Celebrate Earth Day with Climate Caucus

Today is Earth Day, our annual reminder that the environment we live in today exists because of past grassroots environmental activism.

U.S. senator to Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson, organized the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. For context, this was several years after Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, detailing the damaging effects of pesticides on wildlife and human health. It was at a time when air pollution and urban decay were highly visible; a time when the Cuyahoga River caught fire because it was so polluted.

Twenty million people across the U.S. came out on that first Earth Day to demand the government protect human and environmental health from polluting industries. Later that year, under Republican President Richard Nixon, Congress established the Environmental Protection Agency and passed the Clean Air Act. The entire Senate voted for the Clean Air Act. One House Representative voted against it. In the early 1990s, President George H. W. Bush led the bipartisan effort to expand the Clean Air Act. It passed with a wide majority in both the House and the Senate.

New Haven has poor air quality. Most of its air pollution comes from fossil-fuel based activities: local transportation, local industrial activity, and other cities and states. As a result, New Haven has the highest rate of asthma hospitalization in Connecticut and a higher than national rate of asthma, with low-income communities of color suffering at disproportionately higher levels.

A federal carbon fee and dividend is one of the most promising strategies to reduce fossil fuel consumption.

The Citizens’ Climate Lobby launched in 2007 to engage citizens in lobbying Congress to pass a federal carbon fee and dividend bill.

Briefly, fossil fuels would be taxed at the source at an initial $15 per ton of CO2 and increasing $10 per ton each year. Companies would respond by passing on the cost to consumers, but the funds collected would be redistributed equally to households as a monthly dividend. Households that consumed less than the average amount of fossil fuels (an estimated of households) would receive more than they spent or would break even, so many would benefit financially.

Households that consumed more than the average amount would end up spending more on increased energy costs than what they receive in their dividend. This provides a financial incentive to both the consumer and the producer to shift consumption away from fossil fuels. Studies suggest that over 20 years, this system could lead to a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels and create 2.8 million American jobs.

CCL now has hundreds of local chapters across the U.S. and the world, all working towards passing national carbon fee and dividend legislation. CCL chapters focus on leveraging local grassroots energy to engage Congressional representatives on climate change action. In February 2016, south-Florida Reps. Carlos Curbelo, R-Florida, and Ted Deutch, D-Florida, founded the Climate Solutions Caucus, a bipartisan group in the House of Representatives committed to finding policy solutions to climate change.

Currently, 19 Republican and 19 Democrat representatives have joined the Caucus.

Air pollution doesn’t care what your political beliefs are. Neither does water pollution, or rising sea levels. I’m reminded, by Senator Blumenthal, of Margaret Mead’s quote to “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

And so, in celebration of Earth Day, in recognition of how devastating climate change impacts are on our most vulnerable populations, in hopes that we will rally together as one united community to reject air pollution in New Haven, I’m calling on Senator Blumenthal and Senator Murphy to help establish a bipartisan Climate Caucus in the U.S. Senate. I’m calling on Representative DeLauro to reach out to a Republican House colleague and to join the Caucus together. And I’m calling on the New Haven community to call your representatives to tell them that you support this decision.

Please join us this Saturday to celebrate Earth Day in New Haven with the Rock to Rock Earth Day Ride (www.rocktorock.org) and the March for Science (www.sciencemarchnhv.org).