Congress is ignoring climate crisis
If you believe our congressmen should protect us from dangers, you might like to know they are not protecting us from climate change! Neither the health effects nor the climate-related effects are being prevented by Senators Boozman and Cotton, nor by Representatives Womack, Westerman, Crawford, and Hill.
Over and over, concerned citizens meet with them about this, and they turn a deaf ear. The Republican Party is balking at doing anything to help.
Our purposefully out-of-touch congressmen are acting as if the climate crisis is not happening and that they don’t have to pay attention to it. The latest International Panel on Climate Change 2023 report practically screams: “Do everything you can everywhere now: pull out all the stops!” (https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/)
But every time there is a vote in Congress that gives these men a chance to improve the government’s response to the coming crises, they turn it down. This delay is unfixable and unforgivable. They don’t have the right to continue to let fossil fuel companies plunder while tipping points pass by unheeded. They are fiddling while Rome burns, and the survival of the human species is on course to end.
We pay their salaries ($174,000 a year, with lifetime health insurance at 28 percent of cost and up to 80 percent of salary after they retire) to protect us from major calamities. Our complacent congressmen are ignoring the most serious problem we have, but they take our money.
It will take everything all at once to prevent a three-degree Centigrade surface temperature rise worldwide. This is projected to put 75 percent of the world’s population at risk of death by severe heat by 2100, with lifestyles and food production severely interrupted, and many species of life gone extinct.
We need to be at net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and need all-electric cars by 2030. By 2050, millions of people are set to be negatively affected by extremes like the last few fire and flood seasons in California and Canada, only much worse. State Farm, Allstate, and AIG Insurance companies ended new homeowner policies in California, due to too many climate-related claims. We need to stop our own extinction since our “leaders” won’t do it.
This month, our congressmen failed us again by ending a rule by the Environmental Protect-us Agency which would have made big trucks cut nitrous oxide emissions by 50 percent. Forty-five percent of our smog in the U.S. is caused by the transportation segment, and big trucks contribute 59 percent of that. Ending the smog reduction rule was a huge missed opportunity.
Over 1,200 people a year in Arkansas die eight years early because of carbon and smog, and countless others have serious health problems. The EPA’s big truck emissions rule would have saved 40,000 lives a year, prevented 34,000 hospitalizations, and prevented 4.8 million workdays lost, nationwide. The Trump relaxation of coal plant regulations was on track to kill an additional 200-1,400 Arkansans a year, compared to the pre-Trump Clean Air Plan.
If you knew a person was murdering 2,600 people a year in Arkansas, you would call the police.
Another miss is that our six congressmen voted against letting China sell us solar panels at a good price to propel our energy transition, since U.S. solar manufacturers cannot keep up right now with demand. There has been a 30 percent tariff on these goods for a while. To stimulate the solar business in the U.S., Biden wanted to remove the tariff for two years, but thanks to our congressmen it will continue. This stifles progress on clean energy, since China will sell where there are lower tariffs.
This spring, our Arkansas legislators voted to squeeze a flood of solar projects to a trickle by ending net metering at a good rate for new customers who go solar after September 2024, to please the major utilities. To do so, our legislators completely ignored the former chairman of the Public Service Commission, who cited evidence that the poor would not be significantly impacted by utilities paying solar producers a fair rate. Net metering is a way to reduce electric bills, defer climate change, and provide clean good-paying jobs.
Before our home solar installation, our electric bill was between $114 and $197 a month. After solar, our monthly electric bill shrank to zero (ka-ching!), plus a $16 service charge to use the grid and a $54 solar loan payment.
Ozarks Electric pays us to make solar energy for use by everyone during peak usage: After we pay off our loan, our bill will be the $16 service charge, and we will have had free electricity for 40 or more years. Our solar array prevents about 1½ tons of annual CO2 emissions. We love solar.
Energy-inefficient building design is another big source of climate risk. Leaky buildings create 27 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. We need to update our energy codes: The state sets them, then city leaders modify and enforce them. Under J.D. Lowery’s leadership at the Arkansas Energy Office, the state adopted a 2014 code which has not been upgraded. Fayetteville is the most progressive city, but is using its modified 2009 energy codes, while what’s recommended is the IECC 2025 code.
See what your city planners are using and urge them to use and enforce the most up-to-date energy codes so what energy is produced stays in our homes instead of escaping through leaky doors and windows. Most builders do things the way their daddy and granddaddy did, which the human species cannot afford now. As Joyce Elliott always said, “When we know better, we should do better!”
The climate crisis is already happening in Arkansas and worldwide. To understand what you can do, read the Climate Action Handbook by Heidi Roop; and to learn more about energy efficient building design, read https://blueprintforbetter.org.
It is urgent that you contact your congressmen and ask them to protect us from climate change. If 1,000 of you do so this week, it will get their attention. The 5 Calls App for your phone makes calling easy. Please say we will replace all the politicians who will not respond by being strong on climate solutions.