Dear Ms Liang,
I am an Oakland resident and a past and future user of OAK.
I want a plan to make OAK a source of local pride and global leadership in responding to the climate crisis. That is not the plan on the table today. This plan only gestures at the climate crisis and aviation’s role in it, and invests nothing serious to help solve it. In fact, what’s proposed would make OAK an increasing part of the problem for years to come.
The plan is insufficient to our moment. I oppose it firmly enough to invest my personal time and resources to publicly work against it.
I hope you will reconsider and submit a better plan. I would expect it to start from the principle that any change to OAK must make it responsible for less CO2e emission. That is, the net climate impact of the airport, calculated globally and not just to the mixing level, and operating as designed, must be at worst steady.
I believe that most Bay Area voters would agree that this is a reasonable expectation for responsible major infrastructure development today: not to accelerate the climate crisis.
One way to achieve this while expanding might be to make binding commitments to only do business with very efficient aircraft, with a continual ratchet to raise the standard over time. If planners sincerely believe that aircraft will be cleaner in the next years and decades, as implied in the environmental impact report, then they should have the courage of their convictions and make ironclad commitments to only work with extremely low-emissions aircraft.
There must be teeth in all such commitments. To make a merely best-effort promise would be to give bad actors an obvious route to forcing us to renege and allow dirty planes to use a large airport. Instead, we must lock ourselves irrevocably into the best outcomes we know how to plan for.
We also need a clear idea of how OAK will fit into a future that prioritizes AC Transit and other low-intensity travel. For example, we must hear convincing reasons why we will not see people flying from OAK to LAX, along the high-speed rail route.
We might even contemplate, for example, a “this flight could have been an e-mail” policy to discourage frivolous business travel. This kind of idea seems fanciful as we imagine the role of an airport today, but it’s clear that we’re approaching a moment of public re-evaluation of the social and political license of aviation. I would like to see OAK and the Port of Oakland leading this shift. I would like to see us benefiting from a future where Oaklanders, Americans, and people everywhere apply higher standards to climate issues.
I would be upset to hear haters say, in twenty or thirty years, that OAK saw what was happening at the end of the beginning of the climate crisis and tried to slip an airport expansion through just before the public cared enough to ask hard questions.
In conclusion, I strongly object to the present plan, and I urge the Port to reconsider it from the ground up, this time with climate issues at its center. If nothing else, the airport itself deserves a plan worthy of the money it’s already had to spend to protect its runways from sea-level rise.
Sincerely,
Charlie Loyd, North Oakland