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Where I'm from, there's no hiding from the climate crisis.
Too many Republican policymakers in D.C. and my home state, Florida, continue to ignore rising temperatures, rising seas, and rising costs. They pretend that the climate crisis isn't happening and even think that striking "climate change" in statutes will make it miraculously disappear.
But for my neighbors, the impacts of the climate crisis are all too real—record heat, property damage, rising costs. We don't have the luxury of ignoring exorbitant property insurance increases, brutal temperatures, climate-fueled hurricanes, and flooding. My neighbors want solutions to cut costs and cut pollution.
Thankfully, under President Joe Biden's leadership, we have made historic progress over the last few years—and even the last few weeks—to lower costs and tackle the climate crisis. While there is much more that needs to be done, clean energy investments championed by President Biden and Democrats in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are lighting the way forward.
Progress in Washington rarely is made with a single wave of a magic wand; rather, it takes years of dedicated policy work to advance solutions. President Biden and Democrats have been hammering out a plan since 2018, laying the groundwork for the strongest climate record in history. It's important for Americans to understand how much climate progress we've made to recognize what's at stake in this next election.
When Democrats won control of the House in 2019, we created the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, an effort I chaired. Innovators, farmers, entrepreneurs, scientists, environmental justice champions, and more helped us develop the 2020 Climate Crisis Action Plan, which was described as the "most detailed and well-thought-out plan for addressing climate change that has ever been a part of U.S. politics."
When President Biden took office in 2021, he used the action plan as a foundation for his climate agenda. He set the most ambitious U.S. climate goal in history—slashing emissions in half by 2030, and reaching net-zero by 2050. Since then, through both legislation and executive action, we've continued to drive toward that goal resolutely, methodically and often unnoticed by pundits who dominate Beltway political conversations. Of the 715 different policy recommendations included in our committee's 2020 plan, more than 314 are now law.
President Biden and Democrats in Congress worked together to enact the largest piece of the puzzle into law—the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act is a game-changer. The IRA tackles the largest sources of climate pollution head-on with $260 billion in clean energy incentives to update our power grid and $80 billion to make the switch to electric vehicles more affordable, along with major investments in our people, our communities, and our pocketbooks—all while reducing the budget deficit. American families and businesses are eager to embrace cleaner, cheaper energy.
Moreover, just a few weeks ago, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized rules limiting carbon pollution from existing coal and new gas power plants. Combined with the incentives in the IRA, they will transform our power sector quickly, reducing carbon emissions from U.S. power plants by 75 percent below 2005 levels by 2035, and by more than 83 percent by 2040.
But beware—all this progress is at grave risk. America's polluters—and the politicians who support them—are fighting to preserve the status quo. They don't want us to break free from dirty fossil fuels. Polluters and special interests are suing the Biden administration over the power plant rules and other vital EPA actions that limit climate pollution from transportation and across the economy.
We don't have time or money to waste in solving the climate crisis, and I am optimistic that we're on track to meet Biden's stated goal of a 50-percent cut to climate-heating pollution by 2030, but we cannot allow polluters and MAGA politicians to derail our progress. We should take very seriously recent threats to undo everything President Biden has achieved on climate change in exchange for political donations from major oil executives. They mean it. We cannot let them get away with it. We have a moral obligation to ourselves, our kids, and future generations to protect our way of life.
You can't hide from the climate crisis where I'm from. And politicians who make these kinds of promises to Big Oil can't hide from us either. We worked too hard and too long to make this progress on the climate, and we're not going back.
Representative Kathy Castor is a Democrat representing Florida's 14th District. From 2019-2022, she was chair of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
