As Earth Day rolls around again, I can honestly say with deep relief that we slipped a bullet. Actually, we slipped a lot of bullets. Last year’s Earth Day tribute was more of a lament; we were looking at the evisceration of the National Environmental Policy Act, a National Infrastructure Plan that would have locked us into fossil fuels for the next 30 years, the flensing of the Environmental Protection Agency, the surrender of 90% of our Outer Continental Shelf to the oilmen – and actually handing the management of all our regulatory agencies over to fossil fuel interests. And those were just the big bullets!
While some of this may take a decade to repair, we are definitely heading in a much better direction. I was watching a House Natural Resources Committee meeting yesterday on the development of offshore wind, in which even the committee Republicans had to concede that the jobs component of the proposal was salient. Although Rep. Tom Tiffany (WI-7) attempted to take Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) Director Amanda Lefton into an idiot gambit on climate denialism. (This is sort-of amusing to watch for one of those forehead-to-palm-plant moments…)
This committee meeting would not have occurred last year. And we have a lot more to look forward to! Last week I co-lead a Northern California delegation in a series of Zoom meetings with a number of our Congressional leaders. We were a large group among hundreds of state delegations visiting our respective Representatives and Senators, engaging them on the “Ocean Based Climate Solutions Act,” and the Ocean Climate Action Plan. We were discussing coastal resiliency through “Living Shorelines,” CO2 drawdown through “Marine and Coastal Blue Carbon,” as well as the restorative benefits of “Marine Protected Areas,” and the implementation of “Offshore Energy.”
All of this dovetails into the “American Jobs Plan” – the proposed infrastructure bill. And while there are efforts on the Right to disrupt all of the current administration’s agenda, they may be “peeing on their own shoes,” because the public seems to like the ideas of equity, clean-energy jobs, and unhooking from fossil fuels. And hopefully they’ll start liking the idea of things like High-Speed Rail, localized, non-carbon energy generation, preserving our lands and waters, cultivating living shorelines, and designating Marine Protected Areas.
So while we are only just starting in with these proposals, on this Earth Day I feel we can collectively breathe a sigh of relief knowing that we’re setting off in a much better direction.
