By Nick Vu, Editorial Intern
With the locust swarms in East Africa three times the size of New York and a veritable plague afflicting the world and its precious economies, it is starting to feel a lot like the end of days. No, we’re not there yet. But we’re barreling toward a bleak future — the looming existential crisis of climate change. Like the threat of COVID-19, we should have been preparing for it yesterday.
If you aren’t concerned, chances are good you’re a Republican. According to a survey by Yale and George Mason Universities, climate change isn’t among the top 10 issues of importance to GOP voters. That’s because only 41 percent of them even believe it is occurring, Among Republicans who do acknowledge the existence of climate change, only 25 percent believe it’s traceable to human activities.
Among Democrats, meanwhile, climate change is comparatively old news — polls show it has become a top priority for its voters in the 2020 election cycle.
The parties’ drastically different views of the world don’t create conditions conducive to working out a solution. Citizens’ Climate Lobby believes that in order to get anything through Congress, it has to be with the cooperation of both major parties. The lobbying group is a grassroots organization that trains its volunteers in the United States and other parts of the world on how to effectively reach out to their elected officials and encourage them to enact meaningful climate policy.
“I’m always feeling this general anxiety about climate change and … the worst thing you can do is be paralyzed and do nothing,” said Ariane Jong, a Citizens’ Climate Lobby member and graduate student at Chapman University. “You can vote, but you also have a voice. You can talk to your representatives and have an impact on things that affect your life.”
Jong was galvanized into advocacy after she watched the documentary An Inconvenient Truth in high school. With the help of Citizens’ Climate Lobby, she was given the opportunity to speak to Young Kim, her district representative, about enacting climate policy.
“She’s a Republican,” Jong said. “I don’t necessarily identify with a party, but I know a lot of our ideas identify as Democratic, so I was worried about resistance, but actually she was really open to what we had to say and building a relationship, which was really encouraging.”
Jong refuses to believe liberals and conservatives cannot come together on the issue of climate change.
“What I often see that is counterproductive is this idea that you have to convince other people to do certain actions or believe certain things otherwise the issue won’t be solved,” Jong said. “I don’t know if it’s about convincing other people. It’s more about meeting people where they’re at. If you have common values then you can talk it out until you reach a common understanding of how to approach a problem. There’s no need to convince a person, this or that.”
At their February convention held at California State University, Los Angeles, the lobby group hosted a workshop on how to appeal to elected officials based on their party affiliation and political leanings. They also hosted a panel with young Republicans on how they are attempting to change their party’s collective stance on climate change and what they think is wrong with the current proposed list of climate policies.
A minor incident occurred during a passionate keynote by Rex Parris, the Republican mayor of the City of Lancaster and a well-known advocate of climate policy. Parris received jeers when he threw in his support for Donald Trump’s border wall. Parris believes that within 20 years there will be a mass migration event with immigrants flooding into the United States due to global warming making the South American continent uninhabitable.
“Both sides of the aisle are not going to like the solutions,” Rex Parris said. “They are draconian. Climate change is the greatest threat that we have ever faced. My biggest fear? When you say, ‘what wall?,’ that Canada’s going to build one.”
Mark Reynolds, executive director of Citizens’ Climate Lobby, was unsure of what to make of Parris’ remarks. However, Reynolds remains firm in his belief that any meaningful climate policy legislation will require bipartisan support.
“Our solution is 100% market-based and it is revenue-neutral,” he said. “It’s two things that are stalwarts in conservative thinking. In drafting the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, we worked together with 10 Republican offices to get the bill in a way that would be acceptable to Democrats and Republicans, so I don’t anticipate them asking for changes that we couldn’t accommodate.”
The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act would charge a fee on carbon emissions at its source and would disburse the revenue equitably back to the population. So far, the bill has 79 Democratic co-sponsors and one Republican co-sponsor and is awaiting a vote in the House of Representatives.
Reynolds expects the bill will become politicized as soon as it gains more traction in Congress.
“People say Trump will not sign this bill,” Reynolds said. “Nobody knows that, including Trump. It will be at that particular moment what he thinks is best for him that’s going to determine whether he signs a bill or not. So, I don’t accept at all the people who say, ‘why push so hard when Trump wouldn’t sign it?’”