Climate and Environment

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Heatwaves are making Arizona summers hotter and longer. Our air is getting dirtier and more polluted. Wildfires are ravaging our state. Mega-droughts are drying up our water supply, forcing many farmers in our state to lose access to nearly half of the water on which they now rely to grow food for our state's families. 

The climate crisis is hitting Arizona hard. And it's hitting working communities of color like ours the hardest with sky-high asthma rates and increased risk of miscarriage. 

Meanwhile, Arizona's legislature can't even admit that the climate crisis is real, choosing instead to side with the fossil fuel industry and parrot their bogus lies. 

In fact, due to the legislature's failure to fully fund the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ), ADEQ has failed for several years failed to check groundwater for potentially harmful chemicals.

We need to act, fast. That is why I will work with community advocates, scientists, labor leaders, indigenous leaders, and others to ensure we invest in renewable energy, curb the use of fossil fuels, create thousands of unionized, well-paying green jobs, and protect public lands. 

I will also work to introduce two landmark constitutional amendments that could transform our approach to tackling the climate crisis and would position Arizona as an international leader in ensuring a clean, safe environment for all. 

• Protecting our lands and waterways: In office, I would put forth the Arizona Lands and Waterways Bill of Rights, a transformational constitutional amendment recognizing Arizona’s precious ecosystems not only as resources for humans to use, but as legal entities with the right to exist, flourish, thrive, and regenerate. This landmark constitutional amendment—the first of its kind in the country—would establish legal rights for Arizona’s ecosystems, enforceable in a court of law. Under this amendment, Arizona’s Attorney General would have a fiduciary responsibility to litigate on behalf of Arizona’s lands and waterways, but any citizen would also have the ability to go to court on behalf of nature. In sum, this amendment would offer a new and potentially transformative approach to protecting our air, water, and lands and offer new legal tools to tackle the climate crisis.
• Ensuring our right to clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment: I would also work to establish a second constitutional amendment recognizing a clean and healthy environment as an inherent, inalienable legal right of all Arizonans. The Arizona Environmental Justice Amendment (AEJA) would establish environmental health and safety as q basic civil liberty—just like our rights to religious expression and free speech. The AEJA would become a powerful tool to ensure Black, Latino, Native, and low-income communities—which have significantly more polluted and unhealthy air and water and tend to be located closer to toxic waste sites—have access to a clean and healthy environment. The AEJA would also ensure environmental justice is a substantive obligation of Arizona’s government, not merely an aspirational goal.
• Repeal HB 2442: In 2010, Governor Jan Brewer signed a bill into law that bans state agencies from monitoring or regulating greenhouse gas emissions. In office, I will introduce a bill to repeal this absurd, anti-science law and ensure our state agencies have the legal authority to monitor and regulate carbon emissions and other pollutants.