In the coming weeks, a diverse coalition of grassroots organizations will put forward a unique ballot measure to help Portland respond to global climate change.
Called the Portland Just Energy Transition, the measure would add a 1 percent revenue tax on large retail outlets operating in the city and use those funds to invest in environmental justice projects in areas like food production, neighborhood-scale solar and wind energy, energy efficiency and weatherization assistance.
The NAACP’s Portland branch, Native American Youth and Family Center, the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon, Portland 350 and Verde all back the measure.
JoAnn Hardesty, the local NAACP president and a candidate for City Council, said the intention is to create a response to climate change that’s rooted in fairness. Hardesty said the measure would tax only the largest of Portland’s box stores, those with global retail sales of $1 billion or more and Portland revenue of at least $500,000 per year.
“Think about the Kmarts, the Starbucks, the big corporate folks who have been very effective at paying no taxes, at paying no infrastructure fees, but continue to contribute to climate warming,” Hardesty said.
An analysis in June by the city’s Bureau of Revenue supports Hardesty’s claim that the tax’s impact on businesses would be narrow. Using available data, it estimated it would be levied on just 122 companies, with as many as 732 more companies potentially liable, depending on their annual sales in Portland. The bureau recommended broadening the tax to include more businesses and capping the maximum per-business tax at $1 million. Disagreement over these details fractured support for the policy among city commissioners, leading the coalition to opt for a ballot initiative.
“The mayor is for, obviously, a transition to renewable energy, and one that is shared equitably,” said Michael Cox, spokesperson for Mayor Ted Wheeler. “He is not a fan of a Measure 97-style gross receipts tax, and he’ll have to see the final language of the initiative before he takes a position on it.”
FURTHER READING: Measure 97 had economists' support
If passed next year, the measure will create a local fund for environmental justice projects at a scale that is apparently unprecedented anywhere in the country.
The roughly $35 million to $51 million per year that the initiative would produce, as projected by the Bureau of Revenue, would be overseen by a city committee modeled after the Portland Children’s Levy – an initiative that generates tax revenue for children’s programs – and distributed on a project-by-project basis. Coalition members say the aim of these projects is to lower Portland’s contributions to climate-altering pollution, build up locally owned renewable energy and invest in economic development for low-income communities and communities of color.
“Most retailers have the longest supply trains and don’t account for greenhouse gases in the production and distribution of their products,” said Lenny Dee, a volunteer for Portland Just Energy Transition, or PJET. “For every dollar spent at a national retail store, 58 cents gets re-circulated back into the community as opposed to 73 cents of every dollar spent at a locally owned store. Of the approximately 125 companies affected, 45 have overseas tax havens, some with as many as 40 or 50 of these havens.”
The measure is set to be filed by the end of November and slated for a vote on the November 2018 ballot. If it is passed, citywide transition projects could begin as early as 2020.
The initiative arrives at a unique moment in the evolution of climate politics – during a swing toward local politics brought on by the Trump administration and at a time when strictly technical climate proposals are receiving heavy criticism.
After President Donald Trump announced on June 1 that the U.S. would pull out of the Paris climate accord, an avalanche of denunciations was released around the country. The same day, 361 mayors announced they would uphold the accord themselves by working to reduce their own cities’ greenhouse gas pollution. Portland and Multnomah County declared they would work together to transition the entire local energy grid to 100 percent renewables for all electricity by 2035 and 100 percent renewable energy for all purposes including transportation by 2050.
Later that month, the bipartisan U.S. Conference of Mayors announced its support for cities across the country adopting the same goal – 100 percent of renewable electricity by 2035. The organization, which represents mayors from 1,481 U.S. cities, also called for the renewal of the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program, a federal program that provided $2.7 billion to local, county and tribal governments to address climate change.
According to the Sierra Club, if the cities represented by the mayors organization all formally adopted the 100 percent goal, they would replace 422 gigawatts of fossil fuel electricity with renewables – or 34 percent of all U.S. electricity consumed in 2016. So far, 41 cities have formally adopted this goal and 160 mayors have a signed a separate statement pledging to get their cities to 100 percent renewable energy.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu summed up the strategy of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, saying that if the federal government refused to take action, a network of cities would “create a new national policy by the accumulation of our efforts.”
PJET appears to be the only effort in the country to draft a detailed plan that would fund and implement that transition while bypassing formal legislative proceedings. Given the complexities involved, Portland’s initiative could become an important model for the other 40 cities that have made the same climate commitment.
An approach that prioritizes access for low-income communities and communities of color is a significant departure from recent proposals to address climate change and could nudge future proposals in a similar direction.
FURTHER READING: Oregon solar projects must benefit low-income – but how?
Last November, Washington voters rejected what would have been the first state carbon tax in the U.S., Initiative 732. The measure went down after conspicuously failing to win support from labor, environmental and social justice organizations, which complained about their exclusion from the drafting process.
Speaking to Think Progress a month ahead of the vote, Becky Kelley of the Washington Environmental Council summed up her position on what was wrong with the proposal: “Climate policy is not environmental policy. It is everything policy,” she told Think Progress. “It is transformational, societal policy that touches economics and social justice and how we move and what we buy and where we live and all of the things.”
One especially controversial element of the initiative would have required the state to cut taxes to offset what was gained in carbon tax revenue – an open effort to make the overall effect revenue neutral, rather than redistributive.
Initiative 732’s primary backer, economist Yoram Bauman, publicly criticized the idea that taxing large corporations to raise public money could be part of the solution to climate change. Instead, Bauman replaced public investments with tax refunds whose value would increase over time with the price of carbon. After heavy criticism, his measure was defeated 40.7 percent to 59.3 percent.
Chris Lowe, of Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, said that working with the PJET coalition is helping to solve some of the questions over social power that underlay the climate crisis.
“The big ecological crisis question is how do we get the social will to move this? Part of it, I think, has to be getting the more marginalized people engaged,” Lowe said. “The coalition of radicals and liberals who see the ecological crisis isn’t doing it. What are the forces that can be added to that?”
According to one 2014 report from the NAACP, African-Americans in 2010 held just 1.1 percent of energy jobs in the U.S. and gained only 0.01 percent of revenue from energy sector profits. Meanwhile, 68 percent of African-Americans lived within 30 miles of a coal plant, contributing to higher rates of asthma and lung disease in their communities.
By taxing large corporations, funding racial and economic justice and demanding a rapid shift to a safe environment, the PJET coalition satisfies what have become key demands in an increasingly sophisticated environmental justice movement – one that’s far more ethnically diverse and more inclusive of the communities most affected by fossil fuel pollution.
“This idea that we just distribute checks doesn’t really get to the crux of the issue,” said Mateo Nube, a board member of the Oakland, Calif.-based Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project.
“An economy that is based on extracting from a finite system faster than the capacity of the system to regenerate will eventually come to an end, either through a collapse or an intentional reorganization. What folks are trying to communicate is that transition is inevitable at this point but justice is not. So it’s upon us to make it a just transition,” Nube said.
According to the Labor Network for Sustainability, the concept of a just transition was put forward as a way to protect workers from losing employment as fossil fuels are replaced by renewable energy. Labor historian Jeremy Brecher suggested the creation of a “superfund for workers” that could adapt government safety nets to specific sectors like coal mining. In 2015, that understanding became the basis for legislation cosponsored by U.S. Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called the Clean Energy Worker Just Transition Act.
But the concept of a just transition has become broader. As it’s been adopted by environmental justice organizations, it has also become a rallying cry for the vast social and political changes that will be necessary to decommission fossil fuel energy and the systems supporting it. Such a transition will have to be “anchored around a redistribution of resources and power,” Nube said.
“I’d say what defines just-transition work by front-line communities is folks who are combining both visionary and oppositional efforts towards fully transforming economies where they live, towards rooting it in democratic governance, and a governance that is truly living in right relationship with the place where folks live,” he said.
Nube said the kind of just-transition law being proposed in Portland – one focused on the social dynamics of empowerment and not only safety nets – has probably never been proposed as a law before.
If implemented, he said, it could help communities across the U.S. catalyze a shift toward climate policies that address both power and inequality.
In Washington state, another new coalition called the Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy is working on a similar statewide initiative that it says will tax major polluters and raise about $1 billion a year for reinvestment in community projects. A separate Oregon bill introduced in this year’s legislative session called for the creation of a statewide Just Transition Fund created through a carbon cap-and-trade system. State legislators who are supportive of the bill say they hope to pass it next year – but those prospects are uncertain.
FURTHER READING: ‘Carbon pollution isn’t free’: How Oregon can cap, trade, reinvest
“I’ve been around long enough that I know waiting for the Legislature is never a good reason to not do a good thing,” Hardesty said.
“The NAACP believes that climate change is one of the biggest racial justice issues of our time, and we can’t wait for the next four years or eight years for new leadership to come in. We’ve got to start putting these pieces in place now,” she said.
“I’m absolutely giddy to be able to say: You know what, people of color are going to raise somewhere between $31 (million) and $51 million annually, and we’re going to invest it in the people that have not been invested in, in our community,” she said. “And that means houseless people. That means ex-felons. That means people of color. Here’s a great opportunity for Portland to lead again.”