We need a viable, coordinated, popular and immediate response to runaway climate change, which threatens agriculture, coastal cities, human health, biodiversity and global security. We must aim for implementing the goals of the Green New Deal, beginning with a ban on fracking on public lands. We must take back the public conversation and control from those who place record-breaking profits for their fossil fuel donors over the lives of the people they are elected to represent.
Solving this problem starts with working across the aisle on a Carbon Dividends Plan developed by self-identified conservative Republicans. I will support this plan to place gradually increasing fees on carbon emissions and return all proceeds to the American people as a regular dividend. Something like this has worked in Alaska for the past 35 years. This market-friendly, small government policy option also opens a path to help conservatives understand the science.
I will also push to develop an energy infrastructure that relies on balancing energy independence in the U.S. with comprehensive use of wind, solar, and hydroelectric and developing technologies. Incorporating more renewables will help our country move towards energy-independence while creating good jobs and economic stability. In the past five years, the solar industry alone has created nearly 80,000 living-wage U.S. jobs.
Additionally, I will fight against opening our precious Rocky Mountain parks, wild lands and open spaces to drilling or other resource extraction. I will fight to block corporate lobbyists huge influence through campaign contributions and to eliminate tax subsidies those companies get in return, known as ‘pay for play.” I will also fight to make it illegal to promote inaccurate information concerning energy and environmental impacts; Colorado and our nation cannot afford to have a Congressional Senator who shrugs off the threats we face to our forests, air quality, watersheds and public lands.