Marin climate activists urge supporters to engage in November election

September 20, 2016

Experts on global warming told a crowd of several hundred people in San Rafael this week that the Nov. 8 election figures to be a key turning point in the battle to prevent irreversible climate change.

The Time to Lead on Climate coalition, which consists of more than a dozen Marin environmental organizations, held its third educational forum in Dominican University’s Angelico Hall Monday night. Speakers included Michael Wara, an associate professor of law at Stanford University and former climate scientist; Kate Gordon, vice chair of climate and sustainable urbanization at the Paulson Institute; and Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, a former attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“I disagree with those who say that this is the most important election of our lifetime,” said the event’s moderator, Novato Councilman Josh Fryday. “It’s not the most important election of our lifetime; it’s the most important election of this planet’s lifetime.”

Before recently starting a new job as president of the Golden State Opportunity Foundation, Fryday served as chief operating officer of NextGen Climate in San Francisco.

Fryday highlighted the differences between the two presidential candidates’ policies on global warming.

TRUMP OPPOSITION

Republican candidate Donald Trump has called climate change a “big scam for a lot of people to make a lot of money.” He has pledged to shore up the coal industry, reverse commitments President Obama made at the Paris climate conference in 2015 and ease regulations on fossil fuel emissions.

By contrast, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has called climate change an urgent threat; she supports the Paris Agreement and Obama’s clean power plan, which uses the Environmental Protection Agency to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

Huffman said Trump is hardly an anomaly in the Republican party when it comes to climate change. Huffman said Republicans are the only conservative political party in the world that continues to deny the reality of global warming and its human cause.

“The Republican Party is not only bad on climate change; it is recklessly, dangerously, destructively bad, and it is getting worse, not better,” Huffman said. “These are the facts. If you care about good climate policy you better be rooting for Democrats up and down the ballot in this election.”

STRATEGIC ADVICE

Gordon provided some strategic advice on how to win over people who so far haven’t taken much interest in the climate change issue or who are outright skeptics.

“I’m sort of a climate change denier, denier,” Gordon said. “I don’t think there are climate deniers. I think it is a matter of priority and relevance.”

Gordon said it is necessary to find out what issues people care about and then point out to them how climate change ties in. For example, Gordon said when she spoke to businessmen in Iowa about climate change as part of a project backed by Michael Bloomberg, Henry Paulson and Tom Steyer, she pointed out that global warming could result in 80 percent drops in crop yields in some parts of southern Iowa.

“That is a big deal in Iowa,” Gordon said.

She said that climate change is an issue that can feel overwhelming and apocalyptic.

“But the impacts are extraordinarily local and the solutions and opportunities are extraordinarily local. So bringing it home to people is not that hard once you start from where people already are. Your conversation is different in Ohio than in California; it is different in the Bay Area than it is in Fresno.”

GROWING CONCERN

Wara spoke about climate tipping points and climate policy tipping points.

“The climate tends to be stable until it isn’t,” Wara said. “ Then it changes rapidly to new stable states.”

He said there is growing concern due to the devastating fires in California and loss of trees due to disease and pests that what we’re witnessing is landscape transition, “ what happens when you go over a tipping point and are moving toward a new equilibrium.”

Wara added, however that “there are other kinds of tipping points that are much more hopeful and worth focusing on.”

For example, he said solar energy can now compete on a level playing field with any other energy source and wind power in the right places is cheaper than the cheapest natural gas.

“Both technologies are continuing to fall in price every year to the point where by the middle of the next decade nothing else will be likely to compete,” Wara said.

He also cited ambitious commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions pledged by President Obama in Paris and California legislators earlier this month by signing SB 32 as examples of possible climate policy tipping points.

“The situation in Washington, a bit like a huge ice sheet, is very stable right now,” Wara said. “It will be stable until one day when it won’t be, when the fragile position adopted by Republican legislators breaks, and when that day comes, all sides need to be ready to adapt and take advantage of the new environment.

“My sense,” Wara said, “is that despite what you read in the press about partisanship in Washington, that day is getting closer.”


Source: by Richard Halstead