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Recommit to climate action with all-electric policy
Editor:
I appreciate Gennady Sheyner’s excellent reporting on the Palo Alto City Council meeting Feb 26. The Council struggled with a difficult decision to place a moratorium on our Reach Code, a requirement for all-electric appliances in new construction. This code is critical to achieving our city’s climate goals. The decision was deemed necessary due to the lawsuit against a similar reach code of the City of Berkeley by the American Restaurant Association.
While the American Restaurant Association brought the suit, a recent filing by the California Public Utilities Commission showed that SoCalGas admitted it paid $1.14 million to the law firm representing the Restaurant Association in its suit against the City of Berkeley. The fossil fuel companies know the climate action train is coming down the tracks. They can’t stop it but they can slow it down by tying up these climate policies in court. This can go on for years.
I was pleased to see our City Council determined to find a workaround. They agreed to move forward, with urgency, on a policy to incentivize construction of all electric homes.
I hope we take heed from this latest setback and recommit strongly to action for a sustainable future. We cannot let the fossil fuel companies destroy our health for the sake of their shareholder profits. This example should galvanize our support of the City Council for strong climate action policies and direct our own personal actions toward sustainable electric homes.
Susan Chamberlain
Byron Street, Palo Alto
Traffic safety solutions demand data analysis
Editor:
The February 23 issue of the Palo Alto Weekly contained articles about recent bicycling/pedestrian accidents. One involved a child leaving school, hit while crossing a street. A contributing factor may have been ‘walk’ signals with different phases, leading to some confusion. People have suggested various “solutions” including crossing guards. I wouldn’t count on that working: once while running along Middlefield Road, I stopped for a signal at East Meadow. A crossing guard on the other side of Middlefield yelled at me repeatedly telling me I could cross the street. I ignored him: Traffic was moving on Middlefield and neither of us could see the left-turn signal for traffic that could cross my path. His “walk light” might have been on, but mine wasn’t.
Then there’s the recent fatality on Embarcadero Road. The reports in various newspapers indicate that a bicyclist had stopped in the left lane, but at the location of the accident, there are left-turn lanes. The obvious question is whether or not the victim was in the left-turn lane at the time of the accident and if not, why not. There is apparently a video of the accident recorded by a dash cam, so the police department should be able to provide some definitive data as to where the bicyclist had actually stopped. You really need that sort of data to develop any sort of meaningful improvements.
Bill Zaumen
Clara Drive, Palo Alto
Schools must act to prevent suicides
Editor:
Terribly, depressingly, tragically, self-inflicted teenage deaths have become a fact of Palo Alto life.
From 2002 through 2020 we lived through the loss of 15 high-schoolers, and now our total has climbed to 16 with the suicide on February 20th of a 16-year-old girl from Gunn High. We mourn for her and her loved ones.
One cause of our suicides has been the dearth of thinking, empathy, and action from school officials. They’ve ignored the sage exhortation of the high schools’ consultant on mental health, Dr. Shashank Joshi, who in a special 2015 speech to the superintendent, school board and all Palo Altans, downplayed the role of mental illness in our deaths to declare, “… environmental factors must be examined closely.” [italics mine]
For a teenager, environment is synonymous with high school. But the harsh climates of operation at Gunn and Paly have been left unchanged by superintendents, principals and instructional supervisors. Policies on class-size, on communication about amounts of homework and AP loads, on cellphone use, on continual course grading and massive cheating have not been changed — leaving the daily, four-year grind to gradually become murderous.
No, high schools don’t cause teenage despair, but there is much they can do to make it more bearable, more survivable. Gunn, for example, has never calmly asked itself the question: “Though we don’t think it’s the case, is there anything in the way we run our school that might make a suicide more likely?”
The district’s runaway cheating and, now, the introduction of AI chatbots, inflict misery and moral ambivalence on students. They must wrestle with “To cheat or not to cheat” on virtually every assignment, decide to compete with the GPA-obsessed crowd or not — which is deeply discouraging. And the district is asking its teenagers to be complicit in other debilitating crimes. Hundreds of engineers have declared that AI may pose an existential threat to humanity, and The New York Times has sued OpenAI for billions for stealing copyrighted content to train their chatbots. But despite this plagiarism, our high-schoolers are now to use chatbots for writing — even though this denies them a chance at joyful self-expression, demeans their originality and stifles their learning to think, since it is through writing that we learn to think.
There are things in the way we run our schools that add to student despair, and until this changes, nothing will.
Marc Vincenti
Leland Avenue, Palo Alto
Editor’s note: Help is available
Any person who is feeling depressed, troubled or suicidal can call 988, the mental health crisis hotline, to speak with a crisis counselor. In Santa Clara County, interpretation is available in 200 languages. Spanish speakers can also call 888-628-9454. People can reach trained counselors at Crisis Text Line by texting RENEW to 741741.
Ahead of Earth Day, ‘lean on the sustaining infinite’
Editor:
Earth Day is coming up soon. We hear a lot about sustainability, conservation, ecology, natural resources, global warming, and once in a blue moon, the disastrous effects of over population and what we can do about it.
What is SUSTAINABILITY? “the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level” “avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance.”
Mary Baker Eddy states in “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures”, “To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, to-day is big with blessings.”
There is a poem by Jill Gooding, based on this statement that has meant a lot to me.
THREE L’S FOR LIFE
Lean on the sustaining infinite
And blessings will be yours.
Lean not on person, place, or thing
Or economic laws;
But lean upon all-blessing God
Who will all needs supply
And give to all abundant good
That money cannot buy.
Let the reign of Truth and Life,
The reign of Love divine,
Be now established within me
To show God’s clear design
Of Oneness, indivisible,
Of He and me as one,
As water is to ocean,
As sunbeam is to sun.
Love with a heart of tenderness
Your enemies and friends;
However hard this may appear
It’s the quality that mends.
For Love is God in action,
A presence that is felt;
A healing and a saving power
That will all discord melt.
So lean, and let, and love,
This is the balanced Way;
It’s free from self-will, pressure, stress,
It welcomes in God’s day;
The leaning is so gentle,
The letting is so free,
And loving is the only way
To think, and speak, and be.
—Jill Gooding
Jackie Leonard-Dimmick
Walnut Avenue, Atherton
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