Exclusive: The Climate Crisis Will Hit Hard in Mayor Pete's Lifetime. Here's His Plan to Fight It.
Exclusive: The Climate Crisis Will Hit Hard in Mayor Petes Lifetime. Heres His Plan to Fight It.
We sat down with Buttigieg in his home town of South Bend.
Rebecca Leber
Pete Buttigieg wants Americans to understand that the climate crisis isnt only about encroaching seas and shrinking glaciersit affects everything and everyone in between.
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It was South Bends recent floods that inspired Buttigiegs climate plan. One thing weve learned from recent disastersincluding the place were sitting right nowis that there is a complex overlapping bureaucracy when it comes to getting disaster relief, he said. The last thing you want somebody to have to do when theyve been put out of their homes by a disaster is have to navigate all these different agencies to get help.
Buttigieg says he has a plan to fix that in his first 100 days in office by setting up a Disaster Commission that coordinates local and federal response to extreme weather events. And
his climate strategy emphasizes collaboration between Washington and individual communities. The first of his climate plans, an 18-page $2 trillion plan that endorses the Green New Deal, proposes an AmeriCorps-style volunteer Climate Corps, federally issued World-War-II-style bonds for climate change and renewable energy projects, and regional resilience hubs that would work together with a new clean energy bank to loan funds for new technology and infrastructure projects.
Buttigiegs timelines and investments for hitting zero pollution in the major sectors are not quite as aggressive as his competitors. He aims to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, with goals along the way to double clean electricity by 2025, clean up new cars by 2035, followed by trucks the following five years. By comparison, Bernie Sanders, who described his climate plan in an exclusive interview for the Climate Desk and Weather Channel series, has the same 2050 goal, but claims he can clean up transportationcurrently the biggest source of pollutionby 2030.
Buttigieg also embraces two policies that have lost some popularity among the environmental left (and Sanders): He supports carbon capture and storage, and he plans to slap the fossil fuel industry with a carbon tax, repaid as a dividend for taxpayers.
For me the idea [of a carbon tax] is about making sure our prices more accurately reflect the true cost, including the cost to our own future, of things like fossil fuels, he told CityLabs Sarah Holder. The beauty of the carbon tax and dividend is it does a lot of that work in terms of realigning the signals in our economy.
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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/09/exclusive-the-climate-crisis-will-hit-hard-in-mayor-petes-lifetime-heres-his-plan-to-fight-it/