Earth Month Report from CAC
Early in the year the fires in Los Angeles affected many of us in terrible ways. They also clarified our priorities and sharpened our focus on the importance of “building back safer,” which means rebuilding with greater resilience and without restored natural gas infrastructure. And building back at all requires addressing the crippling cost of making affected people and communities whole again. This has vaulted Polluter Pays/Climate Superfund legislation into first place among our priorities: Only the fossil fuel companies—who misled the public for decades about the consequences of their business plans—have the resources even to make a start at rebuilding.
Beginning in mid-January, a long-time volunteer and organizing powerhouse got us 65 meetings (!) with state legislators and key staff—including newly elected senators and Assembly members, “moderate” Dems who often don’t vote for climate bills, and Republicans. These meetings, held on Zoom and sponsored by CAC and the Climate Reality Project California Coalition, have included activists from around California. Each one was carefully planned and facilitated, preceded by a substantive agenda, and covered our priority issues before the legislature this year. In many cases we introduced our expert volunteers to staff developing climate legislation, with whom collaboration continues. The goal of this ongoing program is to establish trusted relationships with our representatives so that we can collaborate with them on climate legislation this year and in the future.
At about the same time, another volunteer had a different, but related brilliant idea—to build our effectiveness in Sacramento by focusing teams of volunteers on the legislative committees that shape the bills they review and move (or not) toward passage. The Capitol Teams, a joint project with 350 Sacramento, hold meetings in the Capitol and represent us at bill hearings. We featured this new strategic focus in January’s legislative training series, which we run twice a year, on Zoom, for new and experienced volunteers.
And, we are sponsoring our first bill this year: SB 368, introducing Passive House building standards for greater resilience and efficiency. With organizing and hard work, we’ll get it passed. Our volunteers have also inspired and instigated SB 500, performance-based regulation of utilities—incentivizing California’s energy providers to increase renewable power and lower bills for consumers. Another heavy lift, but we’re all in! And much more, as you’ll see on our website.
All of this work depends on our Policy Teams developing bill proposals, analyzing legislation, interacting with bill authors, and discerning the positions that we explain and promote in hearings and in meetings with legislators and staff.
As I write this it does seem as if we’re implementing a grand plan to involve activists in policymaking. But—I don’t think we can take credit for that. All of this is the product of collaboration among committed volunteers who share the same goals and work to understand how systems work in Sacramento and where Californians can join in to make a difference. Climate Action California is a growing concern…and it’s not really possible, with all these thoughtful people working together, to predict just where we’ll expand next.
