Local opinion: Hear no, see no, speak no emissions

You open your monthly water bill and it’s a whopper, $400 more than usual. Something big has gone wrong. You call the water company to figure out just where the problem is so you can fix the leak, but the water company says State of Arizona law prohibits them from collecting any information about your water usage and cannot tell you where the problem is or what you can do about it. Arizona Law makes it illegal for them to measure the information vital for you to reduce your big bill. “Whaaaat! Are you kidding me? That’s crazy, how the heck did something like that become law in Arizona? They better change it. I mean that’s a huge waste of water and I could stop it but the State doesn’t want me to.”

That pretty much sums up Arizona Revised Statute 49-191 — except substitute measuring carbon emissions data instead of water usage. Our law prohibits state agencies from measuring any information which could be used for regulating greenhouse gas emissions. No Arizona information about who is emitting what when and how much. From the state there’s no way to tell, no way to address “leaks,” no way to work with the big or small carbon and methane emitters because there’s no state information to go on. What we end up with is numbers from everyone but the state that the state can’t even use if it wanted to.

It’s even worse than that. Arizona counties also have their hands tied because ARS 49-112 limits county measuring authority to nothing more stringent than State regulation. Full circle prohibition. So as a practical matter state and county employees are afraid of pretty much doing anything that has anything to do with mitigating climate change. If the State measured greenhouse gas emissions it could lead to regulatory climate actions — precisely what that law intended to prevent.

This law passed on a party line vote in 2010. In hindsight looking back to that time it was still sort of the dark ages of climate change. It would actually be another five years, 2015, before Oklahoma Senator Inhofe threw snowballs in Chambers to demonstrate that climate change was indeed a hoax and a liberal conspiracy.

It’s really not that long ago but it feels like forever. Times have changed dramatically since 2010. No one is throwing snowballs in the Senate chambers claiming that global warming is a hoax. The country has moved on and a 2023 poll showed that over 80% of Arizonans favor strong action to curb global warming and air pollution. The nine hottest years in recorded Tucson weather history have all occurred in the last 10. Climate catastrophes make daily news, displaced climate migrants batter borders everywhere and climate deniers are headed the way of the Dodo bird.

Our climate is more than just a culture war issue, it’s having serious material impacts on our lives today. We need to move past the partisan part of this law and work towards solutions today. And that means studying and understanding what we’re up against. Is measuring greenhouse gas emissions the right way to go now? Should we repeal a law that’s really not that old? Look no further than to what Peter Drucker, the most famous management consultant in history — the guy who wrote the book on modern management practices — has to say about gathering information you can use to make informed decisions: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” And that’s where we are right now with carbon emissions in this State. We are not allowed to even measure!

We absolutely at a minimum have to enable our communities to coordinate and respond to the climate risks and threats we face. Repeal this law and welcome Arizona into the modern world.