April 06, 2020
The Environmental Council of Sacramento, 350 Sacramento and the Sierra Club submitted a comment letter regarding Sacramento County’s initiation of a Climate Action Plan.
Here is an excerpt from our letter:
Thank you for your leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thank you also for committing to initiate the County’s Climate action Plan (CAP), and to discuss it during the Board’s April 7, 2020 hearing on the County’s General Plan 2019 Annual Report.
We are gratified that the CAP is included in the planning department’s work plan, but disappointed that the Report asserts work won’t begin until “a path forward is made clear” with the resolution of unspecified CAP-related lawsuits in other jurisdictions. Absent identification of such suits and explanation of why they preclude progress on the CAP, the County has not explained why it needs to continue its nine-year delay in fulfilling its greenhouse gas-reduction commitments (noted in Attachment).
As we’ve advised in previous correspondence, since the County committed to adopt a CAP in 2011, four other jurisdictions in the SACOG region have adopted CAPs which they consider “qualified”, and three more are currently in active draft, notwithstanding pending litigation in other jurisdictions.
We recognize this is a difficult time to begin new initiatives, but with both the pandemic and climate crises, time is not on our side. The pandemic crisis is short-term and immediate, but while the impacts of climate change are gradual, they are more enduring.
Therefore, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. We ask you to move ahead with a climate action plan and do what is required to avoid a threat whose scope has no historic parallel; to do not as little, but as much as possible.
