100% News

The Ready For 100 Campaign featured prominently in a story on how states and local communities will lead on clean energy in the Trump era.

From the article: “The Sierra Club’s Ready for 100 program is an effort to get cities to shoot for 100-percent renewable energy by 2035. The group targets local governments in the 20 states that let cities strike their own deals with energy providers. ‘We think this will be a vehicle that will accelerate the transition to clean energy, despite what might happen at the federal level,’ says Kassie Rohrbach, Ready for 100’s associate director.”

 

News of the Ready For 100 victory in Pueblo, CO spread far and wide as the old steel hub commits to clean energy in part to fight price gouging by the local fossil fuel utility.

From the article: “The newspaper reports that the cost of energy has perhaps been one of the largest concerns of Pueblo citizens in recent years. The decision by Black Hills Energy to construct new natural gas plants in 2009 has contributed to some of the highest energy rates in the state.”

 

As part of the Ready For 100 initiative Mayors For 100% Clean Energy, Mayor Steve Benjamin of Columbia, South Carolina shares his clean energy goals in the capital of a red state.

From the article: “One of the mayors signing on as co-chair was Stephen Benjamin of Columbia, South Carolina. A Democrat and the city’s first black mayor, Benjamin hopes to wean the state capital of 134,000 people off fossil fuels in the years to come. ‘We’ve installed enough solar panels on homes and businesses across the city to generate about 8.2 million kilowatt hours of electricity over a guaranteed lifetime of 25 years. For our community, it has the effect of removing greenhouse gases of 13 million car miles.’”

 

After President Trump called on Pittsburgh as a reason for backing out of the Paris Agreement, Mayor Bill Peduto released a Ready For 100 statement covered globally by Bloomberg and others defying Trump.

From the article: “‘Pittsburgh will not only heed the guidelines of the Paris agreement, we will work to move toward 100 percent clean and renewable energy for our future, our economy, and our people,’ he said in a Sierra Club statement Friday.”

 

The Ready for 100 Campaign helped to pass a 100 percent clean energy resolution by all the cities represented by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and the story generated over 100 unique media stories.

From the article: “‘The more cities that not only pledge to move to 100 percent renewable energy but pass that into a local law or ordinance and begin to work on that transition,’ Jodie Van Horn, director of the Sierra Club’s ‘Ready for 100’ campaign, told HuffPost by phone Wednesday from the mayors’ conference in Miami, ‘the closer we can get to meeting the Paris goals through city-level action.’”

 

In Cleveland, Ready For 100 is pursuing 100 percent clean energy to provide good jobs and better air for residents unjustly plagued by nearby coal plants, and the story picked up international coverage.

From the article: “Cleveland’s East Side, where Sierra Club Ready for 100 campaign’s Jocelyn Travis is from, is largely African American. ‘You’ve got a lot of unemployment, you’ve got a lot [of] health issues, there’s so many issues in the black community,’ says Travis. ‘We’ve got to make it relate to people. Most of our households, our family or friends, we know somebody who has asthma, or we know somebody who needs a job.’”

 

In Portland, the Ready for 100 commitment ensured city leaders rejected a proposed fracked gas power plant and remained steadfast to the city’s adopted clean energy goals.

From the article: “On August 8, the Oregon Public Utility Commission rejected a proposal by the one of the state’s largest utilities to potentially expand natural-gas fired power stations in the eastern part of the state — and opponents of the plan argue that the decision was, at least in part, influenced by the city’s new commitment to a clean energy future.”

 

Not long after Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer endorsed the campaign’s 100 percent mayoral pledge, the city embraced the Ready For 100 commitment as a just and equitable future for the city.

From the article: “The majority Black and Latinx city believes it will save lives—and create jobs—with the initiative. According to city’s director of sustainability, Chris Castro, in the Orlando Weekly, ‘solar jobs grew 10 times faster than the overall state economy, adding 1,700 new jobs’ in 2016.”