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Key environmentally-related ballot measures in six states received mixed results yesterday.
On the plus side, Florida voters saw through utility industry efforts to thwart the state's burgeoning solar energy business and California voters appeared to affirm the state's ban on single-use plastic bags. Both Massachusetts and Oregon passed key animal protection laws.
But, two historically significant measures didn't fare as well. An energy and big business-backed state constitutional amendment passed in Colorado, while a controversial carbon tax initiative in Washington went down to defeat.
1. FLORIDA: Florida's utility-backed Amendment 1, disguised as a pro-solar bill, failed to reach the 60 percent yes vote needed to become law.
"Florida voters weren't fooled by the misleading campaign that the utilities tried to perpetrate," Tania Galloni, Earthjustice managing attorney for Florida, said.
A hard-fought grassroots campaign worked to educate voters on the deceptive nature of the proposed amendment to the Florida constitution. The amendment would have allowed utility companies to charge fees to solar customers and make it more difficult for private solar companies to work with homeowners.
Tory Perfetti, chairman of Floridians for Solar Choice, told the Miami Herald, "We defeated one of the most egregious and underhanded attempts at voter manipulation in this state's history."
2. WASHINGTON: Voters rejected Initiative 732, which would have created the nation's first tax on carbon. The proposal would have set a price of $25 per metric ton starting in 2018, increasing to $100 over the next 40 years. The measure was opposed not only by the Koch brothers, but also by the Sierra Club.
However, as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said days before the election, "By making Washington the premier American government to place a price on carbon, Evergreen voters will pioneer the trail away from our deadly carbon addiction and its murderous offspring: climate chaos."
3. COLORADO: Amendment 71, supported by the oil and gas industry, won approval in Colorado. Now, the state constitutional amendment makes it extremely difficult to get citizen initiatives on the ballot, essentially ceding control to big-money backers. An attempt to get an anti-fracking amendment on the ballot sparked the oil and gas industry to spend big on Amendment 71.
A group funded by Anadarko and Noble Energy donated at least $1 million to support passage. Other big backers included the Colorado Gaming Association, Colorado Dairy Farmers and the Colorado Association of Realtors.
4. CALIFORNIA: Two propositions affecting the use of plastic bags were on the state ballot this year. As of this morning, Proposition 67, which would keep the legislatively-enacted statewide ban on single-use plastic bags, appears to be winning. Proposition 65, which was an industry-backed effort to create an ill-defined environmental fund supported by the 10-cent bag fee, was defeated.
The Surfrider Foundation and other environmental groups opposed Prop 65. They said it was designed to confuse voters.
5. MASSACHUSETTS: Voters enacted a landmark law that will protect farm animals from extreme confinement. By 2022, the measure will prohibit the use of veal crates for baby calves, gestation crates for mother pigs and so-called battery cages for egg-laying hens. All three confine animals to spaces so small they can't turn around or spread their wings, in the case of hens, and are inhumane.
The newly-passed Massachusetts law also makes it illegal to sell meat or eggs from animals kept in these conditions, including from those farmed outside the state.
6. OREGON: Voters overwhelmingly approved Measure 100 by a 70-to-30 margin, which prohibits the sale of animal parts and products from 12 species, including rhino, cheetah, tiger, sea turtle, lion, elephant, whale, shark, pangolin, jaguar, ray, and leopard.
More than 150,000 signatures were gathered to put the measure on the ballot.
"Oregon has a long and proud history of supporting wildlife conservation. With this sweeping victory, Oregon has set an important example for the rest of the nation and joins efforts around the world to protect imperiled animals, such as elephants, whales and sea turtles," said Scott Beckstead, senior Oregon state director for The Humane Society of the United States.
Officials in the Yamalo-Nenets region in Siberia are proposing the culling of a quarter-million reindeer by Christmas in order to minimize the possible spread of anthrax, the Siberian Times reported.
The deadly problem began over the summer, as record-high temperatures as warm as 95 degrees Fahrenheit thawed out an anthrax-infected reindeer buried in permafrost about 70 years ago. The outbreak killed a 12-year-old boy, claimed the lives of about 2,300 reindeer and four dogs and sickened about 100 people. It was the first time anthrax struck the region since 1941.
According to the Siberian Times, the proposal to kill 250,000 reindeer is dramatically higher than the number of animals that are annually culled in November and December.
To incentivize the nomadic herders to give up their herds, officials suggested a reward of an affordable mortgage to buy an apartment instead of a cash compensation.
An estimated 730,000 reindeer currently live in the Yamalo-Nenets region, an amount that Nikolai Vlasov, deputy head of Russia's Federal Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance Service, said was already "too high."
"The more dense the animal population is, the worse the disease transfer medium (and) the more often animals get sick," the Russian federal veterinary official said. "Density of livestock, especially in the tundra areas that are very fragile, should be regulated ... Otherwise, they will kill the pastures and later will destroy the indigenous minorities of the north who will have nothing to live on. It is impossible to breed reindeer without limits."
Critics, however, say the proposal to kill 250,000 reindeer would negatively impact the livelihoods of the nomadic Nenets, the indigenous reindeer-herding population who have called the region home for more than a thousand years.
"A huge number of nomads on the Yamal and Gydan peninsulas will lose their means of existence and opportunities to maintain their traditional way of life," anthropologist Olga Murashko told the Siberian Times. "Additionally, it is clear that within the short time frame given, the indigenous reindeer herders cannot be properly consulted on the administration's plans to annihilate a large number of reindeer."
As Survival International described:
"For the Nenets who are still nomadic, their lands and reindeer herds remain vitally important to their collective identity. Land is everything to us. Everything," said Sergei Hudi.
"The reindeer is our home, our food, our warmth and our transportation," Sergei Hudi told Survival.
Alexei Kokorin, head of the World Wildlife Fund Russia's climate and energy program, said the temperatures and the outbreak are connected to climate change.
"Such anomalous heat is rare for Yamal, and that's probably a manifestation of climate change," he told The Guardian in August.
The World Meteorological Organization warned last month that the Arctic's rapidly changing temperatures could affect the weather worldwide:
"Dramatic and unprecedented warming in the Arctic is driving sea level rise, affecting weather patterns around the world and may trigger even more changes in the climate system.
"The rate of change is challenging the current scientific capacity to monitor and predict what is becoming a journey into uncharted territory."