Climate Change

The time to act is now

Senate Democrats have been national leaders in responding to climate change. In recent years we: have required new automobiles to meet tough emission standards; became the first state to mandate environmentally responsible building requirements; have promoted the use of energy-efficient appliances; and have required the use and production of renewable fuels and energy. But we must do more.

Our state’s dependence on snowpack makes us particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts. The accumulation of ice and snow in the mountains long enabled us to hold back water in the winter until it could be gradually released throughout the dry summer months. In recent decades, more of this precipitation has fallen as rain, not snow, leaving less water during the summer. This doesn’t just impact salmon and steelhead. It reduces the amount of water for summer crops, generating electricity, drinking and bathing.

Imagine the Columbia River resembling the Rio Grande today – a river so diverted and dried up it no longer reaches the Gulf of Mexico year round. Neither the people nor the economy of Washington could withstand that. And yet, since 1983, we’ve watched the North Cascades’ glaciers lose 18 to 32 percent of their total volume. This decreasing snowpack creates challenges for how we allocate water throughout the state, and those challenges continue to worsen.

Washington is also especially vulnerable to the climate change effects on sea levels. The shorelines around Olympia, where we’re writing from, are likely to increase from 1 to 5 inches per decade, the largest rise in the state attributable to climate change. This will literally change the outline of our state and threaten to make some coastal communities uninhabitable.

In what will be our biggest step yet, Senate Democrats are offering a landmark piece of legislation to curtail the greenhouse gas emissions contributing to global climate change. Our proposal will roll back Washington’s emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 – a target consistent with the ambitious goal set by the governors of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Oregon who, together with Gov. Gregoire, have formed the Western Regional Climate Action Initiative to cut emissions throughout the West.

To help achieve this goal, our bill establishes a rigorous greenhouse gas performance standard for new natural gas and coal plants, as well as for utilities’ power purchases. It offers utilities incentives to invest in cost-effective conservation and energy-efficiency technologies, and lends utilities a hand by authorizing them to spend money for emission mitigation.

Other goals include reducing imported fuel expenditures by 20 percent by 2020, and working with other Western states to achieve a regional approach to emission targets and an emissions trading program. As has often been the case in American history, the West is leading the way to a better future, and we have excellent partners in these states to achieve this.

Finally, our initiative will place Washington at the forefront of linking good environmental policy with strong economic growth. As we transition to a more responsible environment, new marketplace possibilities will open up as new businesses rise to answer the challenge. We want to triple the number of jobs in the clean energy market. As the rest of the country follows our lead, our state will already have a solid foothold established in the new industries in this emerging sector.

Some scientists say climate change has occurred before in the atmosphere’s natural ebb and flow of greenhouse gases, and they’re right. But it is also true that there has never been a time in recorded geologic history when human activity created such a huge concentration of greenhouse gases. We can assume natural forces can maintain a natural equilibrium under natural conditions. There is no reason to conclude it can respond to the profound impacts of human activity without having a devastating effect on our society and way of life.

Regardless of what we do today, future generations will have to deal with a different climate and world than the one we share. We can’t prevent some degree of climate change. At a minimum, however, we should respond to and deal with the greenhouse gases that we produce, just as nature deals with those she produces.

That is exactly what Senate Democrats are striving to do.