The chapter on air pollution and climate change details the trajectory and goal of former president Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan in particular while paying attention to the main issues at hand policy-wise in trying to combat the effects of climate change.
The section on the growth of clean energy cites Bloomberg New Energy Finance and Natural Resources Defense Council, explicitly environmentally friendly organizations. But even news magazines have noted the boom in clean energy. “Clean Energy’s Dirty Secret”, the feature this week from Economist, demonstrates that clean energy’s main problem is how cheap it is in fact becoming. As subsidies become less necessary to offset the costs of solar and wind power, the advent of clean energy risks tanking the natural gas and coal industries (the latter of which should have already died naturally). It will take delicate policy to make this huge shift from fossil fuels to renewables, and it will require financial sacrifice at first. We need policymakers willing to make this sacrifice.
Jobs will explode with the switch to renewable energy. The difference will be that these jobs will require more training than mining. They will also come with the benefit of not slowly killing those who work in them. Kevin Book of ClearView Energy Partners has it right: the government must provide the incentives. We cannot trust corporations to make the switch on their own out of- what, a moral compass? Corporations are legally people, but they don’t exactly shed a tear over rising asthma rates.
When the expert from Clean Air Watch cites the EPA’s new ozone standard as baby steps, he fails to recognize the fact of the matter: no one will accept anything greater. Many of those in policymaking literally do not believe climate change exists or that air quality is important. Just this year, Long Island residents discovered thanks to an EPA survey that the carcinogenic chemical 1,4-dioxane is more prevalent in Long Island than anywhere else in the state, and that it can leech through groundwater into drinking water. Not only this, but this chemical is an inhaled chemical as well as one imbibed through drinking water, so Long Island residents that take showers with their unfiltered water are still exposed to one of the most serious carcinogens out there. It has been in the water for several years now, only just discovered, and finally the Suffolk County Water Authority is acting to combat it with an ultraviolet reactor. We in the city are lucky in that our water is some of the safest around, but examples like these demonstrate the slow response that state and federal authorities have to even just checking for environmental degradation and its effects on human health. Long Island has it much worse with its Republican representatives. Congressman Peter King opposes all EPA regulations strongly. Congressman Lee Zeldin does not even believe climate change exists. Climate change is not a partisan issue. The Republican party, thanks in part to the Tea Party’s rise and extremist views, has remained stagnant on an issue that affects all of its constituents, arguing with scientists about the very work they do.
A main theme left out of this, in my opinion, when it comes to policy, is the fact that as it has stood for several decades, climate change remains a partisan issue. While governors and state senators have taken it upon themselves in heavily affected conservative states like Florida to work on coastal resiliency and the like, many of those in Congress still remain skeptical of the fact that climate change even exists. As long as the Republican party refuses to acknowledge as a party that climate change is not only a grave threat to national security and human health, but also that it definitively exists, policy will always remain halfhearted and ineffective.
It is hard to believe that this is still a partisan issue, but you are right, it is.