Hi, my name is Kat Lockwood, and I’m The Climate Center’s new CEO. As an organizer, I believe strongly in the power of connecting with people on the issues they care about and working together to create a better world. So starting this week, I will be sharing the most inspiring and timely climate stories I come across, plus opportunities for you to take action and make a difference.
I’ve spent the bulk of my career leading campaigns and turning out voters all across the country. Now, the November election is right around the corner and the stakes couldn’t be higher! The United Nations recently reported that we’ve passed critical thresholds to limit global warming and the Trump administration has undercut climate progress in more ways than I can name here. Meanwhile, the climate crisis is front and center. Destructive flooding in Nepal recently killed 1,000 people, with almost 5,000 still unaccounted for.
The midterms at the national scale present an opportunity to break the Republican-controlled trifecta and give Congress more power to check the Trump administration’s attacks on clean energy. And as the fourth-largest economy in the world, California and our statewide elections will play an outsized role in the world’s climate progress.
That’s why The Climate Center is proud to endorse the No on Prop 45 campaign. Prop 45 would gut the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), California’s most important air and water quality protection law. Prop 45 lets developers fast-track polluting projects like pipelines, refineries, and data centers. It’s a deceptive and misleading measure that corporations are spending millions of dollars to pass at the expense of crucial environmental protections for Californians.
In 2010, I worked on another campaign whose opposition was funded by Big Oil: No on Prop 23. Special interests spent millions to try to trick Californians into overturning our first-of-its-kind landmark global warming law. But by educating the public about this deceptive proposition threatening our climate progress, we were able to defeat it resoundingly. As voters, we can protect our environment and communities by standing up to the special interests that are spending millions of dollars to try to pass Prop 45. Please join me in voting No on Prop 45, and tell your community to do the same.
This blog first appeared in The Climate Center’s bi-weekly newsletter. To keep up with the latest climate news and ways to take action for a climate-safe future, subscribe today!
