Club’s California Legislative Priorities for 2014
Latest Climate Change Report Underscores Need for SB 1132
Take a Channel Islands Tour with Us
April Hot Topic: May Lobby Day
Club’s California Legislative Priorities for 2014
By Kathryn Phillips
Every year in March, after new bills are introduced at the state legislature, the hard business begins of deciding which bills the Club will weigh in on.
This year, the Sierra Club California staff advocates, and the volunteers on the California Legislative Committee, reviewed about 240 bills. Then, during a day-long Saturday meeting, we settled on positions: support, oppose, support if amended, oppose unless amended, watch, watch like a hawk or take no position. Within each of these broader position categories, there are subcategories to help guide staff about how much focus to place on any bill.
By the end of that Saturday meeting, the number of bills on which we will now take a position was narrowed to about 130, with the balance of the bills mostly receiving a “watch” designation. And within all of the bills on which we take a position, for the moment, about 16 rose to the level of being priorities for Club action.
You can see the list of priority bills linked on our website’s Activist’s Tools page about the legislature. Check back often because as some of these bills change or fall to the wayside, and as some other bills become more important, our priority list will change.
To track any of these bills or for more information about specific bills, including analyses by legislative committees, go to the official California legislative information website and tap in the bill number in the appropriate box.
The Club speaks with one voice in the Capitol, so except for very locally focused bills, Sierra Club California staff advocates lead the effort of writing letters and tracking bills. However, we need your help, and often will call on you through statewide email alerts and through special messages on our California Activist Listserv (subscribe here), to be in touch with your legislators to urge an “aye” or “no” vote on particular bills.
If your chapter or group is interested in a particular bill that only affects your immediate geography, and you want to know if your local chapter or group can take a position on the bill, send an email to any of our advocates. They can let you know whether Sierra Club California has taken a position. If we haven’t, our advocates will forward your inquiry to the legislative committee who can then consider the bill in question and the position your chapter would like to take.
Latest Climate Change Report Underscores Need for SB 1132
By Kathryn Phillips
The latest international scientific report on climate change, released on March 31, confirms that climate disruption is occurring and concludes that its impacts are having and will have destabilizing effects on societies around the world.
The grim report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, though, does not suggest that humans are helpless to do anything to impact climate disruption.
To the contrary, it indicates that humans can still influence the future impact of climate disruption by acting now to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“The overall risks of climate change impacts can be reduced by limiting the rate and magnitude of climate change,” the report notes. Reducing emissions now will particularly help to reduce the risks of climate disruption in the second half of this century. Those risks include drought, flooding, sea level rise impacts, biological impacts, extreme weather (hurricanes, tornados, snow storms, heat waves), and low crop yields.
One of the best ways to rapidly reduce climate change emissions is to reduce our dependence on fuels that create carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. One of the key fuels we need to shift away from is oil.
On April 8, Senate Bill 1132, which would impose a moratorium on fracking and other extreme oil extracting methods in California, will come up for its first committee hearing before the Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee. If it passes, it will then go before the Senate Environmental Quality Committee on April 30. After that, it will go to Senate Appropriations and then, if it gets through that committee, it will go to the Senate floor. It needs to complete its journey through the Senate by May 30 to meet required deadlines.
Extreme extraction methods have made oil shale formations once thought untouchable, accessible. These methods not only contribute their own pollution burden—fouling water and air—they also allow access to carbon fuels that, in simple terms, need to stay in the ground. Extreme extraction methods use huge quantities of water. And they suck up investment dollars that would otherwise go into clean renewables, efficiency measures and energy conservation.
Sierra Club California and a long list of allies, including environmental, environmental justice, business, labor, and civic organizations, strongly support SB 1132 and need your help to persuade your state senator to support SB 1132.
Call your state senator and urge him or her to support SB 1132. You can find a link to your senator by filling in your address here.
As the latest science shows, there is still time to help fight climate disruption’s worst effects. Pushing your state senator to support SB 1132 is one way to make good use of that time.
Thinking about a unique vacation this year? Join a Sierra Club California tour of Channel Islands National Park.
This spring and summer, you can experience Channel Islands National Park on a three-day, three-island tour, including hiking and kayaking, with Sierra Club members and a park naturalist. You will experience a precious area of our state not seen by many because the Channel Islands are only accessible by boat or plane.
And your tour benefits the political work of Sierra Club California, the environment's strongest voice in the State Capitol. While you are floating about the islands, you will be helping to protect them and other natural resources found only in California.
Enticingly within view of Ventura and Santa Barbara, one of California’s (and the country's) most unique environments is part of Channel Islands National Park and National Marine Sanctuary.
Just click on the dates below to get more information about the trips and to register:
You may also contact the trip leader, Joan Jones Holtz, for more information at jholtzhln@aol.com.
April Hot Topic: May Lobby Day
Sierra Club California is working with an allied group to conduct a lobby day in Sacramento in May to help pass the fracking moratorium bill, SB 1132.If you think you might want to join the lobby day, watch our website "Hot Links" box on the home page for more information: http://www.sierraclubcalifornia.org. We’ll be posting details soon.
Join the solar revolution with the Sierra Club. Click on the photo below to go solar today and help us at the same time.
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