Irony of Reid's Move: Latinos Want Climate Action

Seems like Senator Reid can’t manage more than one issue at a time. He’s decided to push the bipartisan effort on climate and energy legislation to the back burner and instead focus on immigration reform. If you smell a rough re-election campaign, you’re on the right track. Ironically, Senator Reid is missing a big opportunity to address something that Latinos care a lot about – and that’s climate change.

On the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, the National Latino Coalition on Climate Change (NLCCC) released a study on the attitudes of Latino voters on climate change in three key states –Colorado, Florida AND Nevada. The findings? Latino voters want global warming action.

What’s more – the overwhelming majorities of Latino voters in Florida (80%), Nevada (67%) and Colorado (58%) say they are more likely to vote for a U.S. Senate candidate that supports proposals for fighting global warming. And 8 out of 10 voters reject the idea that fighting global warming will hurt the economy. In Nevada, 72% of those polled said that focusing on clean energy will create jobs.

NLCCC’s Vice-Chair Lillian Rodriguez-Lobez tells us why: “Latino Americans are on the front lines of climate change. We live where we feel the biggest impacts of droughts and hurricanes. We suffer disproportionately from asthma and air pollution, which will get worse under global warming. And, in huge numbers, we work in agriculture – of all industries the one likely to be hardest hit by climate change. The fact is that Latino Americans have every reason to call for an Earth Day revolution.”

Looks like Senator Reid is now saying, you can’t have it all. You can’t live freely in America and at the same time, be safe from the impacts of global warming.

Of course, let’s not just point the finger at Senator Reid. If there were more than one Republican Senator willing to do the work of protecting all of us from the impacts of global warming, then we wouldn’t be in the middle of this mess. In the absence of leadership, we all lose.