Tag Archives: Lobbying

Climate Change and Everything Else

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Throughout my experience participating in the Our Climate Action group, I have acquired new skills that enhanced my learning. My project members and I participated in multiple listening sessions run by other fellows from the Our Climate activists explaining the Evergreen New Deal:  a comprehensive climate change reform policy that will introduce greener solutions to current predicaments. All of this exposure to the bits and bolts of how our state and country runs in regards to introducing laws and regulations has added to my sense of citizenship and provided me with a clearer path to contribution. Before this experience, I felt like I was staring at the system from a distance, and it was too entangled in itself for me to get involved.

One interactive portion of our activism involved spreading a survey to Washingtonians under the age of 30 focused on collecting opinions on what prominent complications must immediately be addressed in our direct environment here in the state. During role in lobbying to Tina Orwall, spreading the voices of concerned residents, I especially made an emphasis on how COVID-19 should not get in the way of climate change policy because the underprivileged community is affected negatively by both COVID and climate change, and these two issues interacting creates an even bigger obstacle.

Climate change is obviously a complicated interconnected system woven through everything from our bodies interaction to the weather, to how our climate changes drastically in the atmosphere. There’s an undeniable chain of consequences between our climate and food. For example, “As reserves are depleted, changes in production would have a bigger impact on the price of food….Scientists have warned hotter temperatures and more erratic rainfall could increase the frequency and intensity of droughts (Reuters).” Droughts will affect how much food is yielded and therefore affect how people will be able to sustain themselves globally. Learning about connections between climate change and the food system, as well as climate change and COVID-19, it was easy for me to realize that underprivileged communities are not only affected by certain disadvantages individually, but also how all those disadvantages come together and create increased adverse challenges. This is why climate change needs to be addressed among the other issues, taking out one factor of damage out at a time, we can salvage what, and who, we are hurting and destroying.

Please watch this short animation on how climate change interacts with the causes and consequences of other global dilemmas:

Fixing the Climate is NOT a One Person Job

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For a lot of my life, I thought the idea of voting with your dollars was brilliant, especially when it came to the climate. Whether it was buying organic every now and then or carpooling, I lived by that idea as much as I could. Over time, I learned this method is not the best at fixing the climate, but how effective it could be was something I still wondered.

After reading Michael Maniates’ piece on individualization, I was primed to understand that working alone at the individual level is futile against the power of private corporations. These companies work under the radar and through the consumer subconscious to gain profit under the guise of going green. In doing this, they seek to pin the blame and responsibility of climate change on the people who have the least power to create lasting change (Maniates 43).

Targeting transportation and electricity were of the biggest parts of Our Climate’s Evergreen New Deal. Source: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/washington-state-carbon-emissions-spiked-6-percent-in-most-recent-tally/

And when I worked with Our Climate for this course’s action project, I gained crucial, direct knowledge on the capability and power of collective action while going directly to policy. On one hand, you have corporations selling you easy activism and pocketing the same money they would have made before green movements. On the other, you have NGOs pushing for policy to the people who the most power. The former has never permeated culture to the point where it makes large or lasting change, but looking at what Our Climate has done in just the last legislative session by updating old carbon laws, impacts will affect this and future generations. Furthermore, we could use votes on previous climate policies to garner even more support for future policies like the Evergreen New Deal.

When we lobbied to Representative Tina Orwall as the final task for Our Climate, I saw how receptive she was to new ideas and policies like the Evergreen New Deal, and it emboldened me. Other fellows told us their experiences were lukewarm. Their representatives were not very approachable and rejected the climate policies. While Representative Orwall wanted to know more about the Evergreen New Deal, beyond that it was broadly for transportation and to hold corporate polluters accountable, she was very interested in learning more when the policy was more solidified, and even connected us to more people who would also want to hear what we had to say. Coming from that, I felt like coming together was more powerful than fractured efforts that end up making the same big corporations richer, confirming what Maniates taught me.

Works Cited

Maniates, Michael F. “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?” Global Environmental Politics, vol. 1, no. 3, Aug. 2001, pp. 31–52.

Turning Individual Action into Systemic Change

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During this course I had the opportunity to work with Citizens’ Climate Lobby on HR 763, the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend act. CCL is a national, bipartisan, grassroots lobbying organization that supports volunteers through online trainings and connects them to groups in their area. We started social media campaigns on Facebook and Twitter and learned how to lobby.

HR 763 would put a price on carbon that would reduce US emissions by 40% in the first 12 years. Economists agree that this is the most effective and cost-efficient way to reduce emissions which is why it has drawn support from Republicans and Democrats. Additionally, the Act is revenue-neutral which means that the government doesn’t keep the tax collected. Instead, it gets sent back to low- and middle-income American taxpayers who will be most affected by the higher prices of a green economy.

Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. Effective, good for people, good for the economy, revenue neutral.

In working with CCL, I found that the politics of food and the politics of climate change are similar in many ways. People tend to be very opinionated on both sides, both issues are complex and affect everyone differently, and both require a combination of personal choices and systemic government change to be solved.

It is key that the Act is bipartisan because the only way that we can fight climate change is together. A resolution such as this is only the first of many legislation actions we will need to take, so it is important that everyone is behind it.

Systems theory shows us that everything is connected, and climate change is no different. A lifecycle analysis of any product shows the ecological impacts along the entire commodity chain. Ecological impacts are usually higher during the production/processing stages, so the externalities are often placed on low income communities. This is just one example of the Triple Inequality of climate change.

Scene of the Oncler's factory from the Lorax by Dr. Seuss.

Stories like the Lorax teach us that it’s okay to replace traditional citizenship duties with purposeful individual consumption, and it shifts the blame from producers to human nature (Maniates). When people are made aware of a dangerous product, they can make the individual choice not to buy it (Szasz). This protects them from the product but does nothing to address the problem for others. We need more than individual choices to combat climate change. HR 763 is one way of collective change, but people still have to make the individual choice to be politically active.

This is a picture from Environmental Lobby Day in Olympia, WA in 2019 that I went to with WashPIRG.

Lobbying for Climate and the Unknown about Industries

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In this class, I had the chance to examine the world food system from closer perspective. Indeed, the system thinking that we have been discussing all along the quarter perfectly applies to the industrial system.  Industries and companies are quintessentially looking for a maximum profit by using additives, pesticides, and fertilizer to increase the yield and minimize losses. Without looking at the consequences, for instance, food additives that are always used by industrials company are harmful for our body, causing obesity and other diseases, and also have an impact on the biosphere such as monocrops cultures, declining wild fish stocks, GMS crops, biofuels uses, etc.

However, the real wrongdoers in this situation are all people, especially politician, who know what is happening but do not lift a finger to change our mode of production, and therefore consumption. In fact, it is the role of our politician to establish regulation and make sure that companies who are not respecting norms and rules will be punished.

In these ideas some of my classmates and I decided to join a group of lobbyists who support the Energy Innovation Act. This Act should reduce America’s emissions by at least 40% in the first 12 years, and create 2.1 million new jobs, thanks to economic growth in local communities across America. Such results could be attained by taxing all companies who are producing greenhouse gas and giving benefice to U.S consumers. Therefore, consumers are not the one paying for a better carbon footprint. Nonetheless, this regulation has exemptions for fuels used for agriculture, the U.S army, and others. Otherwise, it could have the impact of a bomb in all the mass food industries such as in production of pesticides and fertilizers who are required to keep high yield. This policy will force industries to adapt their greenhouse emission effectively in order to keep making money as they meant to do, but with a better respect for our planet.

Until now politics are protecting industrials processed food because it brings a low food price to the population (U.S spend under 10% of their income on food). Therefore, industries in generals have very few regulations to leave the room for them to produce mass cheap food such as the industries who are not constrained, therefore polluting the environment further. Indeed, if a majority of us are showing support and interest to new type of regulation such as the Energy and Innovation act, we will force industrial companies to adapt their mode of production. Let’s not be naïve and wait for industrial companies to deliver us real food and be sustainable!

https://citizensclimatelobby.org/energy-innovation-and-carbon-dividend-act/

https://beef2live.com/story-americans-spend-under-10-income-food-0-124534

Picture 1: https://www.carbonpricingleadership.org/blogs/2019/2/3/bipartisan-carbon-fee-and-dividend-bill-now-before-us-congress

Picture 2: http://www.ecobase21.net/Lesmotsduclimatsmartphone/Companies.html