Public Comment

The coming week of city meetings looks way more interesting than the one we just finished. Nothing came to a vote at any of the meetings I attended except the Planning Commission, which voted to add five parcels to the Adeline Corridor Plan. You can check the quick summary in The Activist’s Calendar for the meetings deserving your attention this week.

The event I most wanted to attend I missed, because I had not signed up with Eventbrite when I first saw the notice. It is a lesson I’d had before and chose to ignore. Choosing to ignore is the very thing about which this diary will focus.

I had lunch with a fellow vaccinated friend on Friday at one of those street parklets without the plastic walls. We’ve talked about climate many times, but I was most surprised by his response. I am still assimilating the shock that we’ve had 0.4°C of temperature rise (global warming) from 0.8°C in 2018 to 1.2°C in 2020. My friend has long believed we’ve passed the tipping points and are now in feedback loops that are accelerating global warming. His response, he said, he’s stopped watching and reading the news. Instead, he’s reading WWII history.

How many of us are choosing to ignore the signs that are all around us? Or maybe we are paying attention, but have decided that our individual behavior is so insignificant in the global context that it doesn’t matter. So, we can continue to enjoy all those little things, even though when they are combined together as the sum of us they have enormous impact. It’s likely a lot more complicated, and why we choose not to act is what I really wanted to hear, even though the group to the meeting I missed was self-selected to be motivated.

The event I missed was, “Getting Off Gas - Berkeley Electrification Community Meeting” on Tuesday evening. Individually, I am about halfway there to electrification. I have replaced the stove, water heater and furnace and the natural gas line to my house is shut off. I still have my Prius, and I am sorry now I didn’t purchase the hybrid plug-in in 2014. I don’t have solar and I could really beef up the insulation.

I’ve never had a gas clothes dryer and never will. My best friend’s mother suffered a 90% body burn when she turned on the gas clothes dryer and the house exploded. My friend’s mother died three weeks later, the day before her eleventh birthday, three days before mine.

The meeting presentation document is available now and the meeting zoom will be posted soon. https://www.cityofberkeley.info/HPWH/ All the charts and diagrams look great until page 43, the timeline. With 0.4°C of temperature rise in two years do we really have 24 years to get off natural gas in our buildings and fossil fuels altogether? It is this approach that makes me think maybe I just need to crawl into bed with wine and chocolate—of course, if I do that it will likely be with a book on politics or another on nature by Douglas W. Tallamy.

In closing, I finished the book Kill Switch by Adam Jentleson on the filibuster. If I hadn’t committed to reading at least a book a week and knowing that I would close with a note on that reading, I would have stopped a couple chapters in. The book did get better when describing how Senate leaders acquired and wielded power especially Mitch McConnell and Lyndon Johnson. Jesse Helms was the first to use direct mail to fund raise.

There were other interesting stories, but the books that I find to be more important regarding where we are today, in the fraying of this democracy, are: It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump by Stuart Stevens, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum and How Democracies Die by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky.

These three books were referenced by Stuart Stevens, Senior Advisor for the Lincoln Project, in his comments on May 5, 2021 in the show All In With Chris Hayes:

“Look, I don`t think this is a tipping point for the Republican Party. I think the Republican Party has tipped. I think it`s a tipping point for America. The greatest danger is not to realize the greatest danger. And what we have here is a moment that appears normal in many ways. We have a normal president who`s going about the business of running a normal, very functional government, but this is an extraordinary moment. 

“And we shouldn`t look to the past to say, OK, it`s just like 1964, it`s just like `68, it`s like `52, because this really never happened in America, at least not since 1860. We should look abroad, like to Hungary. This is a Viktor Orban moment. And what the Republican Party has become, and it`s painful for me to admit this because I spent decades working in it, it has become a major anti-democratic force, little D democratic force in America. 

“It is a dangerous organization that wants to end the American experiment. And the sooner we get about realizing that and understanding it and quit trying to pretend that it`s not, the safer we’ll be and the more we`ll be equipped to deal with it. Because our society is not really ready to deal with what we`re forced to deal with now,... 

It is through the ballot box and through judicial fiat that democracies die…”