Dems offering green policies
Presidential candidates are talking big on climate change
SAN FRANCISCO >> As presidential candidates rush to lay out their plans for reducing emissions and weaning the U.S. off fossil fuels, they’re increasingly taking a page from California and other Western states that have been leading the charge on climate policies.
The entire Democratic field agrees on the need to fight climate change — but environmental activists and voters say that kind of vague rhetoric isn’t enough anymore and are pushing White House hopefuls to take more specific stands.
Two candidates rolled out sweeping plans to cut emissions during visits to the Golden State in recent days, putting a stake in the ground on an issue that Democratic voters rank among their top priorities.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee on Friday outlined a proposal to move the country to fully renewable electricity generation, zero-emission new
vehicles and carbon-neutral new building construction. And former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, using a hike through Yosemite National Park on Monday as a fitting backdrop, unveiled his $5 trillion plan to halve emissions by 2030.
Most, but not all, of the Democratic presidential hopefuls have signed on to support the Green New Deal, the progressive proposal to broadly remove carbon emissions from the U.S. economy and invest in nonpolluting industries. But experts say the muchdebated resolution amounts to more of a wish list than a fleshed-out blueprint.
“In the Obama and Clinton presidential campaigns, neither of them were touching this level” of climate reforms, said Jim Sweeney, a Stanford professor who studies energy and climate policy. He said the discussion of the Green New Deal in Washington, D.C., “may have some very beneficial results — this scale of action is no longer off the table.”
Inslee’s plan has three prongs: He would require utilities nationwide to use 100% clean electricity by 2035 — a more aggressive timeline than a similar law California passed last year. He’d require all new vehicle sales to be electric by 2030. And he’d reform building codes so that newly constructed commercial and residential buildings are zero-carbon by 2030, similar to a plan in Los Angeles.
Inslee laid out a bevy of ideas to achieve those goals, from tax incentives for clean energy projects to investments in deploying more electric vehicle chargers to a “cash for clunkers”-style program that would let drivers trade in their gasoline cars for credits to buy greener ones.
“If you want to go from New York to San Francisco, you need a roadmap, not just a destination,” Inslee said in an interview Thursday after visiting a solar panel-adorned home in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood. “My plan is in part built on things that we know work, some from California, some from my state.”
The economic success of Washington and California, he added, “demonstrate that you grow your economy with clean energy, you don’t restrict its development.”
O’Rourke’s plan isn’t quite as specific as Inslee’s, but it comes with a more fleshed out spending proposal, investing $1.5 trillion in federal funds and trying to coax $3.5 trillion from states and private sources to invest in green energy projects and climate-proofed infrastructure. The former congressman said he would reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and reduce emissions in half by 2030.
“This country needs direction when it comes to meeting the single greatest threat that we’ve ever faced,” he told reporters Monday, with Yosemite’s sequoias and waterfalls in the background.
Of course, any big climate plan would be a tough sell in a Republican-controlled Senate. So O’Rourke and Inslee both emphasized what they could do with executive orders, such as setting a national clean fuel standard that mirrors California’s more stringent rules. Several candidates, including Inslee, also have called for trashing the Senate filibuster, which would likely make it easier to pass a plan through Congress.
“Typically, large government programs are quite inefficient at achieving the ends people want them to achieve,” said Hugh Bussell, the chair of the Alameda County Republican Party. “We prefer a more technological approach to reduce those emissions, rather than the government.”
Environmental activists say the tenor of the race is markedly different from past primaries, with candidates going further with their proposals and making climate change a more central plank of their campaigns. A new CNN poll last week found 82% of Democratic voters listing climate change as a top priority — even above health care, which has long been a key issue for the party.
In another sign that they’re getting serious about it, 12 candidates have signed a pledge to reject money from fossil fuel industry executives, lobbyists or PACs. O’Rourke, who signed the pledge last week, said he was giving back the money his campaign had already received from executives.
“It’s really exciting to see that we are finally going to have the climate election we’ve been demanding for several years now,” said RL Miller, the chair of the California Democratic Party’s environmental caucus, who helped start the movement pushing candidates to take the fossil fuel money pledge.
“I’m not seeing a lot of wishy-washiness or muddling — what I’m generally seeing is the sense that we have a huge problem and we need bold steps,” she said.
Meanwhile, even as O’Rourke and Inslee became the first two candidates with large-scale climate plans, they clashed with each other, with Inslee suggesting O’Rourke hadn’t done enough on the issue over his six years in Congress.
“It’s wonderful that candidates have discovered climate change in the last couple days,” Inslee said at another San Francisco event Thursday when asked about O’Rourke’s plan.
Tom Steyer, the former hedge fund chief who gave tens of millions of dollars to Democratic campaigns and causes in recent years, said that he wasn’t sure yet if he was going to back a candidate in the primary but that the urgency they felt about climate change was the top qualifier.
“Now that fighting climate change polls well, all of a sudden, everyone’s a climate warrior,” Steyer said in an interview. “That’s fine. The question is, do you prioritize it? If it’s not your number one priority, you’re probably not going to get to it.”
Several Democratic candidates also have framed the fight against climate change as an issue of social justice, arguing that minority and poor communities will bear the brunt of impacts.
That was on display Thursday as Inslee visited the house of Gabriela and Javier Rodriguez in San Francisco. The house had recently received a new solar panel installation with help from a nonprofit group that provided workforce training for solar projects in low-income neighborhoods.
“We have to set bold targets so that we can expand thinking about how we could get there,” said Stanley Greschner, the policy director of GRID Alternatives, the nonprofit that installed the shiny new panels on the Rodriguez family’s roof. “They may not be doable today — but hopefully, we find a way to get close to those or totally achieving those goals.”