The prospects for passing the Clean Energy Jobs bill in the February 2018 session of the state legislature are better than ever. It’s time to get together to plan what 350PDX will do over the next six months to help make sure it becomes state law.
Over the last three legislative sessions, working with a broad statewide coalition, we’ve supported evolving versions of a bill to:
- Set a declining cap on greenhouse gas emissions
- Make large polluters pay for their emissions
- Use the proceeds to promote climate justice.
Progress has mostly been incremental, but as the 2017 session wound down in July, very encouraging step started coming together for 2018 – our legislative champions (Sen Dembrow and Rep Helm) are fully committed to passing a new and improved bill, Gov. Brown has identified the bill as a “must pass” priority, House leadership (Speaker Kotek and Majority Leader Williamson) have committed their support, 23 representatives and 10 senators signed on as cosponsors before the 2017 session ended (and more have committed to do so since then), 635 businesses (and growing) have endorsed, and more.
As encouraging as all this is, passage of a strong climate bill is far from guaranteed — we still need to work hard, and work together, if we’re going to succeed.
We’ll spend some meeting time recapping the 2017 session, but mostly we’ll want to look at ways to engage this fall and on into the 2018 session, and how to organize ourselves to be most effective.
Tickets: http://350pdx.nationbuilder.com/state_legislation_team_meeting_september_5th.
