At Tuesday’s City Council meeting, the Council overwhelmingly supported three major environmental items on the agenda.

They were:
 
1) Addressing polystyrene (styrofoam) use in the city. (B. Lowenthal, O’Donnell)
 
2) Developing a Plastic Bag Reduction program (B. Lowenthal, O’Donnell)
 
3) Reviewing a report on Water Quality in Long Beach (B. Lowenthal, S. Lowenthal)

I posted about these measures on Monday, and got a response back from a reader with a different point of view. Many of you might now Joe Weinstein, take a look at his perspective below.

Response from resident Joe Weinstein:
 
The LB Post’s Robert Garcia yesterday praised the LB Council for taking up (so far, mainly in order to pass the buck on) three environmental topics: styrofoam, plastic bags and water quality.

Interestingly, the Council has yet to engage on Garcia’s biggest single identified environmental issue.

His comment began by finding that ‘…one of the most important issues facing our world today is …global warming.’ He went on to claim that on this and other big issues the President and Congress have failed, the Governor and Legislature have done well, and that our own City Council is doing ‘pretty good’.

That’s utterly wrong as to the Council!

Our City Council and City Hall continue to disregard the significant prospective catastrophic impacts of global warming (from sea level rise) ON Long Beach (including the prospective drowning of the Port and Belmont Shore and other low-lying neighborhoods).

Even worse, at the same time they continue to support policies that promote significant WORSENING OF global warming – from maintenance and even increase of massive goods movement and air transport activities: the stock in trade of City-Hall-favored enterprises like the Port, the Airport and Boeing.

As a big city at big risk from global warming that nonetheless is doing its best to promote notably MORE of it, LB is now setting an interesting and important example, one too big and significant for the rest of the world to ignore.

If our current local example is allowed to stand, global warming WILL get out of control, and WILL have its worst impacts on everyone everywhere.

It’s quite simple: the rest of the country and the world is not going to be played for suckers- making their sacrifices to stop global warming – when a big city at big risks from it nonetheless gets to keep on promoting it big-time.