City Climate Policy
Passive versus Active Voice
The first sentence in the handout of proposed City Climate Action Plan uses the passive voice. Passive verbs take attention away from the subject and take attention away from the specific action when that action might come across as hostile to someone. When writing the Climate Policy, the City must not use the passive voice.
Passive: Climate change is recognized as one of the greatest environmental challenges of our time.
We get an active voice, by rewriting the sentence, making naming and making known the subject. Also, substituting "emergency" for "change".
Active: The City recognizes the Climate Emergency as the greatest environmental challenge of our time.
Foxes and Hedgehogs
Hedgehogs focus on one grand strategy and do not waiver from their goal. Foxes see all the details and what might go wrong in the future. By experiencing a process that includes both and working to hold both in our minds, then over time and space the City successfully scales up actions and solutions.
The USA owns the label of the largest overall contributor to climate change thru about 2018. However, when the USA completely eliminates carbon emissions, we barely effect the future course of the climate. This means we need a different strategy. The City's Climate Action Plan must drive down the whole world’s emissions by setting an example and exporting our experience, technology and policy.
How can the USA and the City drive down the emissions of other countries? By making clean technologies irresistible to the entire world. The City must set an example for cities in other countries, like Sister Cities. Implementing clean technologies in the City drives down their cost and creates jobs in Oregon. Then that success gets exported to other cities and countries.
By scaling up clean energy industries using subsidies, Germany lowered the price of solar and wind for everyone, worldwide, forever. The City's Climate Action Plan needs a similar broad goal.
The City's biggest impact happens by driving down the cost of technologies that reduce carbon emissions and making them the cheapest way to provide the energy, food, and transportation for people worldwide.
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