Borough climate action committee members back watered-down, vague statements

Borough Assembly member Aaron Lojewski fired the volunteers on the climate action committee by email as his first action when he became the presiding officer last fall. He never contacted the committee, which had been working for about a year, but said he didn’t like its draft recommendations.

Lojewski had opposed the creation of the committee, with members chosen through a public process, and filled it with people he chose through a secret process.

Lojewski is a climate-change denier. When he ran unsuccessfully for the Legislature in 2016, he said there was not enough evidence about climate change to draw any real conclusions. “There should be no Alaska policy to combat global warming,” he said at the time.

The friends and Republican allies he named as new members to the committee are now supporting vague and innocuous recommendations packaged with enough hedge words that they contain no coherent approach for dealing with climate change. The result would be an inaction plan, not an action plan.

The committee members want the borough to do little in the way of preparing for, researching or adapting to climate change.

After one of Lojewski’s choices quit the panel, Lojewski allowed scientist Terry Chapin to rejoin the committee. This is the draft report.

Here is a 33-page list of proposed changes by the new committee to be considered Wednesday at 6 p.m. For information on the meeting and how to participate by Zoom, go here.

In general, Lojewski’s appointees say they oppose research by the borough, prefer the word “weather” to climate, don’t like to say “warming,” don’t care for prioritizing decarbonization, don’t want to say permafrost is thawing, are reluctant to back renewable energy, don’t want to promote electric cars and don’t want to promote “climate friendly industries.”

Fred Vreeman, Vivian Stiver, Barbara Haney and Aaron Gibson want to delete a proposal that the borough prepare a science-based goal of reducing greenhouse gases for borough operations and for the entire borough.

Harmony Tomaszewski, Mayor Bryce Ward and Chapin supported setting a goal.

Most of Lojewski’s appointees see no need for the borough to work with experts to estimate current carbon emissions and develop a benchmark that could be used in studying detailed alternatives for reducing future emissions.

Haney and Stiver prefer the words “weather events” or “weather impacts” instead of climate change impacts. Vreeman doesn’t want to mention thawing permafrost, but “permafrost changes.”

A majority of committee members oppose a goal of moving toward more borough-owned electric vehicles and the expansion of charging stations through grants. Haney wants borough vehicles to run on compressed natural gas. Vreeman wants low-emission vehicles, while Stiver wants hybrids. For the public, Stiver supports more electric charging stations only after 45 percent of cars are electric and a user fee, while Vreeman and Tomaszewski oppose more charging stations.

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