Climate Action Rethink

With the county’s adoption of the Climate Action Plan, I look forward to 3,000 new trees for canopy during heat waves. I am also curious to see what county staff recommends to put the brakes on new oil and gas exploration. As long as staff is taking another peek at the plan, let’s rip out page six, which celebrates a partnership with Uplift California and REACH, a collaborative for aerospace expansion: private jets, surveillance satellites, bombs, and billionaire space tourism.

Talk about climate destroyers!

A private jet can emit two tons of carbon dioxide in an hour — equivalent to a few months of the average person’s emissions. Falcon 9 rockets that launch Elon Musk’s surveillance satellites at Vandenberg are fueled by kerosene and burn large amounts of propellant that can destroy the ozone layer. Billionaire blast-offs, $450,000 for a four-minute spit into space, emit black carbon into the stratosphere.

REACH argues commercialization of space will uplift coast residents who live paycheck to paycheck to barely make rent.

Nonsense.

Private jet trips and billionaire rocket rides will benefit the one percent, the ownership class, who will buy up real estate to drive up housing costs. Expansion of aerospace will rely on out-of-town professionals or intellectual labor at UCSB, where graduate engineering students are signing pledges never to work for weapons contractors.

Santa Barbara County supervisors should fund climate relief — yes, but not climate pollution. No taxpayer dollars for the merchants of war, the rapacious rich or the privatizers of space.

Marcy Winograd co-chairs the Central Coast Antiwar Coalition in Santa Barbara.