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Is a National Clean Energy Standard the Answer?
For the purposes of these discussions, let’s all put politics aside and judge the proposals by their content and not their proposer’s party.
The 2018 midterm elections swept the Democrats into control of the US House of Representatives and climate change onto the landing pages of most media networks. Since the elections, global heating [i]has continued to be at or near the top of voter priority lists. A recent poll conducted by the communications programs at Yale and George Mason Universities shows that 40 percent of eligible voters now see climate as crucial to whom they’ll vote for in 2020.
Climate polled as a voter priority in previous elections. However, the vouchsafed preference for an aggressive federal environmental agenda never translated into adequate action being taken by either Congress or the president at the time, i.e., G.W. Bush, or Obama. Adequate that is to keep from crossing the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) threshold above which scientists warn the most devastating and likely irreversible impacts will occur.
I grant it’s not easy to protect the environment while simultaneously trying to save the economy and defending the nation against aggressors — foreign and domestic. The problem, of course, is that neither humanity nor the…
