FORT COLLINS, Colo. — America is headed for a crescendo on the issue of climate change when voters go to the polls a little more than a year from now, according to several speakers at a recent luncheon hosted by the national Society of Environmental Journalists.
Democrats consistently list it as a top-three issue, said Guido Girgenti, founding board member and communications adviser for the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led political organization based in Washington that is trying to woo more Republican support for aggressive climate change solutions.
But two Republicans offered different opinions on how voters in their party come down on the issue.
Joe Pinion, a Republican TV commentator and businessman who lost a 2018 bid for the New York State Assembly, said sentiment for climate solutions is changing with some Republicans.
“I'm under no illusion that people in the past have acted in bad faith,” Mr. Pinion said. “It's different this time. There remains a robust number of Republicans who want to do something on this issue.”
But he also said some members of the GOP would “have to be dragged kicking and screaming.”
Mandy Gunasekara, a former Trump administration senior adviser, said she doesn’t see an upswing in support for climate change among Republicans. She predicted climate change will fade as an issue after the primaries.
“Yes, more [voters] are aware and engaged with it,” she said. “Climate is part of the discussion but not necessarily going to be an issue that swings the election one way or another.”
Mr. Girgenti, Mr. Pinion, and Ms. Gunasekara were among the keynote luncheon speakers at SEJ’s annual conference, held earlier this month in Fort Collins, Colo.
They were joined by Heather McTeer Toney, a national field director of Moms Clean Air Force. The pro-air quality group is lobbying for stronger controls on air pollution, citing rising incidences of asthma and lost time at work for emergency room visits by working-class women who don’t have the luxury of taking a lot of time off.
Ms. McTeer Toney is a former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency director of a region that included eight Southeastern states. She also was the first African-American, first female and youngest mayor of Greenville, Miss. She said she wants the world to know there are far more people wanting climate change solutions than the stereotypical, white environmental activists.
She said air pollution is a “pocketbook issue” for everyone, but especially women of color.
“What’s new is how the conversation is couched,” Ms. McTeer Toney said, explaining that concerns about climate change are “breaking through” to Baptist mothers in the South, especially in low-income neighborhoods near emission sources.
“It makes a difference when you have a coal plant right on the fence line of a community,” Ms. McTeer Toney said.
Ms. Gunasekara, who served as President Trump principal deputy assistant administrator of the U.S. EPA’s air and radiation office until stepping down Feb. 7, said the debate over climate change has “become a divisive and a not very pragmatic conversation” and that the New Green Deal “attracted a lot of attention, but the wrong kind of attention.”
“She said she supports the Trump administration’s rollback of several key environmental laws and said a “deregulatory agenda does not mean setting aside the missions of agencies.”
Mr. Girgenti said America needs more than a cap-and-trade system when it comes to combating the effects of climate-altering carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Cap-and-trade systems, in the most simplistic terms, attempt to put a monetary cost on carbon emissions, but Mr. Girgenti said that and other market-based plans, such as a tax on carbon emissions, are no longer enough.
“Solely using [a carbon tax] might have worked two to three decades ago,” Mr. Girgenti said. “What the scientists are saying is it’s probably not possible now. It's too late.”
He added that his agency’s mission to attract Republicans to this cause likely won’t be an easy one.
“There's this idea that if only we spoke the right way Republicans would come on board,” he said. “What we learned from them is to accept there’s going to be a fight.”
First Published October 16, 2019, 3:00 p.m.