Clean Air & Water

Protect What We Breathe. Preserve What We Drink.

Everyone — no matter where we live or who we vote for — deserves clean air and safe water. Protecting our natural resources is common sense. It’s about health, safety, and the legacy we leave behind.

That means holding polluters accountable, making sure rural communities have clean drinking water, and protecting the mountains, rivers, and forests that make North Carolina home.

This isn’t about extremes. It’s about responsibility — to our families, our land, and our future.

If being an environmentalist means believing in wild places to inspire us, air we can breathe, and water we can drink, then you can throw that label at me all day long. But I'm also a builder, a business owner, and a big fan of driving around to playing rivers in my little plastic kayak. So I can't pretend that I'm not damaging the environment or the climate, and I would be a hypocrite to get up on a soapbox and yell at people for living their lives. With that said, it doesn't matter how much money we make, or how easy transport is, if we choke in our own soot or bake to death in a carbon dioxide sun sauna.

We do not need to sacrifice our lifestyle to have clean air and water, or to keep our climate stable and reduce the number of repeat Helene events in our future. We just need to be sensible. The powerful lobbyists of the oil and gas industries, as well as a collaboration of major polluters, have spent billions of dollars promoting the false narrative that we cannot have our traditional healthy American lifestyles without poisoning our children.

In 2022, fossil fuel subsidies in the United States totaled $757 billion, according to the International Monetary Fund. This includes estimates of the cost of Environmental degradation, and health effects such as increased asthma and cancer. 

My interpretation of the same inputs gets me a direct measurable total of active subsidies and tax breaks as a bit under $100 billion. So not much money at all. I mean, who doesn't have 100 billion dollars laying around that they want to give to the fossil fuel industry to foul up our air. Not me.

https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-proposals-to-reduce-fossil-fuel-subsidies-january-2024

So let's start by pulling the rug out from under these sweetheart deals, then follow by holding this extremely profitable industry accountable for at least a portion of the secondary damage to our health and climate. We can do this gently and strategically, without crashing the economy or enacting extreme measures..

The key to this, as with almost everything else I'm discussing in these policy vignettes, is working together to find sensible middle ground, instead of alternating back and forth between each extreme as one party takes control and pushes the other out. Once we start working together as a nation, and ignoring the constant chatter of the fossil fuel lobby, we can enact proactive, long-term investment strategies to gradually make our energy structure and manufacturing cleaner and more efficient, while holding on to our place of leadership in the world for technology.