The US Capitol won't help. Will our statehouse?
How to find if our state can take climate action
Buddy’s an enthusiastic - and effective - campaigner. The neighbors all know where he stands on the issues.
The federal government is AWOL on climate action, and is likely to stay away during most of the fighting ahead. Excuse us for paraphrasing ourselves, but we can’t find another way to say it:
For drastic actions by big government to help protect our neighborhoods - flood barriers, new and cleaner water sources, subsidized retreat from flood-threatened areas, land use restrictions, better drainage, transportation safeguards, investments in technology - we’re going to need a different government. Really different! Here’s what that government will need to do:
- increase some taxes
- curtail some freedom
- create new regulations
- pick some winners and losers, and
- expand government departments in the process.Does this list sound familiar? They’re exactly the actions conservative voters are dead set against! Can you imagine the American electorate coming together to support even a small chunk of this?
Neither can we.
So state, county and local governments are left to do the heavy lifting to help us protect our communities from climate damage . . . if they can.
We’ve already looked at money and leadership problems in town governments - two factors that help or hinder them from protecting residents. Let’s turn to the states and look at the money problems that affect their abilities to build protections against climate dangers. (We’ll leave aside the often-sad question of climate-aware leadership at the statehouse.)
HOW LIKELY ARE STATES TO DO ANY LIFTING?
There are two hidden problems for states.
Unfunded liabilities One big, and almost invisible, drag on state spending is unfunded employee pensions, the cost of pension benefits that states have promised state workers but for which they haven’t set aside enough money.
For states already paying down large pension debts—retirement system costs in some states eat up more than 15% of state revenue—further contribution increases may be difficult to fund without cutting essential services and programs or raising taxes. [Pew Trusts September 2021]
Things improved during the Pandemic (didn’t notice, did we?) thanks to:
phenomenal investment returns of more than 25% in fiscal 2021 (the highest annual returns for public funds in over thirty years) and
state benefit ‘reforms’ that lower costs, often by cutting benefits for newly hired public workers.
These conditions are not likely to repeat. Returns are already back down around 7%, and there’s only so much reduction in pension benefits that workers will accept. Even with these improvements, lots of states still aren’t saving enough to reduce their unfunded liabilities. We can see which those are on this Pew Trusts map (Figure 5).
State Rainy Day Funds Another mostly unknown aspect of state finances is called the budget stabilization fund. These pools of money are basically an emergency savings account and vary widely from state to state. Balances rose in many states during the past few years, but some states spent a lot to plug budget holes. Nevada, for example, had emptied its rainy day fund by the end of fiscal 2020, and New Jersey used almost all of its savings. In fiscal 2021, Alaska estimated that it would reduce its balance by more than half.
Because budget size differs from state to state, the health of rainy day funds is often expressed by calculating how many days of state spending each state’s fund would cover. On average it’s a little less than 30 days but ranges from 105 days in North Dakota down to zero in Illinois. We can check each state on another Pew Trusts map.
Oh, and remember those structurally deficient bridges? Big costs of repairing those and other aging infrastructure still hang over state budgets, competing against climate protection projects.
All in all, even if a state is not hamstrung by political philosophy from protecting against climate damage, it’s an open question whether it can find the money to do so.
WHAT CAN WE DO?
As with a whole lot of climate dangers, there’s not much we can do as individuals.
We can choose to live in a better-funded state. If we identify a flush state from the maps mentioned above, we can add that factor to other climate-related reasons for moving there - or at least helping our children to settle there.
We will find, for instance, that the latest Pew maps show New Jersey has only 13 days of state expenses in its rainy day fund, and it’s still growing its unfunded pension debt. On the other hand, nearby Connecticut’s stabilization fund holds 70 days of expenses, and its unfunded pension amount is coming down.
Join a group to influence state lawmakers. There are a few national groups that work primarily at the state level, among them Climate XChange and the Sierra Club through its local chapters. Most groups protesting outside their statehouse are local to that state. (Let us know if you find other influential national groups that specialize in state issues.) It’s easy, however, to find a local group we might join by putting something like “statename climate action protest statehouse” into our search engine. You’ll find, among others, a kids’ group pressuring the Iowa legislature, and be surprised at how many protests are led by young people!
Two bits of advice. It may be hopeless to lobby state legislatures that have shown little interest in climate issues. One indicator of this apathy is the absence of a Climate Action Plan in 19 states. See this map for which states those are. And be careful to distinguish between lawmakers’ reluctance to tackle the causes of climate change and any reluctance to protect local infrastructure and environment from the effects of climate change. As Buddy and I discovered when we examined attitudes in our political parties, some state houses and governor’s mansions are stonewalling actions on emissions but are much more open to local protective measures.
And, of course, as Buddy points out, at election time we can do more than just vote. We can educate others, submit a state referendum, campaign, protest, and get out the vote! Now is a good time to start; primaries for the November elections have just started.
LEARN, THINK, ACT
We’ve added these two measures of state finances to Our List of Climate-Proof Indicators. There are several more indicators of a state’s ability to protect its residents; we’ll discuss those in a coming newsletter.
We’ve put all this week’s links to sources and resources right in the text above. In our previous 25 posts we deliberately kept them out, placing them at the end here. Which placement is better for our readers? Let us know.