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Wednesday, Sept. 23, 11 a.m. - Budget and Finance Committee
This meeting starts out being all about the kids: you have the ongoing hearing about the Department of Children, Youth, and their Families' Children's Services Allocation Plan FY 2010-2013; and the Children's Services Allocation Plan for the Children's Fund.
Then it veers hard right and becomes all about special financing mechanisms. There's a resolution adopting local goals and policies for the Mello-Roos Community Facilities Districts; and a resolution allowing equipment for water conservation and pollution control to be eligible for funding through the formation of special tax districts.
Then you've got an agreement for fire and medical services as the Hunter's Point Shipyard ... blah blah blah ... airport concession lease ... $30 million for advanced train control system improvements for Muni.... Yadda yadda yadda ....
Wait ... what was that? $30 million for advance train control system improvements for Muni? Did that just happen? Will it help them not crash and stuff?
According to the 122-page document on the purchasing agreement, the answer is: "Something like that." It will, at least, help the system that is crashing the trains from being so obsolete.
Okay. It'll be good to be killed by more up-to-date technology.
Moving on, the meeting ends with a budget update and the ever-exciting Monthly Overtime Report.
All those in favor of the Monthly Overtime Report being presented as a stand-up comedy routine, raise your hand.
I'll give us a start. "So, what's the deal with EMS personnel? Are they, like, saving lives at night too?"
Thursday, Sept. 24, 1 p.m. - Government Audit & Oversight Committee
Peak oil fans, this one's for you: There's just one item on the agenda, and it's a hearing to consider the recommendations of the Peak Oil preparedness Task Force.
I know you're dying to know: what ARE their recommendations? What DO we have to do to be prepared for the day there's no more oil?
Well, I don't want to go through the whole 122 pages with you ... I really, really don't ... but here's a quick preview:
The task force has made recommendations for six areas: Energy, Food, Transportation, Recycling, Buildings, and Societal Functioning. Here's a sample of the recommendations they make for each:
Energy:
- Instruct City agencies and departments that planning must include a scenario of energy decline: Because everyone reads city department guidelines;
- Pursue the conversion of the electric system to a smart grid (also called a "Brugmann" grid).
Food:
- Vastly expand urban agriculture programs and services. No problem! Surely we can use the remaining 20 percent of San Francisco that isn't growing pot to grow food.
Transportation:
- Discourage people from using cars. Instead, have them ride bicycles, which are also called "Steve-Wheels," after the man who is most smug about riding them;
- Convert city vehicles to bio-diesel, even though this is futile because the city won't generate nearly enough bio-diesel to actually power its fleet.
Recycling:
Buildings:
- Retrofit them for energy conservation and on-site power generation. (QUESTION: Is it more important to retrofit buildings for peak oil, or the big earthquake? Because we might not be able to fund both).
Societal Functionings
- Lecture the hell out of people about peak oil.
- Inspire the public to do better! (That always works!)
- Think more locally in everything, and teach neighborhoods to govern themselves. This includes the sweetly naïve line "The City can provide guidelines for community governance." Because they do that so well.
Basically, to prepare for the coming peak oil shortage, we're going to need to become the series of local eco-collectivist hive neighborhoods that people who prepare reports like this are always calling for.
What a shock.
Honest-to-God, couldn't we have saved 15 months by skipping the report and just asking the usual gang of suspects to stand up in city hall and be very liberal in public?
Like all ideological manifestos, the report ends with a vision of utopia. The last section before the summary asks us to "Imagine yourself transported to the San Francisco of 2050." It tells us what we'll see:
"The economy is less consumption-focused, and the pace of life is slower, but surveys consistently show that San Franciscans are far 'happier' than they were in the early 21st century."
And that's not all!
- "Residents rarely need cars"
- "the overall health of San Franciscans is improved over that of the early 21st century"
- "San Francisco has seen a renaissance as the business center of the Bay Area"
- "Jobs that moved to the suburbs during the auto age have moved back into San Francisco"
- "The California High Speed Rail system has been operational for many years"
- "Street life is lively, with frequent fairs, meetings and events."
- "Neighborhood councils participate in decisions affecting them, and this has brought a greater sense of community than ever, while continuing to foster the individual expression that is one of San Francisco's most prized values"
Is this an overly optimistic scenario? NO! Instead, "we are confident that it is a close approximation of what the future holds"!
Don't you see, you fools? Peak oil will bring a paradise on earth, if only we listen to its eco-prophets!
(Sigh). Look, I support the conversion to renewable power, and the smart grid, and CCA, and municipal power generation, and local power generation, and urban agriculture, and all this stuff that ... realistically ... will be expensive to implement and inefficient to use for a long time until all the kinks are worked out.
But still ... even as a supporter of all this ... I would have respected this report a lot more if it had started by saying "Peak oil is coming: You're all dead!" and ended by proposing something really practical, like a system of levers and pulleys to help convey messages across the park.
Can we please be honest with each other and admit that adjusting to a world without artificially cheap power and wasteful consumerism is going to really suck? For all its faults, consumer capitalism does have this to say for itself: If life in the eco-hive collective were so self-evidently great, we'd all be living there right now. Instead, we prefer to throw our trash away unsorted and eat mass-produced animal byproduct, because it allows us to focus more fully on our dream of becoming a voice actor for children's cartoons.
In the future to be created by peak-oil advocates, there may be no mass children's entertainment, and those of us who want to pursue our unfettered dreams may be told "Sorry, we need you to spend your time urban farming and sorting compost into five seperate bins."
The wastefulness of consumer capitalism allows us to waste our own lives like true individualists. How many actors does a society really need? How many lawyers? How many personal trainers? A consumer capitalist society can allow anyone to pursue their dreams -- no matter how crappy, redundant, or useless -- because it creates a superabundance of all the basic necessities. But it's that's superabundance that's unsustainable; and it's that unsustainable superabundance that allows for radical individualism. Anyone who automatically assumes that a sustainable economy can do the same is selling something.
It may be anti-consumer, but there's no question that the peak oil task force report is a sales job.
Postscript:
Speaking of over-the-top idealism applied to environmental policy, the week-in-government will end on Friday with another joint meeting of LAFCo and the PUC. Expect the peak oil report to come up as proof that we desperately need whatever they're selling. After all, they have a report.
