The Elephant in the Room in New Castle
Despite the fact that we are in an exponential upswing in Covid 19 cases across the country, my town is working towards legislation that will enable developers to build out our downtown with reckless abandon.
Fortunately, this time around I’m not the only person who thinks that this is an insanely bad idea. A group has formed to save Chappaqua , they have a petition and are raising legal fees in an attempt to stop this chaos.
We’ve all been asked to make public comments. I am not holding my breath thinking that public comments will stop this train wreck. But I put some comments together anyway and figured I’d share them here as well as emailing my town board.
No one else in my community is really taking about the elephant in the room: climate change. It’s true that we have been focused on the pandemic and on the malignant narcissist currently residing in the White House. It doesn’t mean that we are not still in a climate emergency. Covid19 has helped cut our carbon emissions, but not close to the amounts needed according to the IPCC. Climate change is still a far bigger threat than Covid is.
Here’s what I wrote to my town board.
I write my public comments on the Form Based Code with Linda Zhang in mind. Linda, a Greeley grad, ended her life in July of 2020.
Before she died, she wrote an open letter and scheduled it to be emailed to the New York Times on the following day. As she wrote in her letter to the New York Times, “despite what we all know, the world still considers environmentalism to be something noble, something additional, rather than something necessary”. She felt lonely not having anyone understanding her for ”being the only one who sees the world for what it really is: a train wreck waiting to happen” if there were no drastic changes in how we live.
To learn more about Linda’s Memorial Fund for the Environment, here’s the link: https://www.gofundme.com/f/linda-j-zhang-memorial-fund-for-the-environment
No doubt Linda had read and understood the 2018 IPCC report which states that we have less than 12 years to dramatically cut our carbon emissions. If not, we will exceed 2 degrees celsius of warming which will enable numerous positive feedback loops to kick in paving the way for up to 5 degrees celsius of warming leaving a planet that is for the most part uninhabitable.
The 2018 IPCC report summary for policy makers can be found here:
If you need a summary of the summary, this one sentence sums it up nicely from the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy:
Due to the intense urgency of the climate crisis, global emissions must drop 50 percent by 2030 and reduce a further 50 percent from that level by 2040 to achieve net-zero by midcentury — this is the science-based target of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
The Form Based Code DGEIS fails to address climate change in any way. Under the 2019 amendments to SEQRA, a DGEIS is supposed to consider climate change and the impacts of any development.
SEQRA requires an analysis of the “environmental impact of the proposed
action including short-term and long-term effects.” I do not see any analysis of short term and long term effects in this document. Please refer me to where I can find this analysis.
The DGEIS failed to consider climate change, and the increase in carbon emissions that the form based code will ultimately contribute to our community. During a time where we must be dramatically cutting carbon emissions, this Form Based Code does quite the opposite.
I implore our town board to think globally and act locally when it comes to creating a livable future for our families. Listen to the youth, they are wiser than their years. They will be directly impacted by your actions.
“And since the climate crisis is a crisis that never once has been treated as a crisis, people are simply not aware of the full consequences from our everyday life. People are not aware that there is such a thing as a carbon budget and just how incredibly small that remaining carbon budget is. And that needs to change today.” -Greta Thunberg World Economic Forum, Davos 2019
