Climate change a winning issue. Let’s work together to solve it

By Sharon Swan and Mark Reynolds, Citizens’ Climate Lobby Executive Director

As a lifelong resident of the Inland Empire, I have grown more and more concerned about the dangers that climate change brings to our area and for a future for our grandchildren.  We recently witnessed massive wildfires in our local mountains with toxic air and potential flooding to come.  Climate change will bring more drought, fire, and intense weather.

In the home stretch of the 2020 campaign, presidential candidate Joe Biden leaned hard into the issue of climate change, giving a televised climate speech and running climate-focused ads in swing states. His campaign bet that this issue, once considered politically risky, would now be a winner.

That bet paid off. The votes have been tallied, and candidate Biden is now president-elect Biden. But, as is often the case, his party doesn’t have unified control across the whole federal government. President Biden will govern alongside a Democratic House, a conservative Supreme Court, and a Senate that could either have a slim Republican or Democratic majority. That makes “working together” the order of the day.

Encouragingly, Biden understands that people of any party can and do care about climate change. In a speech this fall, he said, “Hurricanes don’t swerve to avoid red states or blue states. Wildfires don’t skip towns that voted a certain way. The impacts of climate change don’t pick and choose. It’s not a partisan phenomenon, and our response should be the same.” 

Some Republicans in the Senate are expressing similar opinions. In October 2020, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) participated in a climate policy webinar with her climate-hawk colleague, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). She noted that bipartisanship gives a policy longevity, so she said, “Let’s work in a way that is going to get the support that you need from both Republicans and Democrats.” 

Our leaders here in the Inland Empire are signaling their readiness to work on climate change, too.  Rep Pete Aguilar and former Riverside mayor, Ronald Loveridge, have said, “Combating climate change will create Inland Empire jobs.”  Rep. Aguilar participated on a Climate Change Forum on October 8th, sponsored by the Redlands Chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby.

These notable voices are responding to an incredible swell of public demand for climate action. According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, the number of Americans who are “alarmed” about climate change has more than doubled in recent years, from 11 percent of Americans in 2015 to 26 percent in 2020. All told, 54 percent of Americans are either “alarmed” or “concerned” about climate change. Here in the Inland Empire, over 70% percent of our community understand that climate change is happening.

Frankly, those numbers make sense. This year has made it starkly obvious that climate change is here and already hurting Americans. More than five million acres have burned across Western states this year, displacing thousands of people. The Southeast has been battered by a record-breaking hurricane season, where storm after storm makes landfall before communities even have time to recover from the previous one. We need to move as quickly as we can to address the root cause of these extreme events: excess greenhouse gas emissions. 

One fast-acting, effective climate policy we should enact is a carbon fee. Congress could charge a fee or price on all oil, gas and coal we use in the United States based on the greenhouse gas emissions they produce. Putting that price on pollution will steer our country toward cleaner options, slashing our harmful emissions across many areas of our economy at once. The revenue from this type of policy can even be given to Americans on a regular basis—a “carbon cashback,” if you will, that would put money in people’s pockets while we transition to a clean-energy economy. 

Carbon fee legislation like this exists in Congress now, known as the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (H.R. 763). It has support from people and organizations across the political spectrum. In California, twenty-five cities have endorsed the Energy Innovation Act.  Representatives Pete Aguilar and Norma Torres have both endorsed H.R. 763.

Our community is ready for our Representatives and Senators to push forward to make this legislation the law of the land. With the incoming president clearly committed to addressing climate change, and millions of Americans eager for solutions, now is the time to act. Congress should seize the opportunity.