Experts discuss report that looks at ways to address climate change - New Mexico Political Report

Experts discuss report that looks at ways to address climate change | NM Political Report

The CEO of New Mexico’s largest electric utility described the closure of the coal-fired San Juan Generating Station as an example of the concept of a fair bargain.

Pat Vincent-Collawn said the Public Service Company of New Mexico worked with the Navajo Nation as well as the state prior to the closure of the power plant to reduce the impacts it would have on the community.

“We shuttered some coal plants, but we have long worked with the Navajo Nation before that and have given them scholarships and educated them for jobs outside of the coal mine and the coal plants because we knew that this energy transition was coming,” she said during a panel discussion on Tuesday. “And then we worked with the state to bring economic development, job training and other monies that would be invested in that community because if you’re Navajo, you don’t want to leave your native land.”

The concept of a fair bargain is a central focus of a new report released Tuesday by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ Commissioner on Accelerating Climate Action. Vincent-Collawn is one of the four co-chairs of the commission.

The report includes five strategies for how the country can address and respond to climate change. Those strategies are prioritizing equity, fairness and justice; engaging and educating; mobilizing investment; deploying strategic mitigation and adapting everywhere.

The report also includes examples of what these strategies could look like. New Mexico’s Energy Transition Act and the closure of the San Juan Generating Station is highlighted as an example. The Energy Transition Act provided $40 million in funding to state agencies for economic development, displaced workers and community projects on the Navajo Nation.

American Academy of Arts & Sciences President David Oxtoby described the new report as a blueprint.

“The report tries to do something unique by identifying recommendations that are politically feasible and creating an accessible report that can be widely understood,” he said.

Taking action to address the climate crisis is essential to protecting human health, commission co-chair Mustafa Santiago Ali highlighted. He is the executive vice president of the National Wildlife Federation.

“We know that we’ve got millions of people who are dying prematurely from air pollution every year,” Santiago Ali said.

He further highlighted the 24 million people who have asthma, including 7 million children, and he said those are disproportionately people from minority communities.

David Victor, a professor at the University of California at San Diego and author of the books Fixing the Climate Crisis and Global Warming Gridlock, said that it is not enough to just curb pollution. Victor is another one of the commission’s co-chairs. He said actions are also needed to mitigate the impacts of the changing climate, including improving water infrastructure.

“There’s a lot of emphasis on projects that control emissions and a lot of that revolves around electric power…The other half of the report is also about the infrastructure and strategy for dealing with the physical impacts of climate change,” he said. “Because despite all the progress that is being made in controlling emissions globally, we’re still in for a lot of climate change. So we need to be ready for that. We need a strategy for that.”

He said currently there are local and state level strategies but Victor said a federal strategy is also needed.

In developing the report, the commission focused on bringing together a diverse set of voices.

“The fundamental problem we’re trying to solve is that the table has been too small,” Christopher Field, a Stanford University professor and the director of the Woods Institute for the Environment, said. Field is also a co-chair on the commission.

He said important perspectives and experiences have been left out of past discussions on climate change.

They also focused on producing a report that is easy to understand.

“Words are onramps,” Santiago Ali said. “So you can create words that stop folks from entering into a process or you can make sure that folks see themselves reflected in the language.”

When discussing the concept of a fair bargain, the co-chairs emphasized the need for multiple solutions and said that there is not a single, silver bullet technology to address the climate crisis

Field said that environmental justice and environmental concerns need to be integrated into energy development and adaptation investments, but at the same time he said that environmental justice communities need to be more open about the types of technologies.

Santiago Ali returned to the language aspect while talking about environmental justice.

“There are certain communities where the words environmental justice resonate with them because they breathe it and they taste it and they see the other impacts that are going on,” he said. “There are other communities who maybe the words environmental justice are not the right words for them.”

He spoke about communities where coal mines and power plants are closing. Santiago Ali is from a coal community and his grandfather worked in a coal mine.

“You want to make sure that they know that they’re being seen,” he said. “Along with the communities that are in cancer alley or the Manchester community in Houston, Texas or the diesel death zone in California. So all of this is about making sure that people are honored and valued and that they’re being seen.”

Cancer alley refers to an 85-mile stretch of land in Louisiana that contains more than 200 petrochemical plants and refineries.

The Harrisburg/Manchester community in Houston has refineries, chemical plants, hazardous waste sites and sewage treatment plants in close proximity to homes where 98 percent of the residents are Hispanic.

Diesel death zones refer to areas where communities are exposed to disproportionately high volumes of diesel pollution. In California, one of these diesel death zones is associated with the Port of Los Angeles.

The report focused a lot on electric utilities in part because, as Victor pointed out, in many cases decarbonization means electrification.

Vincent-Collawn said new clean energy infrastructure, including transmission lines, must be built.

One recommendation in the report for achieving that is speeding up the permitting process.

Vincent-Collawn said the permitting process is necessary but that it should be reconfigured in a way that allows projects to move faster without eliminating protections for communities and the environment.

“The whole report is about starting a discussion,” she said.