John Kasich, the
Republican governor of Ohio, is announcing his bid for the
presidency Tuesday. Unlike most of his GOP opponents, Kasich
actually believes that climate change is real.
"I happen to believe there is a problem
with climate change," he told the Hill in 2012. "I don't want to
overreact to it, I can't measure it all, but I respect the
creation that the Lord has given us and I want to make sure we
protect it." He made a similar statement in the video above,
taken at a conference last month, but he added that the
environment shouldn't be "worshipped," because that would be
"pantheism."
Despite his comparatively reasonable views
on climate science, Kasich has been pretty noncommittal about
actually addressing global warming. And over the last few
months, he has stepped up his opposition to President Barack
Obama's climate agenda. He's rolled back Ohio's clean energy
goals and has joined a legal challenge against the Environmental
Protection Agency.
"Gov. Kasich seems less extreme than some
other presidential candidates because he couches his views on
climate change with uncertainty, rather than disagreement," said
Dan Weiss, a senior vice president at the League of Conservation
Voters. Still, Weiss said, Kasich's record tells a different
story.
It's no surprise that climate change would
be on Kasich's radar. His state is a leading producer and user
of coal, which is the country's top source of carbon dioxide
pollution. Kasich has said he is "not going to apologize" for
burning coal. He's also been a proponent of so-called "clean
coal" technology, which aims to capture carbon emissions and
store or repurpose them. (So far there's only one
commercial-scale CCS project in the country, at an
astronomically expensive coal plant in Mississippi.) In the
video above, Kasich claimed that his state "reduced emissions by
30 percent over the last 10 years." According to federal data,
total carbon emissions in Ohio fell only about half that amount
between 2002 and 2012. (Rob Nichols, Gov. Kasich's spokesperson,
did not return multiple requests for comment about this
statement and the governor's overall climate record.)
Either way, Ohio's energy sector is among
the nation's dirtiest. It ranks fifth nationwide for total
carbon emissions and has one of the nation's highest rates of
carbon emissions per unit of energy produced, a measurement that
experts refer to as "carbon intensity." That's because of the
state's heavy reliance on coal, which provides 63 percent of its
electricity (as opposed to just 2 percent from renewables). And
Ohio is home to American Electric Power, one of the country's
biggest power companies and the number-two producer of
electricity-related carbon emissions.
Ohio's energy is
among the nation's dirtiest.
The upshot of those statistics is that if
the United States is going to "protect" the Earth, as Kasich
claims to want to do, Ohio clearly has an important role to
play. And yet, Kasich's administration has been a leading
opponent of Obama's Clean Power Plan, a slate of regulations for
power-related emissions that aims to reduce the nation's carbon
footprint 30 percent by 2030 and that forms the backbone of the
president's climate agenda. The rules, which set a different
targets for each state, treat Ohio relatively lightly—according
to a Bloomberg analysis, Ohio would be required to reduce its
carbon intensity, but its overall carbon emissions could remain
more or less unchanged. Last year, the Ohio EPA called the
proposed rules "flawed" and said the federal EPA had "radically
underestimated" their cost. Meanwhile, Ohio Attorney General
Michael DeWine joined with a dozen other states in asking a
federal court to block the EPA from implementing the plan. The
court ultimately declined to hear that challenge, as the rules
haven't yet been finalized.
Ohio may have a difficult time meeting the
EPA target anyway, thanks to a law Kasich signed last year that
effectively shelves the state's own clean energy targets. The
measure, which was backed by the conservative American
Legislative Exchange Council, puts a two-year freeze on
requirements for power companies in the state to procure more of
their electricity from renewable sources like wind and solar,
and to reduce energy demand overall. Clean energy targets like
that would have helped the state meet the EPA mandate in a
cost-effective manner; without them, the state may have to rely
more heavily on curbing its coal use, according to one clean
energy industry group in the state.
So while Kasich might seem like a moderate
on climate, undermining climate-friendly policies is hardly
better than opposing the science outright. The quest for a
climate-savvy GOP candidate continues. |