Greens gone wild
Things got a little hot for representatives of Wakefield’s Environmental Sustainability Committee at last week’s Town Council meeting. But for once, they couldn’t blame climate change.
The leading ladies of the ESC must have been a bit dumbfounded by the criticism leveled at them. After all, they’re the good guys (or gals) who are “doing the work” to save the planet, literally at all costs.
Up to now, they’ve been unaccustomed to hearing a discouraging word while getting the town to adopt pretty much any climate boondoggle they propose, from the Specialized Energy Code to the Climate Leader Communities program.
It’s now clear why ESC founder Julie Smith-Galvin decided to push the pricey Climate Leaders program through at her second-to-last meeting on the Town Council. Time was running out and she knew that without her vote it didn’t have a chance in hell of passing.
Now Wakefield is stuck with it.
The ESC has been on a mission of its own making, pursuing an agenda that members assigned to themselves, and a very expensive one at that.
But money is no object when you’re fighting an “existential threat” like climate change. One of the ESC’s “Guiding Principles” as listed on their web page is to “Think beyond first costs and consider long-term, cumulative impacts when making policy and financial decisions.”
Town Councilor Ed Dombroski noted that he had yet to hear anyone on the ESC talk about the financial impact of their objectives.
“There is a tremendous disconnect,” he said, “between having passion for what you believe is right and the achievement of goals at any cost.” He said that he could not think of any other town committee that does not weigh costs as part of their discussions.
But hey, when you’re the smartest kids in the class and you absolutely know that climate change is an existential crisis, of course you’re going break a few norms.
One of the things that the ESC has been working hard on lately is a town-wide Climate Action Plan, a policy that would impose strict energy standards on private homes and businesses as well as municipal departments.
“Have we tasked you with that?” Town Council chairman Mike McLane inquired.
“No,” was the sheepish, one-word reply from the town’s climate gurus.
“This body (the Town Council) is the policy-making body in town,” McLane reminded them.
Not long after their formation, ESC members decided that the original, rather bland six-point mission that they had been assigned in 2019 when the Town Council established the ESC would not suffice to address the climate emergency facing the planet. So, they took it upon themselves to create their own, much more expansive mission statement and posted it on their web page, never dreaming that anyone would notice, much less question it.
But eventually, members of the Town Council did notice that ESC members had, on their own, revised their assigned mission. Turns out, they can’t do that. It’s contrary to Town Bylaws.
So, now their roles and responsibilities have been trimmed back to those assigned by the Town Council back in 2019.
We can only pray the planet survives.
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[This column originally appeared in the September 19, 2024 Wakefield Daily Item.]
Filed under: Columns & Essays, Humor, Nature & Wildlife, News, Opinion, Politics, Wakefield | 10 Comments
Tags: climate, Climate Change, Climate Leader Communities, conservation, cost, Edward Dombroski, energy, environment, Environmental Sustainability Committee, environmentalism, ESC, Global Warming, Humor, Julie Smith-Galvin, Mark Sardella, Massachusetts, Melissa Eusden, Michael McLane, mission statement, Opinion, planet, policy, Politics, recycling, Specialized Building Code, Tiana Veldwisch, Town Council, Wakefield Daily Item, Wakefield MA
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Mark Sardella 
The ESC people don’t think that they are smarter than anyone else. They simply know more about the subject of climate change than people who have made little or no effort to learn about it. That doesn’t make them smarter than anyone else. It does make their opinion on the subject worth more than the opinion of someone who knows next to nothing about it.
They don’t think that Wakefield alone can save the planet. They do think that Wakefield should set an example for others to imitate.
They are aware that doing something about climate change will be expensive. They also know that doing nothing will be beyond expensive.
The public needs to know what its real choices are – now.
It’s truly sad when individuals presume ignorance on the part of others because they simply disagree with them. This is arrogance at its’ most despicable.
Thank you for this, Mark. I had no idea these morons were just running off the rails. I was stunned. They just took a few simple instructions and considered that a LICENSE?? I have been wondering where they were getting all this authority from. Now I know – they never did! When the Anointed Wise Councilors say you’ve gone too far….
The authority likely comes from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
I’m still wondering how the fire department is going to magically create an extra foot of roadway on North Avenue. Keeping the math simple, 12+12=24. And 8+8+8=24. With 12 foot lanes, if the vehicles going in both directions pull to the side, there is 8 feet in the middle and the fire trucks and ambulances can roll down the yellow line. But 11.5 + 11.5 = 23. 23 feet is one foot less than the needed 24 — the fire trucks ain’t gonna fit. So they call mutual aid from Reading — and Reading runs into the same problem from the other end.How many people have to die before someone figures out that we need lanes that are at least 12 feet wide?!? Or will the new battery-powered fire trucks also be able to fly? (It makes about as much sense…)
What people don’t realize is that when the fire trucks are stationary at a major fire — pumping water, holding a ladder upright, etc — their engines are wide open, as if they were driving down Route 128. So after a few hours, there is someone whose job it is to lug 5 gallon cans around and refuel all the trucks. This is particularly true when a ladder truck (and the pumper feeding it) is hosing down smouldering wreckage 12 hours later. I can (and do) swap batteries out of my cell phone but you ain’t gonna swap them out of a fire truck. And definitely not at the fire scene… Battery trucks will be out of service after a couple of hours….
And as to Global Cooling, aka Global Warming, aka Climate Change, there is interesting new research on El Sol — you know, that massive hydrogen bomb some 93 million miles away that bathes us in electromagnetic radiation, including radiation in the visible spectrum which we call “light.” It seems that the Sun produces varying amounts of super-short wavelength cosmic rays (the shorter the wavelength, the more energy it has) and while the earth’s magnetic field deflects them and the Ozone Layer absorbs them, their energy becomes heat, much as the (much longer) microwaves in your microwave oven heat your food (by spinning the bent water molecule, but I digress). It seems that the peak transmission of these particular waves, which apparently no one knew about before, corresponds to the solar minimum in the 11 year sunspot cycle, when the north and south magnetic poles of the sun reverse. (The Earth’s north and south magnetic poles historically have reversed once every ~450,000 years and last did so 780,000 years ago — so that could be currently happening…) My point is that we have a wildly varying energy source, and a planet that wobbles on its orbit as gravity from the other planets and other things slightly on its orbit. (Think trying to predict the exact path of a ricochet bullet — there are so many variables that it is impossible to do precisely.) And the other thing is that Wakefield once had a mile-thick glacier on top of it — it dug our lakes and Melrose’s Ell Pond, and is why there once was gravel in the Nahant Street Pit. The glaciers then receded, and are still receding — but sometime in the future, Wakefield will again be buried under a mile of ice. And as to glaciers, the US military did a lot of classified research during the Cold War which is now being gradually declassified because the Soviet Union is no more. A lot of work was done on Greenland which was strategically important as a bomber base — and this included core samples, drilling through the mile of ice, and all the way down into the bedrock so what they knew what they were dealing with. And as the military is want to do, they promptly classified these cores and left them stored in a freezer for 60 years.
Well, between the bottom of the glacier and the bedrock was plant material indicating that Greenland was once not only ice-free but warm enough to have stuff growing on it. The Vikings called Greenland “Vinland”, or “Wine Land” as it apparently was warm enough for grapes to grow. Grapes grow in Wakefield, the Concord grape was perfected in nearby Concord, MA — so it is entirely possible that Greenland once had a climate similar to Wakefield’s My point is that I am a researcher — I wrote a 203 page dissertation which is now in the Library of Congress — and I would NEVER have gotten away with the shoddy science that the climate gurus do. And when China is sending so much visible pollution across the Pacific that the air sensors in California flunk the air quality there (on really solid grounds), why are we worried about Wakefield. And why the heck aren’t we worrying about trying to fit an 8 foot wide fire truck through a 7 foot wide hole?!?
Your post is not coherent enough to reply to. Try to reformulate your ideas and then we can talk.
You seem to be suggesting that global warming (which is not aka climate change) is being caused by variations in the amount of heat that the sun is sending our way. You say that this amount of heat is “wildly varying”, according to an “new study” for which you provide no attribution.
But if the amount of heat that the Earth receives from the sun were varying wildly, then the average surface temperature of the earth would vary wildly. But it doesn’t. It shows a gradual steady rise. Now this rise plays out as varying forms of climate change — but the rise is not “wildly varying”.
Here is what NASA has to say about variations in the sun as ur source of heat:
“According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the current scientific consensus is that long and short-term variations in solar activity play only a very small role in Earth’s climate. Warming from increased levels of human-produced greenhouse gases is actually many times stronger than any effects due to recent variations in solar activity.
“For more than 40 years, satellites have observed the Sun’s energy output, which has gone up or down by less than 0.1 percent during that period. Since 1750, the warming driven by greenhouse gases coming from the human burning of fossil fuels is over 270 times greater than the slight extra warming coming from the Sun itself over that same time interval.”
United Nations … that more humorous than the Marx and Engels approach commonly used by the special group.
then the average surface temperature of the earth would vary wildly. But it doesn’t Actually, it does. Montreal, London, and Moscow are all about the same distance from the equator.Yet their temperatures vary wildly — ask Napoleon…. The logical holes in this climate hysteria are so big that you could drive a double-winged snow plow through without hitting anything. It’s a religion, and I believe we should treat it as such.