Lisa Friedman

Climate scientists and energy economists say the plan is technically impractical, politically unfeasible and possibly ineffective.

Yet the criticism does not appear to bother many of the young voters who will have an important role in selecting a Democratic presidential candidate, and who overwhelmingly place climate change at the top of their priority lists, according to polls.

“He has some really great ideas that may not be passed, but it’s definitely stuff that needs to be brought up,” said Chandler Condon, a 25-year-old supporter who traveled from Denver to Des Moines, Iowa, last week for a climate rally with Sanders.

“People saying that it’s too radical, it’s like, well, we need that radical change,” she said.

David Victor, a professor of international relations at the University of California San Diego and a climate adviser to Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, called that “the big challenge for serious policy in the Democratic Party.”

“The progressive wing wants radical change, and climate change is one of those areas where this has really been the most palpable,” he said. “The Sanders plan claims to deliver radical change, but it can’t work in the real world.”

Sanders is not a newcomer to the climate issue; he has spent decades fighting, largely unsuccessfully, for ambitious legislation to increase clean energy, reduce carbon emissions, and end fossil fuel subsidies. He distinguished himself in the 2016 Democratic primaries by calling for a tax on carbon emissions and declaring global warming a national emergency.

This time, he faces a crowded field of candidates vying to outdo one another on global warming. But Sanders seems to have cemented his status as the climate candidate with the most expensive plan, an early embrace of the Green New Deal and a rally last weekend with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Green New Deal’s most prominent champion.

On Thursday Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez introduced a $180 billion Green New Deal for public housing, the first major effort to bring the vision of grappling with both climate change and income inequality into legislation. The bill would provide for retrofitting 1 million units of federally owned housing.

To most climate change experts, Sanders’ promise to reduce U.S. emissions by 71% in a decade and to fully convert to renewable energy by 2050 may win high marks for ambition, but major elements of his plan to get there are implausible.

The heart of Sanders’ plan, a government-run effort to build, manage and distribute renewable energy on a vast scale, would cost more than $2 trillion if it could pass muster in Congress and, several economists said, it might not even curb emissions.

His rejection of nuclear energy as well as technology to capture carbon emissions would make his carbon-reduction targets much harder. His notion of paying for renewable energy by “making the fossil fuel industry pay for their pollution” is vague. And, economists said, his climate plan fails to consider his larger agenda, such as the new infrastructure projects in his economic plan that would create a burst of new emissions. High-speed rail, wind turbines and mass transit need steel and concrete, the production of which requires energy.

“He’s trying to set a marker in terms of the pace and scale of spending that he’s proposing,” said Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer and assistant professor at Princeton University. But, he added, “I don’t think that represents a very nuanced understanding of the set of challenges that we face.”

Paul Hawken, author of Project Drawdown, which analyzes solutions to global warming, said, “His sense of urgency in here is correct, in my opinion. But you can take that sense of urgency and make it more effective.”

Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist, said Sanders was more focused on signaling his ambitions to the party’s liberal wing than sweating policy details.

“People who care about these issues want a warrior,” Payne said. “Whether or not the battle plans they draw up exactly check out is kind of beside the point.”

The foundation of Sanders’ climate change plan is using the federal government to build and generate renewable energy, and sell it to publicly owned distribution systems, with preferential prices for utilities that pledge to break themselves of fossil fuels. The “greed” of profit-driven electric utilities, he has argued, has made them underinvest in the electric grid while clinging to dirty energy.

Sanders’ plan envisions expanding the four existing federal agencies that market electric power, known as federal Power Marketing Administrations, as well as the Tennessee Valley Authority, a government-owned corporation. He would create a fifth such agency that would spend $1.52 trillion on developing renewable energy and another $852 billion on technology like advanced batteries to store energy for days when the sun does not shine or the wind does not blow.

Energy experts say the problems are multifold. Congress would have to create and fund these new entities, a heavy lift even with a Congress in Democratic control.

Moreover, pressure from Washington would not necessarily affect utilities’ likelihood of adopting clean energy. Municipal power boards reflect their communities, so while liberal towns might demand greater levels of renewable energy, rural cooperatives in conservative states quite likely would not.

“I just don’t see that getting off the ground,” said Severin Borenstein, a professor at the Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley.

Not everyone sees doom in Sanders’ nationalization of the power sector. Daniel Kammen, an energy expert at the University of California, Berkeley, called it “audacious but doable.”

Noah Kaufman, a researcher at Columbia University who worked on climate change in the Obama administration’s White House Council on Environmental Quality, said Sanders’ plan recognized that the planet could not afford to wait for market forces to find solutions.

“Climate change presents risks that are big and that are scary, and for that reason it’s being talked about like a crisis,” he said. “He’s proposing policies that match that rhetoric.”

Other analysts criticized Sanders’ rejection of nuclear energy and of technology to capture and store carbon emissions. His plan calls both of those “false solutions” to climate change and calls for a moratorium on the renewal of nuclear power plant licenses.

Yet nuclear power currently accounts for 20% of the nation’s energy mix and more than half its carbon-free power. Allowing aging plants to close would likely mean that natural gas, a fossil fuel, would fill the void and emissions would rise.

“The last thing you want to do is be righteous about how you feel about nuclear,” Hawken said.

Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geoscience and international affairs at Princeton University, said Sanders’ plan did not appear to take political realities into account. He also said he was disappointed that Sanders no longer supported a carbon tax, a position he embraced in 2016. Economists say a fee on the burning of fossil fuels is the most efficient way to drive down global warming, but Sanders says that would not work quickly enough.

Still, Oppenheimer said, Sanders wins points on vision.

“When I talk about these issues I have to be realistic, but that’s why I don’t run for president,” he said. “You need more than that in the political arena. You can’t drain these issues of their lifeblood and turn them into numbers and realistic deadlines and expect people to get engaged about it.”

Zina Precht-Rodriguez, 23, an activist with the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate change group, traveled from Philadelphia to speak at the Des Moines rally last week. She said it’s important to have faith.

“It’s not necessarily proved that it’s impossible because it’s never been tried,” she said.

This article originally appeared in

Sanders' Climate Goals Thrill Young Voters, but Experts Have Doubts

WASHINGTON — Sen. Bernie Sanders’ $16 trillion vision for arresting global warming would nationalize the power sector and promise that, by 2030, the country’s electricity and transportation systems would run entirely on wind, solar, hydropower or geothermal energy, with the fossil fuel industry footing much of the bill much as Mexico was to pay for the border wall.

In a letter to Gov. Gavin C. Newsom of California, Andrew Wheeler, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, accused the state of “deficiencies that have led to significant public health concerns” and issued a veiled threat that federal funding to the state could be at risk.

It is the latest in a series of aggressive actions that the Trump administration has taken against California since the state surprised the EPA by signing a deal with four automakers that opposed a federal plan to roll back a national vehicle tailpipe pollution standard. President Donald Trump has personally intervened to add urban California’s problem with homelessness to his litany of complaints.

“California needs to fulfill its obligation to protect its water bodies and, more importantly, public health, and it should take this letter as notice that EPA is going to insist that it meets its environmental obligations,” Wheeler said in a statement Thursday.

“If California does not step up to its delegated responsibilities, then EPA will be forced to take action,” Wheeler added.

His letter made explicit reference to the “growing homelessness crisis developing in major California cities” — an issue that has captivated the president.

California has sparred with Trump since the earliest days of the administration. But analysts said the newest skirmish is significant because it shows Trump’s willingness to use obscure levers of policy to punish states that oppose him.

It comes days after Wheeler warned that the administration would withhold federal highway funds from California if it did not address a lengthy backlog of state level pollution plans. Earlier this month, Trump said the administration would revoke the state’s legal authority to set its own regulations on planet-warming emissions from automobile tailpipes.

Newsom’s office hit back, saying the EPA’s action was of a piece with the Ukraine scandal fueling impeachment talk and engulfing the White House.

“There’s a common theme in the news coming out of this White House this week. The president is abusing the powers of the presidency and weaponizing government to attack his political opponents. This is not about clean air, clean water or helping our state with homelessness. This is political retribution against California, plain and simple,” Nathan Click, a spokesman for Newsom, said in a statement.

The Trump administration also has taken aim at California in other ways, attacking the state for its handling of the homeless problem and threatening to cut off critical federal wildfire aid.

The EPA letter lays out a multitude of accusations and says the state’s lack of response to its homeless crisis “prompted EPA to review other programs.” It cites numerous pollution discharges into public water systems. While the letter does not explicitly threaten to take funding away from California, it notes that California has received $1.16 billion in federal water treatment funds over the past five years.

Wheeler cited press reports that human feces from homeless people in Los Angeles and San Francisco is increasingly common. “The EPA is concerned about the potential water quality impacts from pathogens and other contaminants from untreated human waste entering nearby waters.”

The letter goes on to cite numerous other problems, including exceeded arsenic and lead levels, and gave the state 30 days to deliver a “remedial plan.”

California has waged its end of the war just as fiercely. The state has 30 environmental lawsuits pending against the administration, most in an effort to stop the rollbacks of climate change regulations enacted under the Obama administration.

Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator appointed by President Barack Obama, called the new environmental accusations against California “ridiculous” and said states like Texas and Louisiana have far more problems with levels of lead and arsenic in water that exceed federal standards. The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comparable data.

“I’m not going to say that enforcement isn’t a problem, but there are other states that are far worse than California,” Enck said. “This an obvious attempt at political intimidation.”

She said the compilation of data about California’s compliance would have involved a large amount of work on the part of EPA staff.

“They apparently have a lot of free time because they are no longer enforcing federal environmental laws,” she said.

Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Water Policy Center of the Public Policy Institute of California, said the EPA’s accusations are not even accurate. When it comes to the issue of homelessness and human waste, Mount said major California cities collect and treat all runoff. The same goes for the sewage and stormwater that the EPA complained is discharged into the San Francisco Bay and Pacific Ocean.

“The impression is that they are discharging raw sewage into the bay. That’s not true. It’s treated,” Mount said. He said California’s water quality has been making steady improvements over the past two decades because of state investments.

Mandy Gunasekara, a former policy adviser in the EPA under the Trump administration, defended the letter, saying California had “failed its citizens in the most basic role of any state, keeping them healthy and safe.” She said if California would not fix its problems, Trump would “step in.”

California has frustrated the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back Obama-era national standards for automobile tailpipe emissions by adhering to an even more stringent standard. In July the state announced that four automakers had signed a deal with California to comply with its tighter standards if the national rollback succeeds.

Trump then announced he would revoke California’s authority to set its own rules for setting tailpipe emissions levels, and the state hit back with a lawsuit, joined by 23 other states that also want tougher standards.

Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford University, called the letter political posturing by Trump to paint liberal states and cities as dangerous and poorly run before his reelection campaign.

“He’s trying to position the Democratic Party as a failed party that cannot govern,” Cain said. “I think everyone in California will see this for what it is.”

EPA Accuses California of 'Significant' Air and Water Problems

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration Thursday, pressing the president’s complaints about homelessness in California, demanded the state improve the way it deals with human waste, arsenic and lead in water as it escalated the administration’s war with the country’s most populous state.

Inslee, the Washington governor and self-described climate change candidate, struggled to stand out in the 2020 field and never managed to reach the Democratic National Committee’s polling threshold to qualify for the September debates — 2% support in four approved polls. But shortly after he declared on MSNBC that he was ending his campaign, Inslee, suddenly, was trending.

Virtually every other Democratic candidate tweeted their admiration for him. Former Secretary of State John Kerry thanked him for being a “strong voice” on climate change. The environmentalist Bill McKibben floated his name for interior secretary. Even The Onion gently spoofed him, imagining that he had bowed out by “transforming into a majestic oak.”

When I spoke with Inslee by phone on Thursday, a few hours after he announced he would seek a third term as governor, he was in high spirits. “On fire,” he told me. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: Tell me how you made your decision finally to pull out of the race.

A: We made the decision because it was the right thing to do for all concerned. We had considerable success in the campaign in a variety of dimensions, and in raising substantially the climate crisis in national conversation. We had success in developing the gold standard of what I really believe is a governing document for the clean energy economy. We had success in driving candidates in what you might think of as an arms race, a good arms race.

We had late success in getting momentum, but it only started to kick into gear three weeks ago with the second debate, because that was the first chance we had to have any national impact whatsoever. There was a big response to that, 42,000 donors in three weeks. But we did not have the polling numbers that would have been necessary to move forward with the debate. We felt that was a realistic requirement to really be in the hunt to win the nomination. It was a straightforward decision at that point.

Who did I speak with? I spoke with my wife of 46 years, my campaign team. But it really was not a very difficult decision. There was great clarity at that point.

Q: So in the end it was the numbers?

A: Yes. We could not meet the 2%. Although our momentum came, it came too late and we had to exhaust our finances generating the donors and did not have the wherewithal to communicate or increase our name ID. We never had enough resources to improve our name identification.

Q: There’s been quite an outpouring since you dropped out. Is it hard to see all this attention now when you’ve left the race?

A: No. To start with zero national name recognition, it’s gratifying to hear people say these things. I’m actually more convinced than I was two days ago that the public, or at least those who were paying attention to this issue, recognize that we were able to move the ball down the field.

Q: What do you think is the single biggest impact your campaign had on the issue of climate change?

A: I think the biggest is just elevating the profile of this issue. This had almost zero discussion in the last presidential race. When I started my candidacy, I focused very intensely on this. There was no plan for any climate debate by any entity, either party or networks.

Listen, I’m not the sole reason for this — there have been a lot of people that I’ve allied with. But I think if you watch the commentary, there is a general consensus that our campaign did promote the discussion in every quarter.

Q: Actually, by the time you entered the 2020 race there was a lot of excitement about the Green New Deal and all the candidates were talking about climate change. Was it hard to distinguish yourself on your signature issue?

A: A victim of our success is good news. I think anyone who looks at this will conclude that our plan is the most robust and the most effective.

Q: Are you concerned that the fact that you never broke past the 2% threshold means voters don’t care about climate change as much as they say they do?

A: I really don’t think you can draw a dark conclusion, because we never achieved a level of familiarity with voters that gave us a chance to test that hypothesis. Two out of three voters couldn’t pick me out of a lineup. There were four or five other candidates with national name ID who started out over that hurdle.

Q: With you out of the race, who is the new climate candidate?

A: We want all of them to vie for that No. 1 position, and I think that’s an open question. I will be active helping any candidate that asks. I’ve already talked to a couple candidates and I hope to make sure that my team can share some viewpoints with them going forward.

Q: Will you endorse?

A: I don’t have any immediate plans, but I’m not ruling it out.

Q: If a Democrat wins, is there a Cabinet position you’d want? At least one person mentioned you for interior secretary. And there seems to be a small movement on Twitter for creating a secretary of climate change position for you.

A: If the voters give me another chance, I intend to be governor. It’s a fantastic job. I love the state.

Q: Will you try again to pass a carbon tax? (Washington passed landmark legislation this year requiring that the state run on 100% clean energy by 2045, after three failed attempts to enact a carbon tax.)

A: It depends a little bit on a [Washington State Supreme Court] decision that is pending. There is reason to believe we will succeed in a previous regulation I proposed.

Q: What else do you want to do on climate and clean energy in Washington State?

A: We want to increase our research and development. We laid the foundation. Now we need to build the house.

Q: Your tweet off the Onion headline was pretty funny. Was that you or your staff?

A: That was my wife, Trudi. But we may have a scandal brewing.

[A campaign aide cut in to say there was reason to believe the illustration in The Onion was not, in fact, of an oak. The aide later confirmed via email, “He doesn’t believe it to be an oak.”]

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/us/politics/jay-inslee.html" id="7b7edd15-e635-3cde-aba6-274c2fb246e3">The New York Times</a>.

'It's Gratifying': Jay Inslee Finally Gets His Moment

When Jay Inslee dropped out of the presidential race on Wednesday night, he found something that had eluded him throughout months of campaigning: national recognition.

Sanders unveiled his proposal one day after Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, who made climate change the central focus of his campaign, announced he was dropping out of the 2020 race. Inslee’s absence could create an opening for another presidential aspirant to seize the mantle of “climate candidate.”

Sanders was an early supporter of the Green New Deal, an ambitious but nonbinding congressional plan for tackling global warming and economic inequality. He is bestowing that same name upon his new plan, which calls for the United States to eliminate fossil fuel use by 2050.

It declares climate change a national emergency; envisions building new solar, wind and geothermal power sources across the country; and commits $200 billion to help poor nations cope with climate change.

Sanders said in an interview Wednesday night that his proposal would “pay for itself” over 15 years and create 20 million jobs in the process.

There is no broadly agreed-upon figure of how much needs to be spent to decarbonize the U.S. economy, but one study estimated that as much as $4.5 trillion could be needed just to modernize the nation’s power grid.

Still, the Sanders plan’s eye-popping price tag is several times bigger than those of his leading opponents. Former Vice President Joe Biden has called for spending $1.7 trillion over 10 years. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has a $2 trillion green manufacturing plan. Other candidates, including former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, have also put forth ambitious proposals.

Sanders’ plan would be funded in part by imposing new fees and taxes on the fossil fuel industry. He described the proposal as putting “meat on the bones” of the Green New Deal resolution and laying the groundwork for a rapid energy transformation.

“President Trump thinks that climate change is a hoax. President Trump is dangerously, dangerously wrong. Climate change is an existential threat to the entire country and the entire world, and we must be extraordinarily aggressive,” Sanders said.

“I have seven grandchildren, and I’m going to be damned if I’m going to leave them a planet that is unhealthy and uninhabitable,” he added.

The proposal comes as 10 Democratic candidates prepare to discuss climate change at a CNN forum dedicated to the topic Sept. 4. The candidates will not debate one another during the event but will instead make back-to-back appearances.

Democratic voters are increasingly demanding that candidates show they are prepared to be ambitious in tackling climate change. A recent Yale University survey found that 93% of party voters supported an aggressive plan like the Green New Deal.

Among registered voters, global warming ranked 17th on a list of 29 important issues — but it was the third most important issue for liberal Democrats and the eighth most important for moderate and conservative Democrats, the report found.

United Nations scientists have urged a deadline of achieving net-zero global emissions — that is, eliminating as much greenhouse gas pollution from the atmosphere as humans generate — by 2050. That would stave off the worst consequences of climate change like rising seas, longer droughts and worsened heat waves, experts say.

Virtually all of the Democratic candidates for president have pointed to that deadline as a critical one, and those with specific plans have used it as a broad benchmark. The majority of them also sidestep contentious ideas like a tax on carbon pollution and instead call for a vast infusion of money toward clean energy research and development.

Sanders’ plan is no exception. Though the Vermont lawmaker was an early proponent of a carbon tax — he once called it “the most straightforward and efficient strategy for quickly reducing greenhouse gas emissions” — his new proposal makes no mention of one.

Instead, he calls for converting the electricity and transportation sectors to 100% renewable energy by 2030 and achieving “complete decarbonization” by 2050 through a massive spending plan.

Robert C. Hockett, a Cornell University law professor who has advised Sanders on climate change policy, said the country now needs more than just a carbon tax. Tackling climate change, he said, demands a vast overhaul of U.S. infrastructure and manufacturing. He said Sanders’ plan, and its substantial price tag, reflected that.

“You’ll see Bernie setting the pace. He’ll be the one who is always prepared to go the furthest,” Hockett said.

Joshua Freed, vice president for clean energy at centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, said he was not impressed with Sanders’ plan. The proposal opposes nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage technology, both of which Freed said must be tools in decarbonizing the economy.

“The Sanders plan appears to be big, but it’s not serious,” Freed said. “We need to have every option on the table.”

The Sanders plan calls for a moratorium on nuclear power plant license renewals, and it says that the goal of 100% sustainable energy “will not rely on any false solutions like nuclear, geoengineering, carbon capture and sequestration, or trash incinerators.”

Sanders’ campaign estimated that roughly $3.1 trillion would be generated from “making the fossil fuel industry pay for their pollution” through new but unspecified fees and eliminating $15 billion in annual subsidies; another $1.2 trillion would come from “scaling back military spending on the global oil supply,” and $2.3 trillion would be collected from new income tax revenues from new jobs in the renewable energy industry, among other measures.

The spending would go toward researching energy storage and electric vehicles, supporting small farms and developing ways to “make our plastic more sustainable through advanced chemistry.” Under the plan, the federal government would also provide five years of unemployment insurance, a wage guarantee, housing assistance and job training to “any displaced worker” in the fossil fuel industry.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/climate/bernie-sanders-climate-change.html" id="eefbee66-8c7d-38f7-a94b-08b1892d2823">The New York Times</a>.

Bernie Sanders' 'Green New Deal': A $16 Trillion Climate Plan

WASHINGTON — Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday released a $16.3 trillion blueprint to fight climate change, the latest and most expensive proposal from the field of Democratic presidential candidates aimed at reining in planet-warming greenhouse gases.

The lawsuit is the latest salvo in a long-running battle over the future of coal and how to regulate the nation’s heavily polluting power plants, which are major producers of greenhouse gases that warm the planet. It also is the most significant test to date of the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate or weaken former President Barack Obama’s regulations to reduce the United States’ contribution to global warming.

It is a case that could go all the way to the Supreme Court. If justices there were to ultimately decide in favor of the Trump administration, it could weaken the ability of future presidents to regulate carbon dioxide pollution from power plants, experts said, and make it harder for the United States to tackle climate change.

“It would have a devastating effect on the ability of future administrations to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act,” said Richard L. Revesz, a professor at New York University who specializes in environmental law, referring to a 1970 law that requires the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate hazardous air pollutants.

The court challenge, , led by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, argued that the Trump administration’s EPA had no basis for weakening an Obama-era regulation that set the first-ever national limits on carbon dioxide pollution from power plants.

The Obama-era rule, the Clean Power Plan, required states to implement plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 2022, and encouraged that to happen by closing heavily polluting plants and instead generating electricity using natural gas or renewable energy. Carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is a major contributor to global warming because it traps the sun’s heat.

“The science is indisputable. Our climate is changing. Ice caps are melting,” James said in a statement. She called the Trump administration plan a “do-nothing rule.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/climate/states-lawsuit-clean-power-ace.html" id="104b3eaa-e499-35ce-a394-85cbccc07ba1">The New York Times</a>.

States and Cities Sue Trump Administration Over Rollback of Climate Rule

WASHINGTON — A coalition of 29 states and cities on Tuesday sued to block the Trump administration from easing restrictions on coal-burning power plants, setting up a case that could determine how much leverage the federal government has to fight climate change in the future.

The changes will make it harder to consider the effects of climate change on wildlife when deciding whether a given species warrants protection. They would most likely shrink critical habitats and, for the first time, would allow economic assessments to be conducted when making determinations.

The rules also make it easier to remove a species from the endangered species list and weaken protections for threatened species, a designation that means they are at risk of becoming endangered.

Overall, the new rules would very likely clear the way for new mining, oil and gas drilling, and development in areas where protected species live.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said the changes would modernize the Endangered Species Act and increase transparency in its application. “The Act’s effectiveness rests on clear, consistent and efficient implementation,” he said in a statement Monday.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement the revisions “fit squarely within the president’s mandate of easing the regulatory burden on the American public, without sacrificing our species’ protection and recovery goals.”

The new rules are expected to appear in the Federal Register this week and will go into effect 30 days after that.

Environmental organizations denounced the changes as a disaster for imperiled wildlife.

David J. Hayes, who served as a deputy interior secretary in the Obama administration and is now executive director of the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center at the New York University School of Law, said the changes would “straitjacket the scientists to take climate change out of consideration” when determining how to best protect wildlife. “We all know that climate change is now the greatest threat ever to hundreds of species,” Hayes said.

A recent United Nations assessment, some environmentalists noted, has warned that human pressures are poised to drive 1 million species into extinction and that protecting land and biodiversity is critical to keep greenhouse gas emissions in check.

Climate change, a lack of environmental stewardship and mass industrialization have all contributed to the enormous expected global nature loss, the United Nations report said.

Ever since President Richard M. Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act into law in 1973, it has been the main U.S. legislation for protecting fish, plants and wildlife and has acted as a safety net for species on the brink of extinction. The peregrine falcon, the humpback whale, the Tennessee purple coneflower and the Florida manatee all would very likely have disappeared without it, scientists say.

Republicans have long sought to narrow the scope of the law, saying it burdens landowners, hampers industry and hinders economic growth. Bernhardt wrote in an op-ed last summer that the act places an “unnecessary regulatory burden” on companies.

They also make the case that the law is not reasonable because species are rarely removed from the list. Since the law was passed, more than 1,650 have been listed as threatened or endangered, while just 47 have been delisted because their populations rebounded.

Over the past two years Republicans made a major legislative push to overhaul the law. Despite holding a majority in both houses of Congress, though, the proposals were never taken up in the Senate. With Democrats now in control of the House, there is little chance of those bills passing.

The Trump administration’s revisions to the regulations that guide the implementation of the law, however, mean opponents of the Endangered Species Act are still poised to claim their biggest victory in decades.

One of the most controversial changes removes long-standing language that prohibits the consideration of economic factors when deciding whether a species should be protected.

Under the current law, such determinations must be made solely based on science, “without reference to possible economic or other impacts of determination.”

Gary Frazer, the assistant director for endangered species with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said that phrase had been removed for reasons of “transparency.” He said the change leaves open the possibility of conducting economic analyses for informational purposes, but that decisions about listing species would still be based exclusively on science.

Environmental groups saw a danger in that.

“There can be economic costs to protecting endangered species,” said Drew Caputo, vice president of litigation for lands, wildlife and oceans at Earthjustice, an environmental law organization. But, he said, “If we make decisions based on short-term economic costs, we’re going to have a whole lot more extinct species.”

The new rules also give the government significant discretion in deciding what is meant by the term “foreseeable future.” That’s a semantic change with far-reaching implications because it enables regulators to disregard the effects of extreme heat, drought, rising sea levels and other consequences of climate change that may occur several decades from now.

When questioned about that change and its implications in the era of climate change, Frazer said the agency wanted to avoid making “speculative” decisions far into the future.

Among the animals at risk from this change, Caputo listed a few: Polar bears and seals that are losing crucial sea ice; whooping cranes whose migration patterns are shifting because of temperature changes; and beluga whales that will have to dive deeper and longer to find food in a warmer Arctic.

Jonathan Wood, a lawyer at the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative group that has represented landowners in opposing endangered species designations, said he believed the changes would improve the law by simplifying the regulatory process and making the law less punitive.

“It’s a shift away from conflict in favor of more collaboration and cooperation,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/climate/endangered-species-act-changes.html" id="53001fc6-712e-3d33-a033-177190df66fa">The New York Times</a>.

U.S. Significantly Weakens Endangered Species Act

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration Monday announced it would change the way the Endangered Species Act is applied, significantly weakening the nation’s bedrock conservation law credited with rescuing the bald eagle, the grizzly bear and the American alligator from extinction.

But there is another issue high on his list of urgent concerns that is not on his party’s agenda: climate change.

“Climate change isn’t going to discriminate between red states and blue states, so red-state actors have to start engaging on these issues,” said Galloway, 19, who is heading into his sophomore year and is chairman of the South Carolina Federation of College Republicans. “But we haven’t been. We’ve completely ceded them to the left.”

While President Donald Trump has led the Republican Party far down the road of denying the scientific consensus of human-caused climate change, Galloway represents a concern among younger Republicans that has caught the attention of Republican strategists.

In conversations with 10 GOP analysts, consultants and activists, all said they were acutely aware of the rising influence of young voters like Galloway, who have never lived through a colder-than-average month and identify climate change as a top priority. Those strategists said lawmakers were aware, too, but few were taking action.

“We’re definitely sending a message to younger voters that we don’t care about things that are very important to them,” said Douglas Heye, a former communications director at the Republican National Committee. “This spells certain doom in the long term if there isn’t a plan to admit reality and have legislative prescriptions for it.”

Trump has set the tone for Republicans by deriding climate change, using White House resources to undermine science and avoiding even uttering the phrase. Outside of a handful of states such as Florida, where addressing climate change has become more bipartisan, analysts said Republican politicians were unlikely to buck Trump or even to talk about climate change on the campaign trail at all, except perhaps to criticize Democrats for supporting the Green New Deal.

That, several strategists warned, means the party stands to lose voters to Democrats in 2020 and beyond — a prospect they said was particularly worrisome in swing districts that Republicans must win to recapture a majority in the House of Representatives.

The polling bears out Heye’s prediction of a backlash. Nearly 60% of Republicans between the ages of 23 and 38 say that climate change is having an effect on the United States, and 36% believe humans are the cause. That is about double the numbers of Republicans older than 52.

But younger generations are also now outvoting their elders. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, voters younger than 53 cast 62.5 million votes in the 2018 midterm elections. Those 53 and older, by contrast, were responsible for 60.1 million votes.

“Americans believe climate change is real, and that number goes up every single month,” Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican strategist, told a congressional panel recently.

He also circulated a memo to congressional Republicans in June warning that climate change was “a G.O.P. vulnerability and a G.O.P. opportunity.”

A new Harvard University survey of voters younger than 30 found that 73% of respondents disapproved of Trump’s approach to climate change (about the same proportion as those who object to his handling of race relations). Half the respondents identified as Republican or independent.

“Here’s another gap between our party and younger voters,” said a recent report by a Republican polling firm, Public Opinion Strategies. Speaking of younger Republicans, the firm concluded that “climate change is their most important issue” and called the numbers “concerning” for the party’s future.

The full effect quite likely will not be felt until after the 2020 election cycle. Trump’s campaign appears to have identified a strategy for winning reelection that relies on polarizing the electorate on issues like race, immigration and, it seems, climate change. But conservatives said the long-term implications of that gambit were worrisome for the future of the party and the planet.

“He gets to set the national platform,” Joseph Majkut, director of climate policy at the Niskanen Center, a center-right research organization, said of Trump. But, he noted, “Every year that goes by, where people are going about their lives as if greenhouse gas emissions are a matter of very small concern, we make the problem worse for ourselves.”

Galloway and 45 other young Republicans with the American Conservation Coalition, a group that advocates for conservative environmental policies, brought that message to Washington last month when they lobbied Congress to address greenhouse gas emissions with free-market solutions.

“You can be skeptical of climate change all you want, but young people aren’t, and there’s no way conservatives are going to win elections if we don’t deal with climate change,” said Benjamin Backer, 21, the coalition’s founder and president.

Backer said he was encouraged by Trump’s environmental speech July 8 as well as recent moves among some Republicans in Congress to advance climate policies. But he also said changes were not occurring fast enough to lure his generation of environmentally conscious conservatives.

“There’s a lot of people out there who would probably vote Republican if they knew there was a conservative agenda on climate change,” Backer said. Instead, he said, “They’re going to go to the Democratic Party, because that’s the only party that’s talking about the environment.”

Trump’s core supporters say they are not worried. Standing in the sweltering heat outside East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, last month as he waited for entry into a rally led by the president, Trey Bagley, 25, readily acknowledged climate science. But Bagley, a sergeant in the Marine Corps Reserves wearing a “Trump 2020, Make Liberals Cry Again” shirt, said that did not make him a Democrat.

“I completely agree that we’re offending the climate,” Bagley said. “But the solutions that are being introduced to fix it are going to drive us back into the Dark Ages.”

He is not alone in that belief. To illustrate that, Alex Flint, executive director of the Alliance for Market Solutions, a conservative nonprofit group that advocates for a carbon tax, hit play on a video of 11 Trump voters around a hotel conference table in Florida discussing climate change. Government cannot be trusted to solve climate change, the focus group agreed. But like Bagley, they also all agreed that climate change is real.

“Republican orthodoxy is changing,” Flint said. “You’re safe saying you acknowledge climate change.”

He said climate change is hardly a top-tier topic among even moderate Republicans. But he noted it is a key differential issue in swing districts that can either help a candidate win young, college-educated and female voters, or lose them.

“It’s a matter of honesty,” he said. “Voters believe it is happening; at the very least, they want their politicians to acknowledge reality.”

Scott Jennings, a Republican consultant and a former campaign adviser to Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said 2020 candidates in different states would take various approaches to climate change, but he predicted that most would focus on simply attacking Democrats and the Green New Deal.

Still, he said, “Someday Republicans are going to have to come up with some proposals that are responsive to these issues and, frankly, be more reasonable and more thoughtful.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/climate/climate-change-republicans.html" id="8ac61c43-35da-33e9-a48e-39d7816a63a0">The New York Times</a>.

Climate Could Be an Electoral Time Bomb, Republican Strategists Fear

WASHINGTON — When election time comes next year, Will Galloway, a student and Republican youth leader at Clemson University, will look for candidates who are strong on the mainstream conservative causes he cares about most, including gun rights and opposing abortion.

The effort comes as Harris, who is running for president, and other Democratic candidates prepare for a set of debates in Detroit this week. Racial and economic disparities on issues ranging from housing to education are expected to take center stage.

Harris, who has yet to release a comprehensive climate change plan of her own, has focused much of her economic agenda on providing tax credits and other assistance to low- and middle-income Americans. This month, she and Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill designed to help people with criminal records obtain housing.

The new proposal, titled the Climate Equity Act, provides a view of Harris’ environmental priorities. Under the plan, any environmental regulation or legislation would be rated based on its effect on low-income communities, which are disproportionately affected by climate change because they are often in flood zones, near highways or power plants, or adjacent to polluted lands known as brownfields.

The rating system would be modeled after the Congressional Budget Office score, which measures the costs of every major piece of legislation.

“We can’t do anything without a CBO score, but we never actually consider if it’s disastrous to communities as long as it’s revenue-neutral,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview.

The bill would also establish an independent Office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability to represent vulnerable communities and create a position of senior adviser on climate justice at “all relevant agencies.”

Ocasio-Cortez was the primary House sponsor of the Green New Deal, a nonbinding resolution that set out a broad vision for significantly reducing planet-warming pollution by 2030 while also guaranteeing millions of new jobs. She said low-income workers were often ignored in the climate discussion.

“One of the tenets of the Green New Deal is prioritizing vulnerable communities,” she said. “We have to talk about Flint. We have to talk about West Virginia. We have to talk about the Bronx, and we have to talk about the ways climate change manifests in our lives.”

Ocasio-Cortez said that she had not endorsed anyone in the presidential race and noted that she had worked with various candidates on different aspects of the climate challenge.

Climate change analysts said they were encouraged by the bill and by the fact that several presidential candidates had recently made issues of equity more central to their discussions of the environment. Many of the candidates’ early plans for tackling global warming focused almost entirely on methods of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, including by establishing a price on carbon dioxide, eliminating coal-fired power plants and investing billions of dollars in clean energy technologies.

But in another example of the growing focus on economic and racial disparities, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington released the final plank of a five-part global warming plan Monday, aimed at new federal policies to prioritize low-income areas and communities of color. Inslee, who has made climate change the top issue of his presidential campaign, also called for a way to score, or screen, federal environmental decisions and proposed a new office dedicated to environmental justice.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Kamala Harris of California and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York on Monday unveiled legislation aimed at ensuring that climate change plans benefit low-income communities. They described the measure as a key element of the Democrats’ Green New Deal.

Lisa Friedman

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