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While Washington Fiddles, Many States

Facing Up to Threats of Climate Change
April 02, 2019 7:30 AM Steve Baragona

Students hold banners and posters during a demonstration against climate

change in New York, March 15, 2019.

WASHINGTON — When Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed

Markey introduced their Green New Deal resolution, Markey said it would be
"the greatest blue-collar job creation program in a generation."

President Donald Trump, on the other hand, said it would "put millions of
Americans out of work."

Battle lines have been drawn with the first major U.S. proposal to tackle
climate change in nearly a decade: Does stopping global warming mean
wrecking the economy? Or is failing to act worse?
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In the coming months, Voice of America will explore the prospects for
salvaging the environment without killing off jobs.

We will meet winners and losers in the energy transition. Our first stop will be
in Markey's home state of Massachusetts, where an energy transition is well
underway. We will visit a town where one of the state's last coal-fired power
plants closed, shedding coal jobs but gaining a cutting-edge solar farm. We
will see how Massachusetts' investments in the green economy are paying
dividends in jobs and economic growth.

FILE - U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Ed

Markey (D-MA) hold a news conference for their proposed Green New Deal to
achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in 10 years, at the U.S. Capitol in
Washington, Feb. 7, 2019.

Though the Senate has voted down Markey and Ocasio-Cortez's nonbinding
Green New Deal resolution, the proposal has put climate change and reducing
greenhouse gas emissions back on the agenda on Capitol HIll. Even Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a steadfast opponent of measures to reduce
carbon emissions, now acknowledges global warming is a real and human-
induced threat.

Trump, by contrast, has called climate change a hoax and sees unfettered
production of coal, oil and natural gas as the path to economic expansion.
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Hotter, drier, wetter

Pressure is growing on elected officials to do something. The impacts of

climate change are increasingly obvious.

Eight of the 10 hottest years on record have piled up in just the last decade.

Hotter and drier conditions in California helped spread the wildfires that
caused $24 billion in damage and claimed 106 lives last year. Those fires broke
the record for area burned, a record that was set just the year before.

A warmer atmosphere holds more water, making epic soakers like last year's
Hurricane Florence more likely. That $24 billion disaster followed 2017's
Hurricane Harvey, which did $127.5 billion in damage to Houston and the
surrounding areas.
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And this is just the beginning. Scientists from 13 government agencies

estimated that if emissions remain high, extreme heat would slice $155 billion
annually from labor productivity by 2090 as more days are too hot to work.
Dwindling water supplies for cities and industries would take a $316 billion toll
each year. Annual health care costs for West Nile Virus, just one of several
diseases expected to rise with warming temperatures, would be $3 billion
higher.

Polls show Americans feel the threat of a changing climate more strongly than
ever. Seventy-three percent say global warming is happening, and 62 percent
say it is mostly human-caused. Both figures are the highest since the Yale
Program on Climate Communication started polling in 2008.

Two-thirds say they are "worried" or "very worried" about global warming.
For the first time, that includes a third of conservative Republicans.

Meanwhile, the federal government is moving in the opposite direction. Trump

has moved to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate treaty. His
administration is working to loosen Obama administration regulations limiting
greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and vehicles.

That has left states, local governments and businesses to fill in the gap. But it
will not be easy or cheap.
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Pricing pollution

One possible tool: Put a price on the carbon pollution that is causing global
warming in the first place.

Raising the price reduces demand for more-polluting fuels and encourages
companies and consumers to find cheaper, cleaner alternatives, economists
say.

Pricing carbon would also raise revenue that can be returned to taxpayers or
invested in reducing emissions.

Participants walk past the main entrance of the One Planet Summit, in
Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris, France, Dec. 12, 2017.

Nine U.S. states price carbon through a cap-and-trade system, a market-based

approach in which polluters buy permits for each ton of carbon dioxide they
emit. California has its own program.

And economic growth in these states has continued as greenhouse gas

emissions have declined.
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"There's a lot of rhetoric about how a carbon tax or a greenhouse gas tax
would wreck the economy," said Brookings Institution economist Adele
Morris. "There's absolutely no peer-reviewed evidence that supports that
assertion."

But these policies are not politically popular. A national cap-and-trade

proposal died in Congress in 2010. Last November, Washington state voters re-
jected a carbon tax.

And they would not solve the problem on their own. Pledges the United States
and others made in Paris will not achieve the ultimate goal of the accord: Keep
global warming to "well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels."

That would take a carbon price of at least $40 to $80 per ton, rising to $50 to
$100 by 2030, according to a World Bank-backed commission. It's only about
$15 per ton in California, and $5 in the nine-state market.

"There's an open question whether politically, it's achievable to hit some of

the temperature targets that scientists have recommended," Morris said.
"That's the conundrum. What's the willingness to pay (in carbon taxes) of the
American electorate? How far can we go before we hit a wall?"

FILE - Kristin Cook, right, of Potomac, Md., joins a rally outside the White House
in Washington.
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Filling the federal vacuum

As Trump moves to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate treaty,
many states are moving forward on their own.

Most require power providers to source a percentage of their energy from

renewable or zero-carbon sources. Several have recently increased these
requirements. New Mexico recently joined California in aiming to be 100 per-
cent renewable by mid-century.

And the private sector is stepping up, as well.

After Trump announced the United States would withdraw from the Paris
agreement, more than 2,000 businesses and investors declared that they
continue to support the climate accord.

A group of large investors managing more than $30 trillion in assets is

pushing major corporations in their portfolios to get on board.

"Any company that's a high-emitting sector, we need to work with them to

radically change their emissions or divest from them," said Mindy Lubber,
president of Ceres, a sustainability nonprofit. Ceres is a founding partner of the
initiative known as Climate Action 100+.

Under pressure from the group, oil giants Shell and BP recently said they will
tie executives' bonuses to reaching climate goals. Major mining corporation
Glencore agreed not to expand its coal mining business.

For investors, Lubber says, the economic risk comes not from fighting climate
change.

"If we don't stop global warming, we wreck the economy," she said.
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Steve Baragona
Steve Baragona is an award-winning multimedia
journalist covering science, environment and health.

He spent eight years in molecular biology and infectious disease research

before deciding that writing about science was more fun than doing it. He
graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a
master’s degree in journalism in 2002.