On Memorial Day, veterans say tackling climate change is key / Public News Service

This Memorial Day, state and local leaders are speaking out – calling climate change the battle of our time – crucial to national security.

Advocates are calling on President Joe Biden to invoke the Defense Production Act to accelerate the transition to renewable energy and phase out dependence on fossil fuels.

Mayor Daniel Lee of Culver City is an Air Force and California Air National Guard veteran who currently works as a project director at the James Lawson Institute. He said the invasion of Ukraine was financed by Russian oil and gas.

“The war in Ukraine is a resource war,” Lee said. “And the more the world is not dependent on Russian oil for electricity for heating or cooling, the less likely we are to engage in resource wars and the more we can slow the effects of climate change.”

Russian oil and gas accounts for 40% of Europe’s energy consumption, but countries are working to reduce this dependency as quickly as possible.

New Mexico State Representative Debbie Sariñana — D-Albuquerque — is also an Air Force veteran. She noted that climate change is fueling extreme drought and massive wildfires across the West – so leaders must act to slow the damage.

“We have people dying for our country,” Sariñana said. “And what kind of country do we have, if climate change continues? Our planet can’t take this any longer. We’re just borrowing the world from our grandchildren.”

Five hundred state and local leaders, including Lee and Sariñana, have signed a petition from the group “Elected Officials to Protect America” ​​calling on the administration to declare a climate emergency and implement a clean energy plan. They are both members of the group’s management board.

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A technology that once existed only in science fiction may soon emerge as a viable solution to climate change. The City of Flagstaff has added carbon dioxide removal to its plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.

Flagstaff officials say that once the technology is proven and deployed, it will extract and neutralize carbon and other pollutants from the atmosphere.

In recent years, significant progress has been made in the development of systems capable of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

Ramon Alatorre is climate and energy coordinator for the northern Arizona city. He said he could be one of the first in the country to implement a climate plan to capture and store carbon dioxide.

“We can reduce as much as we can, but we’re still going to produce shows,” Alatorre said. “And so there will, of necessity, be the other half of the equation. To be net zero, we’re going to have to remove emissions from the atmosphere.”

Alatorre said demonstration projects in Iceland and around the world show promise, but are not yet ready for commercial deployment.

He said his office is also working closely with Arizona State University’s Center for Negative Carbon Emissions to develop CDR technology.

Alatorre said Flagstaff is part of the Four Corners Coalition with other governments in the region — including Boulder County, Colorado — seeking to secure the new technology when it becomes available.

“If we join Boulder and half a dozen other communities,” Alatorre said. “And suddenly we have an aggregate demand and an aggregate pool of resources that could really attract someone who wouldn’t have looked at Flagstaff on our own.”

Alatorre said that while communities such as Flagstaff will eventually use a variety of solutions to remove greenhouse gases, he believes CDR will play a major role in cleaning up the atmosphere.

He said while the technology can be expensive, the cost of not addressing climate change could be much higher.

“Cost curve bending could definitely be achieved by mid-century if we start now,” Alatorre said. “But that we need those early projects to kick-start the process, that it’s really going to be deployment-focused innovation that will drive down costs and future scalability.”

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The mayor of Huntington, where more than 200 homes were recently damaged by severe flooding, said now was “an opportunity” for the state to prevent other residents from experiencing the same tragedy.

Last week, leaders from across West Virginia gathered in Charleston to coordinate a new state flood protection plan. Huntington Mayor Steve Williams was there, and he later warned that flooding can wipe out everything people have worked for overnight.

“Right now I have over 215 homes that have just been devastated,” Williams said. “It just ruins people’s lives. They’ve lost everything. The effect on people’s lives isn’t just palpable. It’s real.”

West Virginia Governor Jim Justice toured flood damage in Huntington earlier this month, just two days after declaring a state of emergency for Huntington and other flood-hit areas.

Projections indicate that the state’s mountains mean West Virginians can expect to be among the hardest hit by weather-induced natural disasters. Mayor Williams said the only solution was for West Virginia to work together.

“Local, county and municipal governments, but you don’t leave out neighborhood residents,” Williams said. “Everyone plays a role in this. We have a chance to get this now. Whether you believe in climate change or not, these things are happening more often than they have ever happened.”

Robert Martin is the director of the West Virginia Office of Resilience. He said they expect to have an update to the state’s 18-year flood plan by the end of the year.

But Martin stressed that West Virginians need to realize that flooding is going to happen here and be prepared to take the necessary steps to mitigate that reality.

“The state’s topography is such that you’ll always have rain,” Martin said. “The rains seem to be a little more frequent than they were before, or it’s cells of heavy rain that are happening. But, we’ll do what we can to ease them, so that we all get inundated, we know that, but it would be on a much lower level.”

Support for this report was provided by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

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Fifteen conservation groups from Wyoming and across the country have filed administrative protests challenging the Biden administration’s plans to resume oil and gas leasing on public lands as early as June.

They’re asking the president to end new leases to protect communities, water, and wildlife. Dan Ritzman — land, water and wildlife campaign director for the Sierra Club — said the move was critical for the administration to meet its own climate goals.

“One of the biggest sources of greenhouse gases across the country is the leasing of fossil fuels on our public lands,” Ritzman said. “So to deal with climate change, we need to keep these fossil fuels in the ground, keep them from being burned.”

Lease sales scheduled for June include 144,000 acres in eight western states, with the majority of acres in Wyoming. Oil companies have repeatedly claimed that opening up more public land for drilling can ease pressure on international supplies and lower gas prices.

The protests are calling for an end to oil and gas leasing and a national plan to align federal management of fossil fuels with the goal of avoiding the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.

Ritzman said new leases on public land won’t lower prices at the pump, in part because it takes years for oil companies to develop leases. He added that companies already have plenty of drilling options.

“The oil and gas industry is currently sitting on millions of acres that it has yet to develop,” Ritzman said. “They’re making these claims not to help the general public with gas prices, but to get their hands on more of this public land.”

The new leases follow record profits in the industry. Shell Oil made more than $9 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2022, according to a Guardian report – almost triple its profits in the same period last year.

Ritzman said land owned by all Americans has been monopolized by the oil and gas industry for too long. He said it’s time public lands were part of the climate solution, not part of the problem.

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