Policymakers need to acknowledge both the magnitude of the water quality problem in Iowa, and the role of nonpoint-source nutrient pollution. Financing has been inadequate. We pay lip service to our financial responsibility as a state and have underestimated what is required for success.
Here we address four questions: What has the state’s spending commitment to water quality looked like over the past 15 years? How much state and federal spending goes to nutrient pollution reduction in Iowa? How much spending is needed to make meaningful progress in cleaning Iowa waters? How can the state raise adequate revenue to make an impact?
The Green New Deal has excited a new generation of activists and beautifully framed how this kind of societal transformation is in keeping with our history. Previous plans, like the Apollo Alliance and Blue-Green Alliance platforms, have carefully incorporated some policy nuances that we can learn from. As the Green New Deal is fleshed out, it can incorporate concerns that unions, transit advocates, urban planners and others have previously raised. We can make transformative green investments, employ people now, direct jobs and training to communities hurt by the conventional energy economy, cut pollution and emissions contributing to climate change, and slash spending on fossil fuels, particularly for low-income families whose homes and cars are often least efficient. That’s a great set of goals!
To create a Green New Deal that can achieve these goals, we must first understand how we use energy and where our emissions come from. In Ohio, 70 percent of emissions come from the electric power and transportation sectors combined. On the other hand, industry uses more fossil fuels than any other sector in Ohio. This means that to be successful, a Green New Deal has to start with aggressive strategies to tackle these three sectors.
Affordable, reliable, and equitably distributed transit can offer enormous benefits to U.S. cities, which today are growing, changing, and diversifying. Transit that is well-planned, well-funded, and well-operated can help protect the environment, improve public health, encourage economic development, raise standards of living, and reduce racial and income-driven disparities.
Despite these many potential benefits, transit ridership today in most cities is falling. Faced with competing transportation options and aging infrastructure, cities must deploy targeted resources and explore key strategies to ensure a robust, sustainable transit system that helps it meet its equity, economic, and environmental goals and obligations. Good transit policy and infrastructure can be put to work to dramatically improve cities, but local governments need to implement policy using a holistic, non-siloed approach centered on equity. Mayors and other city leaders must understand the big picture, use their leadership role to hire and champion effective staff, and direct city departments and transit authorities to work together to design integrated transportation options that consider all modes of transit and all riders.
As we’ve previously written, Initiative 1631 would inject hundreds of millions of dollars per year directly into communities in Washington by imposing a carbon pollution fee on businesses that emit large amounts of carbon dioxide or sell carbon-laden fuels. Revenues from the fee would help our state transition to a dynamic, low-carbon economy with cleaner air and water. And a substantial portion of the new revenue would be rightly invested directly into communities that have been most harmed by decades of air pollution.
Yet to persuade voters to reject this commonsense initiative on the November ballot, opponents (mostly massive, multinational oil companies) frequently reference an unrealistically high estimate of the pollution fee’s average cost to households. While the measure would appropriately increase the costs of carbon-intensive fuels, the actual average impact on households is up to $100 per year lower than opponents are claiming.
In reality, I-1631 would raise high-carbon fuel and energy costs by an average of $13 per month per Washington household in 2020. That’s a small price to pay for cleaner air, healthier communities, and more efficient energy and transportation infrastructure – all of which would create new good-paying jobs in the clean energy, or “green jobs” sector. This estimate is derived from the same model used by the state Office of Financial Management to estimate the amount of revenue that would be generated each year under I-1631.¹