I attended a town hall in Packwood on Aug. 10 with Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. I think she is doing a great job for her district. I like the way that she is making a big effort to hear from the public. I especially like the way that she is trying to get the Democratic Party to pay attention to the needs of working people like they have in the past.
However, I didn’t like her answer to my question. Here is my question: “You have stated in your campaign speeches that you are proud of your record of voting with Republicans on some issues. Republicans have been advocating for reducing the federal deficit by eliminating funding for promoting the development of clean energy that President Biden included in The Inflation Reduction Act. Would you vote with Republicans to eliminate this funding?”
I didn’t write down her response but I will try and summarize what she said. She agreed that climate change is an important issue, but she doesn’t want solutions that hurt working people economically. She doesn’t want to do anything that will raise the price of gas. She doesn’t want to spend money that does not give us a good amount of return relative to the cost. She prefers “market solutions” that are not determined by government interventions. She thinks nuclear power could be the best solution. She thinks electric cars are too expensive for working people. And finally, she does not want climate change measures to cause us to go more into debt.
I don’t feel that she is taking the problem as seriously as she should. I believe that climate change is the biggest issue of our time. We have recently had the hottest month world wide ever recorded. Every summer the fear of forest fires increases. The coral in our oceans are dying. Floods are becoming more frequent. In 2015, 195 out of 196 countries agreed that climate change is a serious problem caused by human behavior and that we need serious solutions. Events since then have confirmed what they concluded.
Making small changes in our behavior and leaving major changes to for profit companies is not enough to meet with the scale of this problem. We should not kick the problem down the road for our children to deal with as has been done for the last 50 years. As to the effect on the cost of the changes on the country’s debt, I would like to see much of the cost funded by closing the tax loopholes for wealthy Americans (that could be a whole new editorial).
Dan Meekhof
Packwood
