On May 16th, 2018, Representatives John Faso (NY-19) and Alan Lowenthal (CA-47) came to FCNL’s Quaker Welcome Center for a bipartisan conversation on climate change.
Reps. Faso and Lowenthal are both members of the Climate Solutions Caucus, and are the second pair of caucus members to participate in a bipartisan conversation at the Quaker Welcome Center. The May 16th dialogue was co-hosted by the National Audubon Society and moderated by Audubon’s President and CEO, David Yarnold.
The discussion focused on how Congress can find bipartisan solutions to climate change and how we can build infrastructure that is resilient in the face of increasingly frequent extreme weather events. The latter of these questions is of particular interest to Reps. Faso and Lowenthal, as they both sit on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
While it is unlikely that Congress will take up a major infrastructure package this year, there are other smaller pieces of legislation that can provide opportunities to address the need for a more climate resilient infrastructure. The Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) is one such bill. WRDA deals with various aspects of water resources and infrastructure, and is up for congressional reauthorization in 2018. “In WRDA, I think there’s a real opportunity to get back to looking at flood, storm control projects, and upgrading stormwater systems” Rep. Lowenthal noted during the event. Rep. Faso also noted an opportunity within the WRDA reauthorization to work towards “building [infrastructure] with a mind towards avoiding that obvious pollution, but also building it in a way that it can sustain and deal with the impacts of severe weather.”
The evening concluded with a question that gets to the core of the Climate Solutions Caucus’s bipartisan structure: “How can we depoliticize the issue of climate change?” Rep. Lowenthal suggested that with growing bipartisan acceptance of the issue, Congress can help to reframe the issue in terms of extreme weather, economic impacts, and public health effects. Rep. Faso noted that in the current political climate, we can’t just “swing for the fences.” Instead, we have to find more modest ways to address climate change, such as the PREPARE Act, which just passed the House. “We have to hit singles and sometimes get on base with a bunt, and sometimes advance the runner by hitting to the opposite field,” Faso quipped, alluding to the caucus’s tradition of bipartisanship and working towards feasible legislative victories.
We were grateful to both Reps. Faso and Lowenthal and their staff for engaging in bipartisan conversation at the Quaker Welcome Center, and we hope it will lead to an increased spirit of collaboration across party lines in Congress. We are also grateful to David Yarnold and the National Audubon society for co-hosting the event. We hope to build on the success of the Quaker Welcome Center bipartisan dialogues and the spirit of bipartisanship within the Climate Solutions Caucus to encourage Congress find innovative and collaborative ways to build a safer, cleaner, and more resilient future.
