Arizona Used To Act On Environmental Issues (Grand Canyon Haze); Now It's A Morass Of GOP Inaction

[hatrack]

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At the time, Napolitano and ADEQ officials determined that adopting the more stringent California Clean Car standards was necessary, especially in light of Arizona’s rapid growth in both population and vehicle use. The tailpipe standards would not only lower planet-heating emissions, but also help the state meet the stricter ozone standards announced by the Bush Administration in 2008. “While this regulation alone will not substantially reduce or reverse ongoing global climate change, it is inconceivable that those reduction targets could be achieved without actors like the state of Arizona undertaking reductions like this,” ADEQ stated in its final rulemaking.

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The Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora were on the verge of signing on to the Western Climate Initiative when the Great Recession hit. By the time the Initiative launched in 2012, Arizona had already pulled out of the cap-and-trade program. When Napolitano was appointed to serve in the Obama Administration as Secretary of Homeland Security in 2009, Republican Jan Brewer landed in the governor’s office. The recession, California’s growing regulatory environment, and President Barack Obama’s election rapidly transformed the state’s political landscape.

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On Feb. 1, 2010, Brewer signed an executive order to pull Arizona from the Western Climate Initiative, saying the program would cripple the state’s economy. Two months later, she signed a law that prevented any state agencies from even monitoring greenhouse gas emissions. The law remains on the books today. In a final blow to the momentum of the Napolitano era, Brewer signed an order that, in 2012, blocked the state from adopting California’s clean car standards. The Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry celebrated the repeal as vindication from California’s “overbearing regulatory environment.” Environmentalists decried the move.

“Brewer and I had very different ideas about what Arizona needed and what good public policy was,” Napolitano said. “She focused on the immigration agenda almost to the exclusion, it seems, of everything else.” Brewer declined to be interviewed for this story. Brewer’s signing of SB 1070, an anti-immigration law, plunged Arizona into political chaos and landed the state in the national spotlight. The rise of the Tea Party and increasing political polarization across the nation pushed climate change to the sidelines and made it increasingly a partisan issue.

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https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2020/09/25/arizona-was-once-climate-policy-leader-in-west-what-happened/5841376002/

[eppur_se_muova]

1. You can spell 'morass' without 'GOP', but it's nowhere near as effective. nt