Step It Up 2007

I just learned about Step It Up 2007 last week when Bill McKibben was on Democracy Now. As a scientist, I am very concerned about global warming, and have been for many years. In recent years it has started to become a mainstream issue. So I was delighted to find that, not only was there a nationwide movement in Step It Up 2007, but someone else started one in my town!

Thank you, Dawn, for starting this event! The weather cooperated: 88 is unusually warm for November. The turnout of 20-30 people was better than I expected. (I brought many of them there through the Green Party network.) She got a good group of speakers, too. Christine Mulholland, SLO City Council Member (and a Green Party member) gave a wonderful talk. Rosemary Wilvert gave out Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFLs), a simple way to reduce your energy consumption. Lisa Quinn talked about Rideshare, our County's program matching people for carpools. Liz Apfelberg promoted both Green Party issues in general, and spoke against nuclear power, as it does generate a lot of greenhouse gases in mining and refining ore into fuel, plus decommissioning a nuke plant requires huge amounts of fossil fuel energy.

Council Member Mulholland noted the City has many good policies, but they don't implement themselves. It takes an advocate, sometimes a persistent advocate willing to push people out of their comfort zones of “this is how we always do things”(business as usual).

Her most important example, in my opinion, concerns the upcoming remodeling of City Hall. When I was on the Planning Commission, the staff's first draft update of the Conservation and Energy Element of the General Plan was totally inadequate, as if we hadn't just gone through an electricity crisis in this state. I used all my political capital to fight for much more ambitious policies. Thanks to the support of many on the Commission, in the community and on the City Council, I am proud of the resulting policies the City adopted. But, as Christine reminds, policies on the books aren't enough. So she is pushing for the building to incorporate as many energy-saving design elements as possible. (See the Architecture 2030 Challenge http://www.architecture2030.org/ below).

Christine ended her short speech with an observation that really rings true for me: she would be tempted to slump into despair over our many overwhelming problems, were it not for the contagious enthusiasm of other people touting solutions to those problems.

Later in the program, I grabbed the mike briefly to echo the importance of designing buildings for energy efficiency, which is what the Architecture 2030 Challenge is all about. * This is the most important thing we as a society can do to fight global warming. * Seventy-six percent (76%) of the energy produced by the new coal plants planned will go to operate buildings. We can now design buildings to consume HALF of the energy of the average building. Let's do it!