Letter to editor: Volunteers distracted from addressing climate change - Woodland Daily Democrat
Letter to editor: Volunteers distracted from addressing climate change - Daily Democrat
This week the well-meaning volunteers of Yolo County’s Climate Action Committee will be hosting three open houses to collect public input.
However, I think these volunteers,-like climate committee volunteers on 4 other Yolo County cities, are being distracted from the elephant in the room.
Each of the five Yolo government’s Climate Act Plans note we need a plan to reduce auto driving if we want to address our greenhouse gases (GHG), the source of 65% of Woodland GHG.
For example, the city of West Sacramento plan set a goal of reducing driving 40% by 2045 by a shift to transit and active modes.
Yet, the proposed widening of the I-80 Freeway is projected by UC Davis researchers to do the opposite: encourage more driving and longer commutes 177.9 million more miles of driving each year. This means an increase in the county’s carbon footprint larger than the entire City of Winters.
UC Davis research demonstrates like all past widening, this one won’t fix congestion for long: the freeway is 100% certain to re-congest after a few years due to more car travel the widening it itself encourages.
Yet not one of these five climate commissions have discussed this project and its tradeoffs or have a plan to provide input to Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) in July.
It is not the volunteers on these committee’s fault: it about city and county staff who haven’t put it on their agendas.
This is accomplished by the widening advocates in government who claim to want public input but actually discourages it by spin:
Inevitability Spin: Yolo Transportation District (YoloTD) Planning Director has stated regardless of EIR findings, he expects Caltrans will go forward by issuing a statement of “overriding consideration” so its too late for public to change anything.
Greenwashing Spin: YoloTD has a flier claiming a wider freeway will be “environmentally sustainable.”
I am hopeful there is still time for the climate commissions to question this project and its design. They might begin with by asking project cheerleaders why Caltrans itself rates this project design last on its 24 statewide projects list to improve mobility.
By Alan Hirsch, Yolo County
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.