Two are from Frederick County.
Annapolis, Md. (KM) – The Chesapeake Climate Action Network’s Action fund has released its endorsements for this year’s primary for the Maryland General Assembly, and two Frederick County candidates are on the list.; They are Delegate Ken Kerr, who is running for re-election, and Delegate Karen Lewis Young who is running for the State Senate.
The Maryland Director of CCAN Action Fund, Victoria Venable, says the environmental group made its endorsements for each candidate running for re-election by examining their voting records. “Two big pieces of legislation that we judged their voting record on were the Clean Energy Jobs Act of 2019, as well as the Climate Solutions Now Act of 2022,”: she said.
For all candidates, Venable says the CCAN looked at their platform. She says all of them supported a Climate Justice Resolution which calls for “100% clean electricity by 2035; ending subsidies for trash incineration, and increasing investments for underserved communities; looking at things like increasing access to clean transportation; and also incorporating local union labor in all of our large clear-energy projects,”: she said.
All of the candidates on the list are Democrats. “While we weren’t excluding any Republicans or independents from our endorsement process, most of them ended up being ineligible because they voted against our key issues,” says Venable.
Venable also said endorsements can make a difference “We’re hoping when voters are going to the polls, they are thinking about the top issues that are important to them. And many people, especially younger people who have hopefully years and years on earth to look forward to, are thinking about climate change when they’re picking their elected officials,” she says.
The Action Fund is an arm of CCAN.
CCAN says the world is running out of time in addressing climate change. “Many of the climate scientists that work on projecting and estimating what the trajectory of emissions means for our planet say that the decade of the 2020’s is the last decade for us to do meaningful climate change in order to avoid a climate crisis,” says Venable.
She notes that those same scientists have said if the earth’s temperature increased by more than 1.5-degrees Celsius, it could lead to widespread climate disasters.
By Kevin McManus
