During a visit to Ukiah High School Thursday, students asked Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) many questions that most Californians would likely want to know the answers to: What can be done about wildfires, high gas prices and the lack of affordable housing?
“What we pay for gasoline in California is always the highest in the nation, and the answer to that is to liberate all of you from gasoline,” Huffman told the students packed into the school’s Little Theater. “I drove up here in an electric vehicle, and it’s pretty cool, to not ever have to pay the ransom at the pump to the oil companies. All of you should be liberated from gasoline in that way, and we’re going to have to do it to solve the climate crisis anyway.”
But if everyone is driving electric cars, wondered sophomore Jaidyn Atherton, “how are we going to keep them charged if we have many blackouts?”
“The answer is, we’re not going to meet that demand on today’s (electric) grid, you’re going to meet it on tomorrow’s grid,” Huffman said. “And we have to accelerate the modernization of that grid. Some of it involves these transmission lines that PG&E needs to modernize (and put underground) to protect them from trees and from sparking fires when the wind blows, and some of it involves micro-grids that are less dependent on mass transmission lines and not affected by power shut-offs.”
Atherton also asked, since so many of us are still driving gasoline-powered cars, “what is one way we could lower those gas prices?”
“There are not a lot of great answers,”Huffman said, describing windfall taxes or gas-tax holidays as strategies that depend on the companies selling gasoline being willing to pass those cost reductions on to consumers, which he said is not likely to happen. “To some extent, there is a social license that we all give (those companies) to keep ripping us off, and we should not do that. The ultimate answer is to make people less dependent on gasoline.”
As for lowering the cost of housing in the state, Huffman described that as “a much trickier” problem to solve, since “that’s all market-driven, and our real estate market is just wildly out of control, and there’s no great solution. It’s mostly decided at the state and local level, but as your congressman I’m constantly working on ways that I can provide funding and support so the communities that want to build affordable housing have a chance at doing it.”
As for addressing wildfires, Huffman said “first, there is no silver bullet that is going to make this all go away and stop happening,” describing the reality of much-larger and much-more frequent wildfires the state is now experiencing as “the culmination of a bunch of factors: one of them is that the climate is absolutely changing, and challenging us in ways we haven’t been challenged before.
“But we also have more fuel load built up in our forests, because we started suppressing fires,” he continued. “So when you see people doing prescribed burns celebrate that, because we need to re-introduce fire into the system. And we’re also going to have to do some thinning of that vegetation manually, so we’re going to have to go in and cut some trees,” but do it in a more natural and healthy way than has been done in the recent past.
When another student asked what sorts of things your average resident could do on a daily basis to help mitigate climate change, Huffman suggested swapping out gas-powered appliances like stoves, water heaters and furnaces for appliances which use electric or solar power to cook food or heat water.
After answering several questions inside the theater, Huffman stepped outside to shake hands and take pictures with a small crowd of students. One of those students was sophomore Cameron Habley, who shared her goal of attending the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado with Huffman, who urged all the students to find and pursue a passion.
“I don’t care what your politics are, figure out what you care about, authentically, and try to make a difference,” he said, also urging the students to become as informed and as educated as possible, because “we live in the dis-information age. But with good information and a good education, you’ll be better able to figure this out.”
