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babylonsister

(170,962 posts)
Thu Sep 19, 2019, 06:48 PM Sep 2019

Exclusive: The Climate Crisis Will Hit Hard in Mayor Pete's Lifetime. Here's His Plan to Fight It.


Exclusive: The Climate Crisis Will Hit Hard in Mayor Pete’s Lifetime. Here’s His Plan to Fight It.
We sat down with Buttigieg in his home town of South Bend.
Rebecca Leber

Pete Buttigieg wants Americans to understand that the climate crisis isn’t only about encroaching seas and shrinking glaciers—it affects everything and everyone in between.

snip//

It was South Bend’s recent floods that inspired Buttigieg’s climate plan. “One thing we’ve learned from recent disasters—including the place we’re sitting right now—is that there is a complex overlapping bureaucracy when it comes to getting disaster relief,” he said. “The last thing you want somebody to have to do when they’ve been put out of their homes by a disaster is have to navigate all these different agencies to get help.”

Buttigieg says he has a plan to fix that in his first 100 days in office by setting up a Disaster Commission that coordinates local and federal response to extreme weather events. And his climate strategy emphasizes collaboration between Washington and individual communities. The first of his climate plans, an 18-page $2 trillion plan that endorses the Green New Deal, proposes an AmeriCorps-style volunteer Climate Corps, federally issued World-War-II-style bonds for climate change and renewable energy projects, and regional “resilience hubs” that would work together with a new clean energy bank to loan funds for new technology and infrastructure projects.

Buttigieg’s timelines and investments for hitting zero pollution in the major sectors are not quite as aggressive as his competitors’. He aims to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, with goals along the way to double clean electricity by 2025, clean up new cars by 2035, followed by trucks the following five years. By comparison, Bernie Sanders, who described his climate plan in an exclusive interview for the Climate Desk and Weather Channel series, has the same 2050 goal, but claims he can clean up transportation—currently the biggest source of pollution—by 2030.

Buttigieg also embraces two policies that have lost some popularity among the environmental left (and Sanders): He supports carbon capture and storage, and he plans to slap the fossil fuel industry with a carbon tax, repaid as a dividend for taxpayers.

“For me the idea [of a carbon tax] is about making sure our prices more accurately reflect the true cost, including the cost to our own future, of things like fossil fuels,” he told CityLab’s Sarah Holder. “The beauty of the carbon tax and dividend is it does a lot of that work in terms of realigning the signals in our economy.”


more...

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/09/exclusive-the-climate-crisis-will-hit-hard-in-mayor-petes-lifetime-heres-his-plan-to-fight-it/
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