Here's some good news. Though the City has not made any formal announcement, the agenda for the Climate Action Plan Committee meeting on Tuesday the 12th shows a new name.
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| Meeting agenda for Dec. 12th |
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| Julianah Douglas via Linkedin |
Julianah Douglas is our new Climate Action Plan Manager. Her most recent academic work for a Masters in Public Health focused on food waste and landfills.
It'll be great to see how she learns, listens, then takes charge and coordinates City processes and policy.
The meeting on the 12th appears to have the same agenda as the postponed meeting from last month.
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| "Individuals and consumers are responsible..." Individualism as Discourse of Delay |
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| Driving's still worse! |
Hopefully, though, the interest in food waste doesn't signal too much focus on individual household discretionary choices, which depend on people making virtuous and sometimes difficult choices, and is not something that really scales at the magnitude we need to reduce emissions.
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| Anything to deflect from fossil fuel - NY Times |
Worry about the City trying to understand Climate Action as a PR and messaging problem rather than anything that calls for policy action remains a concern. (See more notes on the postponed November meeting.)
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| November |
The Climate Action Plan Committee meets Tuesday the 12th at 2pm.
3 comments:
Very disappointing cop today
Getting people to not make garbage is a part of the climate action needed. But also, what to do with what garbage they do make is also a part of the solution. Much of the waste that Salem makes (more than the average Oregonian) now goes to the Coffin Butte Landfill. If citizens put compostable materials (food waste especially) into the garbage bin instead of the green compost bin, it will very likely just end up making methane that too often is released into the air. Compost does not make methane.
If the City of Salem would require all food related businesses to compost and also require that all apartments have compost collection facilities, it could reduce the waste going to landfills that make methane. Some studies done by Marion County Environmental Services in the past showed that about 40% of the garbage people put in the grey bins could be recycled or composted.
Composting is not only good for the environment, it saves people money. And the end product creates a sellable product.
The current Climate Action Plan totally underestimated the impact of garbage on the overall impact on the air quality. Not only does the data from the incinerator skew low, but so does the methane from the landfill. No doubt because the landfill is in Benton county, but Salem does generate the source.
As Jane Goodall says, When everyone does a little, it adds up to a lot!
Fantastic book about how nine key techniques corporations use to evade responsibility for the harms caused by their actions. He uses a teaching model, illustrating how each of the nine propaganda strategies (or memes) get applied in looking at struggles to respond to the ills caused by processed foods, auto domination, and climate change —
The book is “Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment” by Grant Ennis. Five Stars.
Two of the book’s three focus areas are preoccupations of this blog, but the bigger picture is Ennis’s insights into the strategies corporations use to keep us from using active government interventions to actually address problems we face.
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