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The 21C Transportation Campaign (note our new campaign name!) 350 Washington is working in coalition with Front and Centered, Disability Rights WA, and Transit Riders Union for a green and equitable transportation system for the 21st century, which halts highway expansion and dramatically increases investments in public transportation, bike, and pedestrian infrastructure, rail, and electric-vehicle charging. See our joint Transportation Bill of Rights and the 350 WA Community Project list. Join us! What if we could pinpoint exactly how much more pollution and climate change will be generated by a new highway proposal? This Thursday our campaign will unveil a new tool created by the Rocky Mountain Institute that uses peer-reviewed methods to calculate the long-term impacts of building more highways and roads. Join us with national leaders in transportation and climate activism to learn how you can put this tool into action to fight for more transit, safer streets, and cleaner air where you live. Speakers Include: · Stephen Lee Davis - Smart Growth America · Rosalinda Guillen - Advocate for farm workers and rural justice leader · Ben Holland - Rocky Mountain Institute · Anna Zivarts - Disability Rights Washington · Andrew Kidde - 350 Washington · Paulo Nunes-Ueno - Front and Centered Thursday, October 21, 1:00 pm, Online, register here Don’t forget! Have you asked your legislator to participate in the week without driving? Email them here! Even better, participate yourself and post about your experience on social media with hashtag #NoDrivingWeek -- and tag your lawmaker! (Look them up on social media to get their handle right. Bonus points for tagging your local 350 group! Ingrid & Andrew, 350WA CAT Transportation Leads Want to learn more about the campaign, or join the team? Check out this brief intro and volunteer form!
October is Fair Trade month Want a mini-break from your organizing work? Check out Theo Chocolate’s hour-long presentation - Cocoa Conversations: Fair Trade Cocoa Impacts. Thursday, October 21st at 6 pm
Youth Climate March, Friday, October 29th On October 29th, young people and adults are taking to the streets of Seattle to call out the largest climate polluters in our city.
What: Fossil Free Future: March & Action The march is part of the Global Day of Action, with climate activists all over the world taking to the streets to call out the funders and enablers of climate chaos.
Join us on the streets on October 29th to make sure the call for climate justice is heard loud and clear by those in power. WA Can’t Wait Campaign In 2021, WA Can't Wait Campaign Campaign built a movement of constituents and organizations across Washington who called on their legislators to update the Growth Management Act to address the biggest crises facing our state. This upcoming legislative session, the campaign is back to finish what it started and ensure that our state is planning for the impacts of climate change, housing equity, and protecting our farms and forests. No matter where you live in Washington, whether rural, urban or somewhere in between, you are impacted by these crises and the ways that they intersect with our land-use decisions. To ensure this work gets done, we are focusing on three policy initiatives for the 2022 legislative session: 1. Pass HB1099 to ensure Washington cities and counties are planning for climate-resilient communities while reducing our contributions to the climate crisis. 2. Fully fund the implementation of HB1220 to ensure that the state legislature does not short-change housing equity and that we are doing everything we can to address race and income-based housing discrimination. 3. Close the GMA’s ‘illegal growth loophole’ to protect farmland, forests, and critical habitats from unnecessary sprawl by passing SB5042. Check out their full campaign platform and bill tracker to find out more about each of our priorities and where they are at in the legislative process. Want to plugin? Here are some ways that you can get involved: · Make a submission to the campaign's Storytelling Project and Livable Future Art Initiative · Sign up for campaign updates
WA Fair Trade Coalition How Fossil Fuel Companies Are Using Trade Agreements to Attack Climate Initiatives And How We Stop Them
To avoid the worst outcomes from climate change, humanity has less than a decade to make substantial progress towards eliminating greenhouse gas emissions. We literally do not have time to try to twist climate initiatives to align with the expansive rights that oil, gas, coal, and other corporate interests are awarded within existing trade agreements, nor to litigate such policies in extrajudicial trade tribunals. Establishing New “Rights” for Oil, Gas and Coal Companies Trade agreements establish a host of new “rights” for transnational corporations, including the right to move goods across borders, to invest across borders, and to access markets across borders. This gives a lot of power to the fossil fuel industry because policies that interfere with these so-called rights are subject to attack in trade tribunals. Oil, coal, and natural gas are all goods moved across borders, and the largest fossil fuel companies all invest across borders. As such, government actions that limit the export or import of fossil fuels can be challenged as violations of trade agreements. Even indirect restrictions on trade or investment in fossil fuels are subject to attack, including restrictions on oil or gas drilling; restrictions on the building of pipelines or export terminals; and any other actions that have the effect of reducing trade in oil, gas, coal, plastic, timber, and other goods. Wake-Up Call: the $15 billion Keystone XL Pipeline Case In July 2021, the company TC Energy launched a suit under the North American FreeTrade Agreement (NAFTA) against the United States for refusing to grant it permits for the Keystone XL Pipeline, a project designed to increase the flow of dirty tar sands oil from Canada thru the United States to markets throughout the world. The company is demanding $15 billion in taxpayer compensation for its “lost expectation of future profits.” A so-called “regulatory takings” case like this would be laughed out of the U.S. court system, but has a real chance of winning in a trade tribunal. Allowing trade deals to require that governments pay off polluters for the loss of their “expected profits” whenever taking climate action is extremely dangerous.
For a just and sustainable global economy As written, these trade pacts expose even the richest nations to billions, if not trillions, of dollars in penalties that could otherwise be spent on things like green energy, public transportation, a just transition, and disaster relief. Given that low and middle-income nations simply don’t have the funds available to lose such suits, many may give in to fossil fuel sector demands to avoid that liability. This is a clear and immediate threat to any progress we can hope to make on climate change. Other Examples of Trade Attacks on Climate Policies The Keystone XL trade suit is just one of over 1,100 trade challenges brought throughout the world. Not all of these cases have to do with climate, but fossil fuel companies are now launching more trade challenges than any other sector, with more than one in three of all new cases over the past decade affecting oil and gas extraction, mining, or power plants. Among many examples: • A U.S. company called Lone Pine is using NAFTA to demand over $100 million from Canadian taxpayers because Quebec put a moratorium on fracking under the Saint Lawrence River. • The company behind a coal-fired power plant that Germany had refused to grant operating permits used a trade challenge to force the government to grant the permits — so the power plant is now up and running. • The oil giant Chevron used a trade tribunal to undermine an Ecuadoran court order that it pay $9.5 billion to clean up oil spills in the Amazon and provide health care for affected indigenous communities — and now the tribunal is determining how much the government will have to pay the company instead. Policies that restrict fossil fuel projects aren’t the only ones at risk. Existing trade pacts have likewise been used to attack governments’ green energy projects. Eliminating Trade Attacks on Climate Initiatives The straightforward solution here is to make climate initiatives immune from attack under trade agreements. Trade justice campaigners worldwide have made considerable progress in recent years against the “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” (ISDS) provisions in trade agreements that allow individual corporations to directly challenge government policies they believe violate their trade agreement “rights” in extrajudicial tribunals that circumvent domestic courts. The ISDS system is both anti-democratic and anti-environment, and it must be eliminated altogether. “Government-to-government” trade challenges also jeopardize robust climate action. To help remove this threat, the World Trade Organization (WTO) should enact a “peace clause” under which governments agree not to use WTO rules to attack one another’s climate policies. A WTO peace clause already exists for food security measures, and that precedent must now be extended to climate policies, too. For more info, visit: www.tradejusticeedfund.org
Yes to East King County PUD is a campaign to give the boot to privately-owned, for-profit PSE and replace it with a democratically-controlled, not-for-profit Public Utility District (PUD). PSE is expensive, unaccountable, opaque, heavily invested in natural gas, and dragging its feet on renewable energy. Washington’s 23 other electrical PUDs provide cleaner (90%+ carbon-free!), cheaper (20% lower rates than PSE), and more reliable electricity. And PUDs are transparent and locally accountable to their customers. Please visit the website Yes to EKCPUD to learn more and volunteer to support our efforts. Thank YOU!
350 WA Network Civic Action Team 350 Washington Civic Action Team 2022 Campaign Overview for Volunteers
We are heading into a new cycle of the 350 Washington Network’s shared legislative campaign, the 350 WA Civic Action Team (CAT). This campaign design was developed using a combination of resources including:
What We Do Our volunteer-driven teams all contribute to our shared effort to create and publish two emails and one text action a week during the legislative session. These action emails and texts direct our state-wide membership base to take targeted advocacy actions based on the intelligence we gather on the movement of each policy for that given week. We provide tools,, talking points, and clear directions for our members to take effective action (e.g. send emails, make calls, and utilize the tools available on the State’s website for a range of advocacy types including signing in pro/con/other on policies, providing written comment and providing remote video testimony). We also support constituents in building meaningful relationships with their district legislators through virtual lobbying ahead, during, and after the legislative session.
2022 Mission Educating and empowering people to advocate in the WA state legislature to pass strong, sound, and just climate policy while strengthening partnerships and relationships.
2022 Goals
2022 Policy Priorities These are in development ahead of our 2022 campaign launch.
Key Changes in the Campaign for 2022 While most of the essential elements and components of our work together are the same from year to year, here are several key ways we are elevating the campaign experience for the 2022 cycle.
Teams & Projects for 2022
You can also read more about our Teams & Roles here in our Master Spreadsheet.
To produce additional advocacy content ahead of and during the session for social media platforms, and to provide additional advocacy offerings to our 350 WA Network during session; to develop & share campaign recruitment toolkits Trainings to Support Volunteer Participation
Additional Resources 1-Pager on 350 WA CAT and 350 WA Network
Campaign Contacts If you need to talk to us, feel free to contact one of the campaign leads below! Grace Hope, they/them 350 Washington Network Coordinator 350 WA CAT Campaign Co-Lead
David Perk, he/him 350 WA CAT Campaign Co-Lead Katherine Leggett, she/her 350 WA CAT Campaign Co-Lead
Cha Cha Sawyer, she/her 350 WA CAT Campaign Co-Lead
Joshua Rubenstein, he/him 350 WA CAT Campaign Co-Lead
Snoqualmie Tribe Ancestral Land Movement 350 Eastside organizes on the ancestral lands of the Snoqualmie Tribe. Please check out the Snoqualmie Tribe Ancestral Land Movement and support this movement as you are able.From the Snoqualmie Tribe Ancestral Land Movement website:It is through education and awareness that individuals can integrate land acknowledgment and respect for the Snoqualmie Tribe into their recreational practices and experiences. The Ancestral Lands Movement seeks to spread awareness of the Snoqualmie people who have lived in the southern Salish Sea region since time immemorial and share the significance of these lands and provide information on how people can help the Tribe in respecting, restoring, and protecting these lands.
Please mark your calendars for the next 350 Eastside General Meeting: Wednesday, November 17th, 2021 @ 7 pm. A link will be forwarded closer to the date of the meeting. In community, Emily, Lin, Lynn, Marilyn, Phil, and Sara
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