January 20, 2022

"Go and try something"

Welcome back to The Planet You Save, a weekly newsletter on local climate action. I’m Taylor Kate Brown and this week’s interviewee absolutely wants to talk to you about heat pumps.

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(Palo Alto’s City Hall, with trees painted blue in 2018. For art, apparently.)

One of the first things I did when I started writing a climate newsletter for The Chronicle was create a google alert for “Bay Area” + “climate change”. It wasn’t a particularly nuanced search, but it did lead me to Sherry Listgarten’s “A New Shade of Green”.

A New Shade of Green is a blog she writes for Palo Alto Weekly, a local newspaper in the town you know as the home of Stanford University and plenty of tech and venture capital companies.

Sherry’s background is in computer science, not environmental issues or journalism. But she started writing the blog after talking with some like-minded neighbors (one an actual climate scientist, this is Palo Alto after all) and emailed the Palo Alto Weekly to say they should have a climate column. She was persistent and ended up writing a de-facto one. Now it’s regularly among the most read blogs on the paper’s website.

It’s “relatable,” she says, “because I am just a random person living in Palo Alto, and so is everybody else reading the blog.” But it’s clear Sherry has taken the responsibility of writing about local & state climate policy seriously and with her audience of non-experts in mind. The topics cover both her own curiosity, what’s going on in town, practical concerns and questions she gets from neighbors.

I talked to Sherry about the climate issues she’s focused on and what she’s learned from writing A New Shade of Green. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.

Tell me about Palo Alto’s approach to climate change so far?

It has it’s own utility, which is a rarity. In California there are maybe 20 or something municipal utilities, that means it can have a lot of flexibility on what it does. And so about 10 years ago, [the utility] decided to have carbon-free or what is called carbon-neutral electricity before that was a popular thing to do.

People have adopted solar roofs early, driven electric cars early. Palo Alto also was very early with composting and on wastewater treatment, they’ve been pretty innovative. I would say it’s a pretty environmentally conscious town, it’s part of the culture. With the emissions goals, it made some fairly aggressive ones maybe 15-20 years ago, but the only thing it really managed to accomplish was making electricity carbon neutral. The town has actually not treated it with the seriousness it needed to in order to accomplish those goals, and lately it has recognized that.

Why do you think it wasn’t taken as seriously if the town is environmentally conscious?

I think that was everybody was just paying just lip service. Ten, fifteen years ago, we knew [climate change] was a big deal, but we didn’t really dig into what it would take to hit that goal.

Things like retrofitting every house [to remove gas furnaces and hot water heaters] was almost too big to contemplate. I feel like sometimes local governments make these proclamations because it looks good or it feels good, but without really knowing what’s involved in accomplishing that.

There are a couple of very strong advocates for the environment [in town], this group called Carbon Free Palo Alto and some other people; they’ve been lobbying the city saying, hey, you guys are not making adequate progress on this. Now [Palo Alto] is saying if we were to do this, what would it cost and what options do we have for getting the money and things like that? It would have been better if they’d done this 10 years ago, but at least they’re doing it now.

What do you hear from readers and residents of Palo Alto?

I hear a lot from readers. Sometimes they want to know do I have a person who installs good heat pumps, but also sometimes they weigh in on policy issues, or ask good questions. I hear from lobbyists or from experts involved in these industries. I wrote about price gouging of heat pump water heaters, and heard from BayRen [local climate government group]. They ended up starting a whole effort on their own site to understand what was going on.

The residents of Palo Alto want to know what they can do. But sometimes they worry more about plastic than they do about flying. I try to say, here are the biggest impact things, try to think about what you can do there.

What have you learned about figuring out the differences between climate candidates on the local level?

My first thing is: do they understand what’s going on? They would have an idea of what an 80% [emissions] by 2030 reduction looks like, they would know for the things that would need to get done, what’s hard and what’s easy.

There’s some diversity of opinion right now on the [Palo Alto city] council with regard to how much to prioritize getting people into EVs versus getting people out of cars entirely. You know that’s a very legitimate difference of opinion, and I don’t really care if you’re one or the other, as long as you’re being practical about it.

What would suggest people do to get started on taking action in their town?

I would start off by doing a carbon footprint for themselves and think about how you can reduce your own emissions. Next, look at your power and understand what kind of electricity you’re getting. You can extend that to your city. Find out who in your city knows this stuff and try to find out what it is they’re doing. Who cares? Who’s making an effort? What are the schools doing? What is the city government doing? What is the college doing? What are local businesses doing?

Mostly, people shouldn’t be afraid to make an effort to try. I think even a single individual right now can make a difference, it doesn’t take much right now to flip things in a good direction. Anybody who is willing to spend some time and focus attention, I think can make a difference. I mean, I’ve been surprised — you just have to find one or two other people who are similarly minded, and you’re off to the races.

I would encourage people to really think about what they can do, what are they interested in and then don’t hesitate to go and try something. It can be anything, from an art project to a science project to a government thing to getting solar panels put up at the parking lot of a school.

You can just talk to your neighbors. Hey, you want to come and see my heat pump water heater? Come look, I have an open house. I’m not kidding. I get questions all the time: How big is it? Is it noisy? What does it look like? You will find people who are interested coming out of the woodwork. People want to know this stuff.

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