Last week, we received our voter information guides in the mailbox. Before I had a chance to even take a look, I found my fifth-grader reading through the guide with a checklist. Looking over her shoulder, I saw her list of the proposition numbers – most with question marks next to them – but one with a big, bold check mark: Proposition 4.
Even though I hadn’t said a word, she gets it. In her short life, she has been through three wildfire evacuations, she has been told not to drink the toxic drinking water in our friend’s neighborhood in Merced County, and she has been kept inside for days and weeks on end due to dangerous, orange, smoky skies. I don’t have to explain why investing in climate resilience is about the best financial decision California could make right now for her future. The kids get it.
But don’t just take it from them, take it from the esteemed climate scientists who I work with at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who have been analyzing how climate change is impacting the Golden State in a myriad of ways:
- From more dangerous and destructive wildfires: The Fossil Fuels Behind Forest Fires
- To melting summers and prolonged extreme heat: Too Hot to Work: Assessing the Threats Climate Change Poses to Outdoor Workers
- To more intense droughts and floods, drying up crops and contaminating drinking water: Troubled Waters: Preparing for Climate Threats to California’s Water System
- To higher seas, threatening communities and critical infrastructure: Looming Deadlines for Coastal Resilience: Rising Seas, Disruptive Tides, and Risks to Coastal Infrastructure
I probably don’t need to tell you any of this, because you are living it. We know the facts: recent wildfires have burned millions of acres of forest and cost taxpayers billions of dollars; more than a million Californians don’t have access to clean drinking water; and our state’s precious farmland and wildlife are at risk from the impacts of a changing climate.
Proposition 4 invests in a more resilient future by providing much needed funding to address these threats, particularly in the most vulnerable and low-income communities where the needs are greatest. It will invest almost $4 billion in safe drinking water, drought, flood, and water resilience, $1.5 billion in wildfire and forest resilience, $1.2 billion in sea level rise and coastal resilience, and about a half billion in extreme heat mitigation. As a water scientist, it’s particularly important to me that the bond prioritizes storing water underground, refilling our depleted groundwater aquifers. Groundwater storage, unlike surface water storage (or dams) will continue to work even as it gets hotter and drier.
Some people say it’s too expensive and we should have made these investments earlier. (Ironically, these are many of the same people who also argued that climate change wasn’t “real” just a few short years ago.) In fact, there couldn’t be a better time to borrow money as interest rates have plummeted over the last few months to the lowest point in many years. At the same time, the costs of inaction are rising. Fire suppression costs, alone, more than doubled from below a half billion in 2020 to over $1.2 billion in 2022.
Climate change is here and it’s costly. Wildfire risks are already driving up insurance and utility bills. Proposition 4 marks an historic shift from simply throwing money at disaster response to proactive investing in disaster prevention, saving billions of dollars in future costs from devastating fires, water shortages, and other climate hazards. The only question is whether we do the right thing now or let the problem get bigger and more expensive for our kids to deal with later.
The science and the kids are clear: Proposition 4 is the right thing to do—we should listen.