Page 24 - Sonoma County Gazette February 2020

SMART’s Green Commuters Reduced
Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 33% Compared to Using an Automobile
Sampling of Infographic from SMARTGreen Communite Fact Sheet at SonomaMarinTrain.org
© Tish Levee 2020
“Love Where We Live” is this month’s Gazette’s theme.
While this means Sonoma County, I want to take a wider perspective. We need to love where we all live—this planet. If we really love it and if we
love our children, we have to get really serious about saving it for the future. Already, we’ve lost so much of what we cherish. Because the losses have been incremental, we don’t always see them until some cataclysmic event such as the fires (followed by floods, hailstorms, and dust storms) in Australia. The horror down under just keeps getting worse, and it’s still summer there! NASA recently released a graphic video showing how much the planet has heated up just since 1880! See it at://tinyurl.com/ws3m33j
Great news locally. On January 14th the Santa Rosa City Council unanimously passed a Climate Emergency Resolution modeled after
the Regional Climate Protection Authority’s, with two amendments by Councilmember Chris Rodgers; one stated that “addressing climate change underscores everything we do,” committin g the city to being carbon neutral (zero greenhouse gas emissions) by 2030 and requiring the city to develop a public tracker, regularly updated, of progress towards this goal. His second amendment requires the Climate Action Subcommittee to review specific actions to meet and achieve these goals, giving consideration to the List of Actions submitted by the community-led Santa Rosa Climate Emergency Resolution group. Santa Rosa joins Cloverdale, Cotati, Healdsburg, Petaluma, Sebastopol, Windsor, and Sonoma County in declaring a climate emergency. Such resolutions have been declared in 1318 local jurisdictions in 25 countries, representing over 800 million people.
To study the agency’s impact on greenhouse gas emissions, SMART released a Green Commute fact sheet showing that people who ride SMART reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 33% compared to completing the same trip in
a car. To-date, SMART riders have prevented 8.1 million pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from being released into the environment—equivalent to 4,770 acres of forest carbon sequestration.
“California’s national leadership on climate change is strengthened by
the investments we are making in greener, forward-looking transportation alternatives like SMART. It’s great to see data that shows how SMART is cutting greenhouse gas emissions and reducing congestion in the North Bay by providing a reliable public transit option to help people spend less time in their cars while providing a transportation platform that can grow and expand over time,” said U.S. Congressman Jared Huffman.
“Our house is still on fire!” As I write this, Greta Thunberg just finished addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Although a key topic at Davos, a survey of CEOs released this week showed that climate change wasn’t even in the top ten threats seen to business growth.
“The bottom line is this, 60% of our greenhouse gas emissions in California come from automobiles,” said State Senator Mike McGuire. “SMART is about the future and provides the North Bay with efficient and reliable public transit. California is a national leader on climate change, and if we hope to break this dangerous cycle that we’re in, we need to continue to move the SMART project forward.”
Greta pulled no punches with the elite attendees, telling them all investments in fossil fuel extraction and all subsidies for coal, oil, and gas had to end, and all companies, banks, institutions, and government had to divest from all fossil fuels—“not by 2050, or by 2030, or even by 2021, but NOW.... Our house is still on fire,” she concluded. “What will you tell your children?...It seemed so bad for our economy we didn’t even try. “
Many SMART riders continued this positive impact of reducing emissions by connecting to and from the train station using low emission forms of transportation such as walking, biking, and other public transit.
The costs of not eliminating emissions are adding up.
About 50% of SMART riders walk or take other public transit, while approximately 14% ride a bicycle.
Recently Bloomberg (not considered a radical source), reported a study
of 143 countries that generate more than 99% of all greenhouse gas emissions, which found the upfront costs of $73 trillion to phase out fossil fuels and run the entire world on clean energy would be offset by savings of $11 trillion a year so that it would pay for itself in under seven years. While even advocates of such
a plan (the GREEN New Deal for instance) agree that the technology to do this without jeopardizing reliability is not wholly available, it’s rapidly becoming so. We need to start moving in this direction NOW! We need to STOP all emissions now, not just lower them.
Why, yes, I AM a Greta fan; how did you guess? At 17, Greta is doing the things I wish I had known enough to do and had the courage to do, years ago. If all of us could’ve been more like her and her young colleagues,
we might not be in such a dire climate crisis (or as Greta has said, “climate catastrophe”). The Friday before Davos, she joined 15,000 climate strikers (over 10% of the local population) in Lausanne, Switzerland. Just 74 weeks after she first sat alone outside the Swedish Parliament with her sign saying, “School Strike for Climate” in Swedish, over 13 million strikers in 228 countries have followed her lead. She’s been to climate rallies all over Europe, the US, and Canada, traveling without flying. I just read her first book in English, No One is Too Small to Make a Difference, with 16 of her speeches at climate rallies and to world leaders. The public library has it; it’s a quick but great read.
“SMART is undeniably a critical transportation option that results in far fewer greenhouse gas emissions than single-occupancy car use,” said Suzanne Smith, Executive Director of the Sonoma County Transportation Authority and Regional Climate Protection Authority. “We need SMART. We need all of the tools available to reduce emissions from the transportation sector.”
SMART Board Chairman Eric Lucan pointed out that, ”Even though SMART is still in its infancy, each month thousands of people across the North Bay are making a green choice by riding on SMART to get to work, school, shopping and for leisure trips. They choose SMART not only for the environmental benefits but also for the ease of being able to leave the car behind and avoid the stress of sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic congestion.”
With each SMART train able to carry 158 seated passengers, and cars during the commute carrying an average of 1.08* passengers, this equates to each SMART train reducing traffic congestion by eliminating 146 cars idling in traffic. SMART commuters free up 12.8 miles of roadway each weekday.
The agency’s clean-diesel trains which are equipped with modern, efficient engines that meet the Environmental Protection Agency’s Tier 4 emission standards, cutting particulate matter emissions by 96% and NOx emissions by 93% compared to regular diesel engines.
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