Reuters/Pawel Kopczynski
- The federal government must address the climate, state lawmakers said at Climate Week NYC Tuesday.
- Federal action could help avoid "patchwork regulation" – but it may be difficult in some states.
- One lawmaker said her state focused on talking about jobs to get bipartisan climate-action support.
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The federal government must lead the way on broad climate policy, a group of state legislators said during a Climate Week NYC event on Tuesday.
The session, titled "Keeping Cool: How States Are Leading on Climate Action" and sponsored by the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators, brought together state lawmakers from Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and North Carolina to discuss how they were tackling issues like carbon emissions, while engaging their communities.
"We need federal action to set standards and then allow individual states to take those basic standards and build upon them for their constituencies," state Rep. Alex Valdez, a Colorado Democrat, said during the session. "We need a baseline because without a baseline, we don't have the support of industry. We don't have a place to build from."
Federal action would also help avoid "patchwork regulation," something he said big businesses in industries such as oil and gas, which are responsible for emissions, didn't like. But Valdez acknowledged that passing climate-centric legislation may be easier in some states than others.
In his address to the UN General Assembly this week, President Joe Biden called taking action on the climate crisis "code red for humanity" and said the world was approaching a "point of no return" when it came to extreme weather events, which are taking lives and causing billions of dollars in damage. Biden said he was working with Congress to create climate investments that would lead to well-paying jobs.
State Sen. Reuven Carlyle, a Democrat from Washington, said it was still the states that had a "moral obligation to lead."
"States have to envision a sustainable future, ultimately having the courage to tackle the system's issues of building an equitable approach to decarbonizing our economy," he said.
Carlyle's hope is that states will set a baseline, which will then be responsibly calibrated at the national level, he said.
One of the ways Washington state is taking climate action is through its law for 100% clean energy, which requires the state's utilities to move to a carbon-neutral electric supply by 2030 and hopes to eliminate fossil fuels by 2045. Earlier this year, the state also enacted the Climate Commitment Act, a cap-and-invest bill to reduce pollution in communities disproportionately affected by environmental and public-health issues.
Washington engages key stakeholders in its climate initiatives, including for-profit entities, communities of color, low-income residents, and the business community, Carlyle said.
Environmental equity is also a key part of climate policy in Oregon, where lawmakers have encouraged communities of color, low-income residents, and others to share their vision for climate action, state Rep. Khanh Pham, a Democrat, said during the session.
The state recently passed the Energy Affordability Act to offer discounted rates on utility bills for low-income residents. It also established the Healthy Homes Program to provide weatherization funds focused on reducing energy consumption for residents and has committed to 100% clean electricity by 2040.
"Those are the goals that we wanted to tackle to make sure that we're not just addressing greenhouse-gas emission as an isolated case of just molecules in the sky, but really recognizing that racism, white supremacy, inequality, economic inequality are really at the heart of it," Pham said.
While she echoed the need for a strong federal baseline to support states in climate action, Pham said both state and federal governments needed to focus on building resilient communities.
"We really have to take an interest, a deeper intersectional look at the challenges we face," she said.
Partisanship is one challenge that many states face in taking climate action. Democratic Rep. Pricey Harrison of North Carolina, who moderated the session, said focusing on job creation and the economic influence of climate policy in her state had helped overcome some of these challenges.
North Carolina is among the top states in solar-energy installations and has committed to reducing carbon emissions by 70% by 2030 and being carbon-neutral by 2050. These renewable-energy initiatives have received bipartisan support because they've created hundreds of thousands of jobs and promoted business interests, such as tax breaks, Harrison said.
"It's really hard to talk about climate change too much," she said. "But you can talk about jobs, and that's what we've done."