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Welcome to the Climate Fwd: newsletter. The New York Times climate team emails readers once a week with stories and insights about climate change. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
The midterm elections are around the corner, and here on the climate desk we’ve been looking at how the issue of climate change is playing out around the country.
It’s made its way into high-profile races where candidates have sparred over climate science, like Florida’s contest for governor between Ron DeSantis, a Republican who said he didn’t want to be known as an “alarmist,” and Andrew Gillum, a Democrat who said he’d be a governor who “believes in science.”
And increasingly, we found, candidates in tight House and Senate races are becoming less shy about putting climate change on the airwaves, using political advertisements to both attack their opponents’ views and burnish their own green credentials.
The biggest climate battle to watch is in Washington State, where voters will decide whether to approve the country’s first tax on carbon dioxide pollution. Oil companies have so far contributed more than $30 million to oppose the measure, known as Initiative 1631.
Beyond the elections, our colleagues Eric Lipton and Hiroko Tabuchi chronicled how the Trump administration’s new rules governing oil and gas drilling are driving a fracking boom across the American West. So far, they found, more than 12.8 million acres of federally controlled oil and gas parcels have been offered for lease, triple the average offered during President Barack Obama’s second term. Flaring and venting of methane, meanwhile, has jumped 72 percent compared with two years ago amid rollbacks of federal rules curbing such practices.
Elsewhere in the world, the far-right nationalist Jair Bolsonaro is now president-elect of Brazil, with potentially dire implications for the Amazon. It’s a good time to reread Somini Sengupta’s insightful piece on what his victory could mean for global climate change policy.
In India, hazardous air pollution is getting worse, our reporters found. Toxic air kills seven million people a year worldwide, a United Nations report said this week, and India’s cities are among the world’s most polluted.
Finally, it looks like we’re in for some more dangerous extreme weather events. At least nine people have died in Venice, which is experiencing its worst flooding in a decade.
One thing you can do: Vote
As Lisa just noted, Election Day is less than a week away — Tuesday the 6th of November. So, this week’s thing you can do is a big one: Look at your candidates’ positions on the environment, and get out and vote.
But when you think about how to cast your ballot, don’t just focus on candidates running for the House and the Senate. Take a careful look at candidates running for state and local offices.
Statewide ballot initiatives and under-the-radar local races could actually have the most immediate impact on climate change and clean energy policy, our colleague Coral Davenport reports.
The power of state officials can be seen in California. By 2016, the last year for which figures are available, the state had reduced its greenhouse gas emissions to levels slightly below its 1990 totals, according to data from the California Air Resources Board. Those gains were primarily because of efforts at the state and local levels, like heavy investments in renewable energies.
Even closer to home, local and county elections can also affect emissions through building codes and transit planning.
They can also determine who ends up in harm’s way. In many municipalities, planning and zoning commissions are elected positions. And the officials in those positions make decisions like whether to approve development projects in known flood zones.
In some places, planning and zoning commission positions are appointed by government officials rather than elected. In those cases, it’s still worth going to meetings and getting a sense of who is appointed and whose interests they’re considering when making decisions.
Here’s one more thing you can do: Submit your writing to this newsletter! We’re asking you, our readers, to contribute to our “One Thing You Can Do” series. Send your full submission, no more than 250 words, to [email protected]; it could be published here. Deadline: Dec. 1.
Canada’s leader stakes his future on carbon taxes
After two years of presenting himself on the world stage as a climate champion, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada has put his money where his mouth is.
Mr. Trudeau has pledged that all of Canada will have a price on carbon dioxide pollution by 2019. So far, however, only six of the 10 provinces have implemented some form of tax or fee on their carbon pollution; all three Canadian territories have agreed to pricing plans.
This month, Mr. Trudeau said he would impose carbon taxes on the four holdout provinces that refused to implement their own measures: Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and New Brunswick.
That sets up a political battle with those provinces and makes climate change a big issue in the next general election, expected in October 2019. Mr. Trudeau’s main rival in Parliament, the Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, who represents a district in Saskatchewan, has assailed the plan as a gimmick that will impose undue costs on Canadians.
The fight will resonate far beyond Canada because carbon prices are increasingly seen by experts as the most effective policy tool to combat climate change.
On Oct. 8, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, considered the world’s most authoritative scientific body on climate change, issued a major report concluding that taxes or fees on carbon pollution would be the best way to avert the most dangerous effects of global warming. The same day, the Yale economist William D. Nordhaus shared the Nobel in economic science for his work on carbon prices.
Mr. Trudeau’s plan would impose a tax of about $15 per ton of carbon dioxide on industrial polluters, rising to about $38 by 2022. Most of the revenue would be returned to citizens in the form of rebates.
Politicians in Washington and around the world, many of whom view carbon taxes as political suicide, will be watching closely to see how Mr. Trudeau’s effort plays out.
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