In order to do this, we'll need to do things like go bike riding instead of driving, use car pool lanes, plant more trees and keep those trees that we have from dying, and use more public transportation. Which sounds great except for the fact we already know this. It's not like we're all sitting here, reading the report and thinking "gosh, if I take BART to go downtown I could help save the environment-- I never thought of that."
Okay, the plan is mainly a bunch of ideas to help get us there and actually has a price attached to help make all of these wonderful ideas come to fruition. But there's a catch, mainly that it'll cost about $630 million a year to do all of this. Currently, we spend about $32 million. So part of the report is a game plan for coming up with the money to do all this by doing things like bond measures and public/private fund raising.
But that brings up the usual problems. People want to use public transportation but the public transportation isn't so good. Bike riding sounds easy but we keep on having battles over cars vs. bikes. And it goes without saying that everybody loves things like car sharing but they love it when somebody else does it. And another question is if the plan has jurisdiction over other city departments. The report says we need to encourage more bike usage so does that mean the city has to get a bit more serious about being bike friendly or will we have the usual spats?
One more thing about climate change, which is what to do about our reservoirs. As you might have noticed there hasn't been much in the way of rain this year. Luckily, we have enough left over from last year. But if the lack of rain and the attendant lack of snowfall becomes something that we have to deal with as part of Global Warming, we need to figure out what to do about that. In that regards, PUC General Manager Susan Leal is having a summit meeting to discuss what to do.