Voters should make climate justice a defining issue in the 2024 presidential election - NPI's Cascadia Advocate
Voters should make climate justice a defining issue in the 2024 presidential election - NPI's Cascadia Advocate
We can, at times, see with our own eyes what others would deny.
Recently, relaxing in the front yard of a friend’s home near Darrington, I gazed up through fire smoke to the glacier-topped summit of 6,800 foot Whitehorse Mountain.
The bottom-to-top ascent is a bear, eased only at climb’s end… there has long been a gentle snow slope leading up to the summit.
But no more.
The summit slope has largely melted, leaving treacherous ice in its place.
The view is a composite of climate damage in the Northwest, of fire and ice.
Our glaciers are shrinking fast, change visible within the lives of Baby Boomers.
So, what, you say? Well, we depend on them for summer river flow which provides electric power, sustains irrigation, supports recreation and provides habitat for salmon.
Just visit the upper reaches of a river often nicknamed the “Magic Skagit.”
Thunder Creek feeds into Diablo Lake, part of Seattle City Light’s harnessing of the Skagit River. The creek is filled with meltwater in spring but sustained in the summer and fall by the Boston Glacier. Upstream, on 9,075 foot Jack Mountain, the Nohokomeen Glacier feeds Ross Lake and 505 foot high Ross Dam.
When I was a kid, both the Coleman and Roosevelt Glaciers on Mount Baker were advancing. A University of Washington engineering professor, Dr. Art Harrison, was measuring the advance. Tongues of the Roosevelt Glacier were curling around a cliff face. Hauling markers over stream outlets and up to remote Bastille Ridge was a major exertion.
Both glaciers are now retreating, the Roosevelt having pulled way back from the cliff face. The Easton Glacier, on the south side of Mount Baker, has pulled back even further, leaving a long ice-sculpted moraine in its wake.
My friend in Darrington, Gary Paull, spent years as trails and recreation coordinator with the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. He has, in retirement, revisited mountains climbed years ago, reporting back on Facebook how far they have melted.
I have on a wall at home a picture of two mountains, Hinman and Daniel, the highest peaks in King County, taken from the Robin Lakes across the valley.
Hinman is white with a glacier draped over its summit.
The glacier has since melted.
The Lynch Glacier on Mount Daniel survives, but not for long.
The Anderson Glacier in Olympic National Park, long used for climbing training by Mount Rainier-bound climbers, has totally melted. A small lake sits at the site of a vigorous glacier thirty years ago. The Lillian Glacier has also vanished.
If you want definitive evidence, check out U.S. Geological Survey pictures from the South Cascade Glacier, deep in the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area.
The USGS has studied the glacier for half a century, monitoring its retreat and near-disappearance. Its shrinking mirrors that of the Grinell Glacier in Glacier National Park, once a popular hiking destination and now almost entirely gone.
The national park will soon be without its namesake glaciers..
The great third powerhouse at Grand Coulee Dam, largely secured by Washington’s late legendary Senator Warren G. Magnuson, is an essential power source during wet, dark days of late fall and early winter. Water to power downstream dams on the Columbia River is stored in the ninety-mile-long reservoir behind Mica Dam, located in the Rocky Mountain Trench between the Canadian Rockies and Selkirk Mountains.
It is fed by meltwater from the Columbia and Clemenceau Icefields. The glacial tongues from Continental Divide peaks are rapidly retreating.
The impacts of climate damage are also found in fire and heat.
The small town of Lytton, in British Columbia’s Fraser River canyon, recorded Canada’s all-time-record temperature of 47.9 degrees Celcius (translated to 118.22 degrees Fahrenheit) during the 2021 heat wave. A fire consumed much of the town, killing two of its residents.
The region’s fire season has grown in length and ferocity. We’ve experienced such blazes as the 256,000-acre Carlton Complex fire in the Methow and Okanogan Valleys. Last week, The New York Times carried maps of three California counties largely consumed by recent fires. To our north, in B.C., a fire last summer jumped the waters of Lake Okanogan.
The smoke from B.C. and Eastern Washington has, at times, inflicted Puget Sound population centers with the world’s worst air quality. In 2017, as I returned from a Netroots Nation Conference in Atlanta, the Northwest from the air was covered with smoke.
Only the 14,410 foot summit of Mt. Rainier stood above the acrid layer.
Ever since the long, hot summer of 1988, pundits have speculated that climate damage would be a major factor in the upcoming November election. As temperatures have cooled, however, the political implications of global warming have melted away
Will it be so in 2024?
Extreme weather is increasingly all around us. We’ve experienced record fires in northern California and southern Oregon. Famed hiking destinations of the North Cascades have been closed due to a fire near Stehekin at the north end of Lake Chelan. Fierce tornadoes have hit America’s heartland. Warm Gulf and Atlantic waters are causing hurricanes to strengthen as they approach our coastlines.
The test will come at the ballot box, here and across the country.
The Biden-Harris administration, with its Inflation Reduction Act, has made record investments in clean energy. Kamala Harris plans to continue those investments. Donald Trump, in his Thursday ramble with reporters, took up his (inaccurate) rant that wind turbines kill birds. He has joked that rising ocean levels will create more beachfront property. The Republicans are pledging to repeal provisions of the landmark legislation.
In this Washington, voters will pass judgment on Initiative 2117, the handiwork of Washington State Republican Party Chair Jim Walsh and wealthy initiative underwriter Brian Heywood. It would prohibit pollution penalty credit trading and axe the 2021 Climate Commitment Act, which provides for a cap-and-invest program designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by ninety-five percent in the next quarter century.
NPI’s polling indicates the measure already has majority opposition from voters.
The evidence is in front of our eyes. We can also breathe it. The question is: Will we focus merely on the mass media’s chosen issues of the moment or summon the resolve to act on a long term vision toward the planet and our corner of it? The West Coast is feeling the consequences, and has a leadership role to play.
It’s time for a variation on Democratic strategist James Carville’s famous 1992 maxim about the economy. This year, it’s the climate, stupid.
Related Knowledge Center: Air emissions
More than 30 years after the last major update of the Clean Air Act, the U.S. Supreme Court has upended the ability of Congress to give the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies broad scope to combat air pollution, including the emission of greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, further Biden administration efforts to limit emissions face opposition in the courts.