Letter: We must lead on the climate crisis

The climate crisis is upon us. The future is now.

But for the efforts of our firefighters and a last-minute change in the winds, the Caldor fire would have destroyed our community. Less than a year later, the north shore was similarly threatened with a similar fate from the Mosquito fire. Many other communities, including several close by, have not been spared.

The consequences of our changing climate are no longer relegated to the future, we live them in our present. The question cannot be “should we act” but “how should we act”. We can choose to wait, and let this be the problem of others, or lead. I choose the latter.

South Lake Tahoe’s recent commitment to a 100% carbon-free electric supply by 2030 is the right goal and the right motivation. Now that pledge must be met with actions. We must be willing to make investments that demonstrate solutions to a crisis that we are otherwise leaving to our children to clean up.

It was disappointing then, to see the new recreation center will nonetheless receive a significant amount of its heat through the burning of fossil fuels rather than using electric heat pumps. In a building that was originally budgeted for $40 million, but for which the city recently issued a bond that will, with interest, cost $84 million, this was apparently deemed wasteful spending. This is short-term thinking about the long-term infrastructure that will last at least a generation.

The state of California has recently mandated that all new vehicles sold by the year 2035 will be fully electric. We must make real efforts in improving both the reliability and capacity of our electric grid, undergrounding utilities, and increase clean and reliable generation capacity to sustain an electrified future. These are achievable goals. They will require sustained focus and effort - but they can be done.

We can move our public transit towards electrified bus service, and support electrified school buses, along with an improved capacity for public charging infrastructure. Lake Tahoe Unified School district recently chose to replace their old school buses with new diesel buses, despite strong local efforts in support of electric options. This was another missed opportunity at the local level.

We can also support local clean generation with a mix of incentives and purchase agreements to install solar generation above our many large, open parking lots. Such systems have the secondary benefit of shielding parked cars from the sun and inclement weather and have become common in new developments as solar costs continue to decrease and demand for a clean generation has increased (solar panels are quite warm and can melt and shed snow loads). While many of our houses and homes are highly shaded, we are all familiar with how sunny and hot our parking lots can get.

In addition to solar, investigations are already underway into the use of biomass gasification energy generation in our region. We are all familiar with the sight of prescribed burn piles during the shoulder seasons, but rather than the current practice of open burning of this kind of forest thinning waste (materials not suitable as lumber), this biomass can be gasified and then used to generate power. Such systems can turn forest thinning operations from a net cost, into a revenue generator - producing power even when the sun isn’t shining. These activities should continue to be supported and developed.

These things cost money, and locals have certainly been taxed enough, but the recent Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 allocated some $391 billion in federal spending on energy and climate change. Much of this already-allocated money will be given out as grants to local communities for investment in exactly these sorts of renewable energy and climate mitigation efforts. We are in a unique moment where significant grant money is available, if only we make the effort to get it.

The problem is not too large, nor too expensive to solve, but there is an enormous amount of work to be done, in a thousand little places. The problem of global climate change cannot be solved exclusively at the local level – this must be acknowledged - it will ultimately require massive national and multinational cooperation. But what local action can do, is demonstrate these solutions, and show the world what a clean future can look like. To show that many small changes can add to a large-scale shift in the way we interact with and extract resources from our environment.

These are changes we must make, but importantly they are changes we can make. They won’t all be easy, but if there’s anything I’ve learned from my friends in Tahoe, it’s that we are people who can do some impressive things.

- Scott Robbins, Candidate for South Lake Tahoe City Council