Berkeley City Council agenda for January 19, 2021:

Berkeley commissions to hold secret meetings (Item 3)

Council will likely pass on consent a rule change that allows Berkeley commissions to appoint subcommittees which then meet in secret. Why? To save staff time during a pandemic emergency that will likely continue for at least half this year’s legislative session and probably beyond.

Under the Brown act such a subcommittee is legally permissible but only under a strict rule that no member of the public may participate in the meetings, not even through asynchronous communications.

Place your bets on whether or not such closed-door appointed subcommittees will really discuss issues with nobody but each other. Hint: of course they won’t. They’ll just pick and choose who gets to provide public input privately.

Protecting fossil fuel producers, killing humans (Item 23)  

Climate scientist Michael Mann was invited to appear on the TV show “60 minutes” this past October. He reiterated something very well known in the climate science community: If global emissions don’t fall sharply in 2021-2025, then they would need to fall so quickly thereafter that it is all too likely to be socially impossible – too late. Mann called that outcome “game over for climate”. 

Mann is not alone. It is hard to find climate scientists who would disagree. It is not hard to find climate scientists who think Mann is being optimistic. 

“Game over” means that every child you see today will live in a world of deaths that dwarf every previous war combined, a world of massive crop yield falls, water shortages, greatly accelerated sea level rise, loss of species beyond all imagination, and a profound destabilization of human civilization itself. Everyone alive today, not only today’s children, will suffer. 

With awareness of those facts, more than a year ago former council member Cheryl Davila proposed to urgently ban the sale, in Berkeley, of new fossil fuel burning cars by 2025. She proposed to urgently explore how rapidly petrol sales could be ended. It was a bold idea and one of only two pieces of proposed legislation in Berkeley history that are consistent with the physical demands of the actual climate emergency. (The other example, a proposal to adopt as policy consistent with the Paris Accord goals, was also by Davila.) 

The proposal coming up on the 19^th was suppressed in committee by Council members Robinson and Harrison for more than a year. 

Now that Davila is gone, the item has miraculously been passed out of subcommittee, but not before amending it to make it toothless. The subcommittee watered it down to protect car sales for the foreseeable future. It is the kind of political subterfuge every fossil fuel company board member and executive loves. Their dismantling of Davila’s item differs from Trumpian climate policy only in the tone of its delivery. 

Why did they do this, aside from the general hostility these council members regularly showed council member Davila? A last minute addition to the item, made by Harrison, reveals: they are willing to protect greenhouse gas emissions because they fear the loss of taxes. Jesse Arreguín expressed the same concern to the S.F. Chronicle recently. (“Berkeley considers banning the sale of gas-powered cars by 2027. But is it feasible?”, January 11, 2021) 

I look forward to them sitting on a panel, someday soon, with an audience of BUSD students, explaining their decision to let a tax revenue concern justify sacrificing their chances at a future. 

Requiring pay-raises for grocery store employees (Item 26)

With no visible consultation with unions or employers, and no visible analysis of the impact, Terry Taplin has proposed requiring all grocery stores to give employees a five dollar per hour pay-raise until the pandemic emergency is over. 

In related news, Amazon, a company accelerating its plans for automation in response to the economic crisis, owns Whole Foods and has already been working for some time on replacing employees with machines. 

Council members Bartlett and Arreguín have signed up to co-sponsor.