Climate Point: Voters support conservation and climate action

Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate change, energy and the environment. I’m Dinah Voyles Pulver, a national correspondent on Paste BN’s climate and environment team.

Among the items on ballots around the nation this week were more than a dozen measures related to conservation, climate and wildlife.

In Washington, voters overwhelmingly rejected efforts to repeal the state’s landmark climate legislation, the Kitsap Sun reported, in partnership with the Washington State Standard. The measure would have repealed the state’s Climate Commitment Act, approved in 2021, which established a cap and invest program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The repeal was voted down by 61.7% of those who cast ballots.

The program's revenue is earmarked for infrastructure projects designed to deal with climate change and related issues, like transportation. Critics said the plan has been too costly to residents. The repeal also would have barred state agencies from creating a market for carbon allowances to be traded or taxed, which is designed to lower emissions.

Money for clean water: In Rhode Island, voters approved a referendum to borrow $53 million for “clean water, open space and healthy communities.” Projects earmarked by the referendum include money for clean water, recreation, farmland, flood controls, and Roger Williams Park Zoo. Similarly the state previously approved $65 million and $70 million bond issues in 1987 and 2004. The largest single item is $20 million for the Clean Water Finance Agency to use to provide loans for wastewater projects to communities struggling to reduce pollutant discharges into Narragansett Bay.

Parks and greenspace: In Fort Myers, Florida, voters approved a $75 million bond for parks and greenspace improvements. The measure passed with 67% of the votes. The bonds will be issued in different amounts at different times for specific projects, and the city would repay the money over 20 to 30 years, according to City Manager Marty Lawing in The News-Press. The measure will cost the owner of a $250,000 home about $86 per year the city said.

Other measures approved by voters included a $10 billion climate bond in California, $6 billion for clean water and conservation in Suffolk, New York and a $30 million bond to fund a four-year grant program to enhance and expand the state’s network of trails, reported The Nature Conservancy, which worked to support a dozen of the ballot initiatives.

Right to hunt and fish: Meanwhile, also in Florida, voters overwhelmingly supported protecting the right to hunt and fish in the state’s constitution. An amendment to do so passed by a margin of 67.4% to 32.5% on Tuesday. State law requires such amendments to receive at least 60% of the vote to pass.

The amendment declares: "Fishing, hunting, and the taking of fish and wildlife, including by the use of traditional methods, shall be preserved forever as a public right and preferred means of responsibly managing and controlling fish and wildlife." Twenty-three states have similar measures to protect hunting and fishing.

Proponents said the amendment was needed to guard against any future efforts to take away their hunting and fishing rights, as has happened in other states. Opponents argued the amendment is legal overkill that could lead to indiscriminate wildlife killing, and feared "traditional methods” could eventually allow nets that entangle fish by the gills and other currently banned fishing and hunting tactics.

Lawsuits debate the protection of wildlife and water

In Washington, two groups sued to stop a plan to kill up to 450,000 barred owls in the next 30 years, as part of a plan to save northern spotted owls.

The spotted owls, a threatened species native to the Pacific Northwest, are threatened due to climate change, wildfires, habitation destruction and competition with invasive species. Scientists say the barred owls, which invaded the region from the eastern U.S. need to be removed.

Atlantic sturgeon, sometimes called living fossils, are increasingly being caught by commercial fishing trawlers in the coastal waters of New York and New Jersey, and that’s leading to higher mortality rates that threaten its future, a new lawsuit alleges.

The Hudson Riverkeeper and the Delaware Riverkeeper Network sued the states of New York, New Jersey and Delaware to try to prevent sturgeon from winding up in bycatch in gill nets and in the nets of bottom trawlers. “The Atlantic sturgeon, an ancient sentinel of the Hudson River, stands on the brink of extinction due to a failure of regulatory oversight,” Hudson Riverkeeper Tracy Brown said.

The state declined to comment on the litigation but issued a statement affirming its commitment to the restoration of the massive fish that may reach 14 feet and live 60 years. The legal action calls for tougher state and federal monitoring of the endangered fish once prized for its caviar. The population of the adult fish in the Hudson is estimated at around 450.

In Arizona, an alliance of conservation groups say the state is failing to protect the San Pedro River and is allowing water rights of a riparian conservation area to be violated. The groups filed lawsuits against Gov. Katie Hobbs and the state's water resources department in June and in August, and plan to sue again within weeks to demand the review of over 35 development projects.

“We’ve known for decades that home construction in the area was based on the fantasy of a limitless water supply," said Robin Silver, co-founder of the Center for Biological Diversity, which has led lawsuits to protect the San Pedro River for about three decades.

In other news:

Study shows: A new report published in the British medical journal The Lancet says climate change has created a health crisis that continues to worsen, and threatens to undermine 50 years of gains in public health. Health harms created by climate change stack up to being "the same order of magnitude as the harms associated with medical errors," said Jonathan Buonocore, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health at the School of Public Health, Boston University and one of the paper's authors.

The report cites fossil-fuel-related air pollution, tropical cyclones worsened by climate change, heat waves' links to preterm births and future climate change effects. On the positive side, the U.S. adoption of wind and solar power has led to an estimated 1,200 to 1,600 fewer premature deaths in the U.S. in 2022 due to better air quality.

Panthers in Florida: Watch as a Florida panther roams the Everglades.

Klamath River: View a photo gallery tracking efforts to restore the river and read a new story about the removal of the dams.

Read on for more including surprising facts about apples and the rising costs of the 2024 hurricane season. Some stories below may require a subscription. Sign up and get access to eNewspapers in the Paste BN Network. If someone forwarded you this email and you'd like to receive Climate Point in your inbox for free once a week, sign up here.