Marin’s Huffman to pitch Democrats’ climate plan
Lawmaker plans virtual meeting on massive legislative strategy
Marin Rep. Jared Huffman will pitch a new national climate crisis action plan this week that seeks to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions nationwide by 2050.
Huffman will host a virtual town hall-style meeting Thursday to talk about the plan, “Solving the Climate Crisis.” The 547-page report drafted by the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis outlines a legislative roadmap pushing for a massive expansion of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.
In addition, the plan calls for prioritizing environmental issues that disproportionately impact low-income communities and communities of color; achieving net-zero emissions by the electricity sector by 2040; boosting federal transit spending and conversion to zero-emission vehicle fleets; limiting leasing for fossil fuel extraction on offshore and onshore public lands and protecting at least 30% of all U.S. lands and ocean areas by 2030.
“I am excited to see this kind of a comprehensive climate plan released in the Congress. It’s never been done before,” Huffman, DSan Rafael, said on Tuesday. “This is by far the most comprehensive look that any congressional committee has taken.”
Many of the major provisions in the plan were included in Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s $2 trillion clean energy plan that was announced Tuesday. Biden’s platform seeks to stimulate the economy and job growth by expanding the nation’s renewable energy infrastructure and manufacturing industries while working to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Biden’s plan also calls for an expedited 2035 target for netzero emissions by the electricity sector.
“These are the most critical investments we can make for the long-term health and vitality of both the American economy and
the physical health and safety of the American people,” Biden said during a press conference in Wilmington, Delaware.
Huffman said he is pleased to see many of the top-line recommendations of the report have made their way into Biden’s policy platform as well as in recently introduced legislation such as HR 2, known as the Moving Forward Act.
“That’s the way we hope it will work is that this product that we’ve put out will then show the path for specific bills and policies that will follow,” Huffman said.
HR 2, which was approved by the Democraticcontrolled House earlier this month, proposes $1.5 trillion to fix highways, bridges and other infrastructure, expand transit systems, expand broadband capacity to rural areas and boost funding for developing water storage, recycling and desalination projects among other changes.
Among the bill’s policies is Huffman’s $25 billion proposal to modernize the U.S. Postal Service system, including $6 billion to replace the service’s vehicle fleet with zero-emissions and electric vehicles.
“We have this great opportunity to take that shameful fleet and turn it into a shining example of clean transportation, and my bill does that,” Huffman said.
Other policy initiatives being proposed include restoring habitats such as wetlands and salt marshes as well as collaborating with agricultural producers for carbon sequestration. The plan also proposes using natural ecosystems to build resilience to the impacts such as climate change, such as sealevel rise. Part of HR 2 includes $125 million to expand restoration work and climate change resiliency in the San Francisco Bay Estuary.
The priorities laid out in the House plan, Biden’s platform and HR 2 face strong opposition from Republican lawmakers and President Donald Trump who have described the initiatives as job killers.
The Democratic plan “punishes the American economy” and “gives a free pass to China” to pollute, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said in late June after the House plan was released.
Dale Mensing of Redway, Huffman’s Republican challenger in the upcoming November election, said the climate crisis is a “hoax.”
“Big shots such as they, must surely realize that the primary element of science is verifiability, demonstrated by predictability,” Mensing wrote in an email. “The so-called climate crisis is neither verifiable nor predictable. Liberal leaders seek to eventuate the New World Order because they seek to eliminate the Bill of Rights.”
Trump campaign surrogates on Tuesday described Biden’s energy plan as a waste of taxpayer money and sought to compare it to the Obama administration’s clean energy loan guarantee program created as part of the 2009 stimulus effort to bolster an economy reeling from the Great Recession.
Some companies that benefited from that program, including solar panel manufacturer Solyndra, which won a $528 million taxpayer-backed loan guarantee, collapsed after receiving federal subsidies.
“That is Solyndra on steroids,” said Republican House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, in a call with reporters organized by the Trump campaign about the Biden energy plan. “Joe Biden has been here before. You can see his track record.”
A White House statement described HR 2 as being “full of wasteful ‘Green New Deal’ initiatives” that would impede economic growth and impose unnecessary mandates.
“It is heavily biased against rural America,” the statement reads. “It also appears to be entirely debt-financed. And it fails to tackle the issue of unnecessary permitting delays, which are one of the most significant impediments to improving our infrastructure.”
Huffman said that despite Republican colleagues’ talk of wanting to address the nation’s crumbling transportation infrastructure, they find an excuse not to do it.
“That’s pretty week tea if the best you can do is repeat the words ‘Green New Deal’ over and over and hope you scare people away from something that is actually really great for the economy and is going to help communities all over the country,” Huffman said.
Addressing the climate crisis and implementing the plan’s goals will require winning elections, Huffman said.
Doug Wilson, a Marin Conservation League board member and chair of the league’s climate action working group, said while the league has yet to take a formal position on the plan, it contains many issues such as environmental justice and greenhouse gas emissions.
“We have to get away from fossil fuels in transportation, housing and in generating energy itself,” Wilson said. “We don’t have much time and it really means we have to make some fairly radical changes, more radical than most of us would feel comfortable making, but we really have to do that.”
Huffman’s virtual town hall will take place from 4 to 6 p.m. Thursday and will include former California Sen. Fran Pavley and former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy. The public can submit questions by email beforehand to huffmanQandA@mail.house.gov. The town hall can be viewed on Facebook at Facebook.com/RepHuffman or the Marin TV Education Channel — Comcast channel 30, AT&T channel 99, or streaming online at cmcm.tv/30.
The House climate action report can be found at climatecrisis.house.gov/report.