Sound Off: County takes climate crisis seriously, but real change happens at federal level

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, February 25, 2026

By MELANIE BACON

The week of Feb. 21–28 is the sixth year of Black Climate Week, led by The Solutions Project and NAACP. History shows that climate change disproportionately harms marginalized and disenfranchised communities. So Black Climate Week is a particularly crucial initiative this year, when the most racist administration in over 100 years is doing everything it can to bring back the glory days of smog, pollution and extinction of species.

The administration has gelded the Environmental Protection Agency by eliminating the scientific endangerment finding rule which stated that greenhouse gases endanger public health by heating up the world, so now cars manufactured in the US can emit as much pollution as manufacturers wish. It is allowing oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s ecologically sensitive North Slope and also wants to allow ore mining near the pristine Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness in Minnesota, both of which will turn some of the most beautiful places in our nation into slag heaps as well as violate the interests and rights of indigenous citizens.

Throughout the rest of the globe, marine protected areas are being established as tools for conserving nature, enhancing marine biodiversity, sequestering carbon in undisturbed sea bottoms, mitigating the effects of climate change, and promoting sustainable fisheries, but our current administration is allowing commercial fishing in both the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument and in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument in the Atlantic. The Administration has ordered the Pentagon to buy more coal-powered electricity and has delayed approvals for renewable energy projects on both federal land and private property. It will be difficult to track the climate effects from all this, because the administration has outsourced management of the supercomputer used by more than 4,000 climate and weather scientists across the country from a leading research lab to an undisclosed third party.

And most of that was just this month.

We live in a climate emergency that the federal government is bound and determined to exacerbate rather than solve. And unfortunately only they have the power to implement real policy solutions to the disaster they’re gleefully and intentionally dumping on our children’s laps. The rest of us can only try to be resilient as we face the impacts that national and international climate policies are having on our planet.

So what are we doing at the county level? Several years ago the Board of Island County Commissioners made these three policy statements the foundation for our Comprehensive Plan Update: our Climate Resiliency Resolution, our Equity Statement and our Health in All Policies Board of Health Resolution. We are almost done with the Comp Plan update now, and among the many, many goals are the following:

Protect and restore undeveloped coastal ecosystems to increase the resilience of species and habitats to climate change.

Protect and preserve water quality and quantity from drought, extreme heat, and other hazards exacerbated by climate change.

Enhance emergency preparedness, response, and recovery efforts to mitigate risks and impacts associated with extreme weather and other hazards worsened by climate change.

Protect community health and well-being from the impacts of climate-exacerbated hazards — prioritizing focus on overburdened communities — and ensure that the most vulnerable residents do not bear disproportionate health impacts.

Climate, equity, and health are inextricably linked. Awareness of Black Climate Week is particularly important this Black History Month.

The Board of Island County Commissioners has heard from some members of the community that they would like us to declare a climate emergency. Let me be clear: I agree that we are living in a climate emergency. The Board of Island County Commissioners is responding to the best of our authority to the effects of climate change on our citizens. But the Board does not have the authority or ability to alter climate change itself. The Board could pass a Climate Emergency Declaration, which would mean that all of the county’s funds and focus would then be targeted on causes of climate change so we’d have to mandate such things as, for example, no gas-powered vehicles allowed on our islands — but such efforts would not alter the trajectory of climate change, only take funds and focus away from other important issues we actually can impact like homelessness and public safety.

I am a county commissioner. If you want me to actually fix climate change, elect me president.

Melanie Bacon is the chair of the Board of Island County Commissioners.