Bernie Sanders and AOC Want Congress to Declare a National Emergency over Climate Change

by Tara Golshan (Vox) Climate activists around the world are pushing governments to treat global warming as an emergency. -- ... On Tuesday, they got three prominent progressive allies in the United States to publicly join their cause: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) and Earl Blumenauer (D-OR).

The lawmakers introduced a joint resolution calling for the US to join 16 other countries and hundreds of local governments in declaring a “climate emergency.”

A concurrent resolution is nonbinding and does not have the force of law. But Blumenauer said this is the first step toward a Green New Deal, an ambitious progressive resolution Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) proposed earlier this year to address climate change and growing inequality.

The resolution declares global warming “a climate emergency that severely and urgently impacts the economic and social well-being, health and safety, and national security of the United States,” and calls for “a national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization of the resources and labor of the United States at a massive-scale to halt, reverse, mitigate, and prepare for the consequences of the climate emergency and to restore the climate for future generations.” READ MORE

Excerpt from Politico's Morning Energy: WHAT'S THE (CLIMATE) RISK? A subcommittee hearing today will mark the latest move from House Democrats to address climate change and press corporate America on its role in tackling social and environmental issues.

A House Financial Services subcommittee will examine a set of bills this afternoon, including one that would require public companies to disclose details of their climate change risks. In a memo released before the hearing, committee Democrats said there's "growing evidence" that environmental, social and governance information is vital to investors, as Pro's Zachary Warmbrodt reports. "Many investors view ESG information as important not just for evaluating reputational risks, but for evaluating companies' financial performance as well," the memo said.

— Witnesses today include Mindy Lubber, the president and CEO of Ceres, a sustainable investing nonprofit, and James Andrus, an investment manager for the California Public Employees' Retirement System Investment Office.

The hearing comes amid larger calls within the Democratic party to force companies to disclose the risks they face from a warming atmosphere, including several leading 2020 presidential hopefuls who have released plans to strengthen climate-related disclosure requirements. And they're not alone — Commodity Futures Trading Commission member Rostin Behnam, a Democrat, called for the agency last month to form a subcommittee focused on climate-related financial market risks, warning that global warming could spark a financial meltdown. READ MORE

Excerpt from Bloomberg: Congress is moving legislation that could direct the Defense Department to calculate replacement costs for its most vulnerable installations and ensure that new installations are built to better withstand climate impacts.

Lawmakers are expected this month to wrap up that bill—the fiscal 2020 defense authorization measure—and some members say it’s time for the Pentagon to start putting estimates on the table.

“We should put a price tag on it because a price tag helps to focus the mind on the cost of doing nothing,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said, “even if the bigger issue is, of course, that we should be doing something to address climate change broadly.”

Having a price tag is “important information to know,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), an energy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. He noted that the hefty costs of recent storms “have been a pretty prominent part of our discussion both in the disaster relief package as well as the defense authorization act” that recently passed the Senate.

“But I think it would be irresponsible not to consider in that same analysis what the costs of mitigating” future impacts from severe weather on military installations, he said.