A Democratic nominee for Congress in a Trump-heavy district has a lengthy history of far-left environmental activism that could complicate his bid in a state where coal production is still king.
While Zach Dembo was a student at Stanford University, he was involved with Stanford Climate Change Campaign, a subset of the student group Students for a Sustainable Stanford, according to a 2006 article in the Stanford Daily obtained by the Washington Reporter.
“Global warming has become a hot issue at Stanford University with the University’s announcement of new sustainability institutes and funding increases for environmental research in the past few years,” the article from October 23, 2006, reads. “Yet students at last night’s kickoff for the Stanford Climate Change Campaign, a subset of the student group Students for a Sustainable Stanford, expressed concern that the University is not taking action fast enough.”
“Senior Zach Dembo spoke to a group of about 70 students and staff in the Bechtel International Center about convincing the University to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and establish targets similar to that of the Kyoto Protocol,” the article continues. “The group has specifically demanded that the University reduce emissions by 10 percent of the 1990 emission levels by the year 2020 and eventually work toward achieving zero net carbon emissions.”
“To the campaign’s organizers, the proposed policy was everything but ambitious,” the article adds, quoting Dembo directly. “‘I wish I could tell you that what we’re proposing to you now is cutting edge, that we’re pushing the envelope, but the fact of the matter is, we’re behind,’ Dembo said. ‘We’re behind our other benchmark institutions, we’re behind in the state, and I believe we’re behind in the nation.’”
Twenty years after Dembo condemned Stanford University from the far-left, he is running for Congress in Kentucky, with a biography that leans on his time at Stanford. Dembo’s home state of Kentucky ranks 7th in America in coal production — and the policies that Dembo pushed decades ago could devastate the state.
Dembo’s campaign did not respond to request for comment about whether he holds the same values he advocated for in Congress.
Critics of the Kyoto Protocol argue that it would punish countries like the United States, while allowing polluters China and India to be free of many environmental constraints.
Dembo’s path to Congress to succeed Rep. Andy Barr (R., Ky.) is further complicated by Kentucky political history; Barr, who is favored to succeed Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) in 2027. In 2012, Barr ousted longtime Rep. Ben Chandler (D., Ky.) by focusing in part on then-President Barack Obama’s war on coal.
“While Chandler was able to hold off Barr in his Lexington-based district during the GOP wave of 2010, the congressman appears to be a political casualty of what many in coal country call the Obama administration’s ‘war on coal,’” Politico’s Charlie Mahtesian wrote at the time.
Dembo’s Republican opponent, Ralph Alvarado, previously spoke with the Reporter about his campaign for Congress.
