U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR)
U.S. Conference of Mayors
Washington, DC
January 24, 2019

[DEMOCRACY IN ACTION Transcript]

Well thank you so much, Mayor.  It's a pleasure to be here with you all and with not only Shane Bemis from Gresham, but also Ted Wheeler from Portland, and Jason Snyder from Tigard, Steve Callaway from Hillsboro, and Denny Doyle from Beaverton.  So thank you to the Oregon mayors for making it all the way across the country.

Now Mayor Bemis was talking about a pretty big accomplishment, taking the biggest energy hog in Gresham, and turning it into a net positive energy by generating energy from what they call FOG, fats, oils, and grease, which is also a bit of a euphemism for sewage.

But you all didn't even give them an applause for that big accomplishment. So how about a little appreciation for Gresham for setting that great example.

Climate chaos is affecting people all over the world.  Certainly in our states and in our cities.  Back home in Oregon we see our fishermen affected by warmer, smaller streams and warmer, more acidic oceans, our farmers affected by droughts, we see our forests and our logging industry affected by the forest fires, but we see the cities very much affected.  You know Portland, from
some of the smoke this last year, on some days was the fourth most polluted air, I'm told, in the world, and San Francisco on certain days was worse than Beijing.  So the smoke from those fires is having a big, big impact. 

And we see different impacts all across America.  In New Hampshire we see warmer winters, meaning more ticks, meaning a lot more Lyme disease.  In Florida we see the red tide that's gone 10 months out of 12 on the Gulf side.  In fact when I was down there, people were not only complaining about the toxins on their lungs, but also the stench from the dying sealife, and were talking about taking inland vacations.  Throughout the southeast, the impact of the hurricanes.  From Idaho on through California horrific forest fires and of course the enormous tragedy of the entire town of Paradise been obliterated this last summer.

All of this, these facts on the ground, we're not talking computer models somewhere into the future, we're talking facts on the ground right now, and all of this is reinforced by the UN Climate report and the fourth national climate assessment that came out a few weeks ago from the Trump administration.  And I know you as mayors see the impact in so many other ways including salt water intrusion and drained aquifers and floods and the list goes on and on.

Which is why I'm so glad that as mayors you're taking a stand across America, lobbying during
the Recovery Act for the energy efficiency and conservation block grant program.  How about if we lobby now and get that into the 2020 spending bills at the end of this year?

You're adopting a variety of clean air policies, aiming for 100% and you've spoken out, 400 mayors of so, speaking out about being still in for the International Paris Agreement.  Thank you to the still in mayors across America.

And then there's all these different projects that you're experimenting with and providing an example to other cities.  The example from Gresham with their wastewater treatment; from Greensburg, Kansas, with their LED streetlights; Plano, Texas community-wide energy challenge encouraging a switch to renewables; Evanston, Illinois, Community Choice electricity aggregation, enabling residences and small businesses to utilize renewable energy; Atlanta, Georgia ensuring that all of their large properties have to be LEED certified repeatedly every 10 years; and Portland, Oregon with Mayor Ted Wheeler, Mayor, where are you?  Somewhere in here, not seeing him. 

But the team from Portland, we did an initiative in Oregon, the clean energy community benefits initiative.  And so this was the people in the city speaking up and saying, hey, what if we were to put a fee on our very largest retailers, a 1% fee, and that 1% fee would proceed to go—and this is on their sales—we proceed to go to a whole variety of energy saving, energy efficiency, social and economic justice projects within the city.

And so when you saw initiatives fail all across the country, this one passed 65% to 35%, an enormous victory as we take on climate chaos.

So you all deserve a federal partner.

You deserve one, but you don't have one.  We need partnership with the federal level on modest sized projects, such as those energy efficiency block grants, renewable energy tax credits, a city energy savings program to go with the rural energy savings program.  How about zero interest loans that would cover the difference in the cost between a diesel bus and an electric bus?  To be paid back with the savings in maintenance and fuel.  How about maintaining the electric car tax credits that are expiring this year for three of our major brands made in America?

And how about big visions like keep in the ground.  Keep in the ground is a bill I introduced in 2016 that said our citizen-owned fossil fuel should no longer be leased out to be extracted and burned.  If we're going to work in partnership with the rest of the world to take on climate chaos, we can't still be selling what we own as fossil fuels.

Or how about another big vision.  In 2017 I introduced 100 by '50, 100% clean and renewable energy by the year 2050.  And this laid out a vision or a roadmap for every energy sector of our economy.  It included a just transition for fossil fuel workers, it included economic and social justice for underserved or minority inner city communities, it proceeded to lay out that vision in detail so that we could start to wrestle with implementing such a roadmap.

Well, that vision, the principles of that vision, are being represented now by another name.  And that is the Green New Deal, and I encourage you to think about the principles that are in that and to help drive this strategy of utilizing renewable energy and driving this transition to 100%.

Now, we are in the place where so much has happened over our generation.  In a single generation we've increased carbon in our atmosphere by 30%, from the time I was born 'til I'm standing here on this stage here before you.  In a single generation, we have decimated a large share of the world's forests, the lungs of our planet.  In a single generation, we have seen a five-fold increase in the rate of carbon pollution, going from about half of point per year to about two and a half points per million, parts per million, in a single year. 

So as much as we think we're taking on this challenge, the problem is actually getting worse with every decade.  We're accelerating our carbon pollution, we're not deaccelerating and eliminating, which means we as human civilization have a lot of work to do very, very quickly.  The feedback loops are scary.

There was a picture a couple weeks ago of a lake in Alaska that was boiling.  And you might initially think, well, that's a hot spring.  But it wasn't a hot spring.  It was cold water, cold water boiling with fine methane from underneath the lake coming up and coming up at such a rapid rate it was a rolling boil.  Well, methane, as we all know, pound for pound or space for space, far more damaging to our climate than is carbon dioxide, over 20 year period, about 80 plus times, 84 times more damaging.

Franklin Roosevelt said, these are unprecedented and unusual times in which we must resolve to resume the country's march along the path of real progress, of real justice, of real equality.

It was a time he said for a new deal for the American people.

Well, these are unprecedented and unusual times.  We see devastation of rural assets with forests and farming and fishing.  But we see enormous costs being imposed on our urban centers that you all work to represent and improve.  So it's a time where we all have to come together.  Forget Democrat and Republican or East Coast and West Coast or rural or urban.  This is a challenge unlike any human civilization has faced on this planet.

And so we can take it on at the federal level, but not right now.  Responsibility has shifted to the local level, to our cities.  And as city leaders so many of you have signed up for the vision, the vision of 100% renewable energy and putting out an action plan to take the first steps in that direction.  If you haven't signed up for that vision yet, please consider doing so.  Sierra Club is working with cities all over the nation, and more than 90 cities have now signed up to that effort.
Consider doing that.  Consider working with your colleges, with your places of worship, and with your companies to develop a 100% resolution and an action plan.  Some 75 or so Fortune 500 companies have laid out 100% vision and an action plan for their companies.

So this is something that can involve all of us at every level.  In fact, it must involve all of us at every level, working together in this fight to save our beautiful blue green planet for this generation and all the generations to come. Thank you so much.

###