Month: March 2019

Future Generations Thriving: A Green New Deal for Seattle

By Got Green & Puget Sound Sage
Photo by Peg Hunter

Got Green and Puget Sound Sage are excited by the opportunity the Green New Deal presents to build good jobs, clean our air and water, and leave a healthy planet for future generations. We know what a Green New Deal looks like locally, because we’ve been working on it in coalition with our partners at SouthCORE, Front & Centered, and The Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy.

Community control of development, affordable housing, rooted communities, living-wage jobs, public transportation, healthy food, renewable energy, clean air, water, and land, and corporate accountability are the components of a Green New Deal. Community connection is how people survive and bounce back from emergencies. Strengthening community cohesion is a climate adaptation and resilience strategy.

Got Green and Puget Sound Sage recommend substantial investment from the federal, state, and local level to kick start, support, and scale up frontline community-led work on:

Living-wage jobs that benefit or conserve the environment and preserve or expand environmental health for workers and the surrounding community

Living-wage and unionized jobs in the renewable energy and building trades sectors

Renewable, local energy infrastructure, including solar, wind, battery-storage, and other community-owned and -driven energy solutions

Rapid, convenient, affordable, and electrified public transportation

Energy-efficient, affordable housing and capacity to weatherize existing housing stock

Support for workers and businesses transitioning out of the fossil fuel industry and into renewable energy or other industries, including job training and pension security

Support with energy bills, weatherization, and transportation costs for low-income people

Subsidies going to support the fossil fuel industry must be phased out and reinvested into renewable energy. Resource investment and infrastructure development must prioritize communities most impacted by the damaged climate and ongoing pollution. Also, frontline communities need to have power over how development occurs and how resources are deployed because they know what solutions will be most effective at addressing the problems in their community.

A Green New Deal for Seattle must not include cap-and-trade or carbon market-based policies, harmful geotechnologies, or energy produced from fracked gas and nuclear power. Cap-and-trade policies do not eliminate carbon emissions 1 2 3, fracked gas produces unacceptable carbon emissions 4 5 and earthquakes 6 7, and nuclear power produces deadly byproducts 8 9 10.

All of these policies and fuel sources harm frontline communities and workers at sites of extraction and production, and pollute our air, water, and land. Their use is unnecessary when we have renewable energy options increasingly available for our use and development.

We have a plan for how to build healthy, resilient communities in Seattle and beyond. We call on our city to set an example for the nation by modeling what it looks like to invest in and follow the lead of local communities on the frontlines of climate change and ongoing pollution.

Join us in building a future we are proud to pass on to our children.

See more of Peg Hunter’s photos here. Photo license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

1 Four Years In, What Can We Learn from California’s Cap and Trade Program, Front and Centered, 2016, https://frontandcentered.org/four-years-in-what-can-we-learn-from-californias-cap-and-trade-program/. Accessed 20 Mar. 2019.

2 Cushing L, et. al., A Preliminary Environmental Equity Assessment Of California’s Cap-and-Trade Program, – USC Dornsife.” 2016, https://dornsife.usc.edu/PERE/enviro-equity-CA-cap-trade.

3 Cushing L, Blaustein-Rejto D, Wander M, Pastor M, Sadd J, et al. (2018) Carbon trading, co-pollutants, and environmental equity: Evidence from California’s cap-and-trade program (2011–2015). PLOS Medicine 15(7): e1002604. Retrieved September 2018, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002604

4 Fracked Gas, PSR – Physicians for Social Responsibility. https://www.psr.org/issues/environment-health/fracked-gas/. Accessed 20 Mar. 2019.

5 Howarth, R.W., Santoro, R. & Ingraffea, Methane and the greenhouse-gas footprint of natural gas from shale formations, A. Climatic Change (2011) 106: 679. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-011-0061-5, https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs10584-011-0061-5.pdf.

6 Ellsworth, W.L., Injection-Induced Earthquakes, Science, Jul 2013, Vol. 341, Issue 6142, 1225942. DOI: 10.1126/science.1225942

7 National Research Council. 2013. Induced Seismicity Potential in Energy Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/13355. https://www.nap.edu/catalog/13355/induced-seismicity-potential-in-energy-technologies.

8 Barron, R.W, Hill, M.C., A wedge or a weight? Critically examining nuclear power’s viability as a low carbon energy source from an intergenerational perspective, Energy Research and Social Science Vol. 50, 7-17, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2018.10.012.

9 Wheatley S., Sovacool, B., Sornette, D., Of Disasters and Dragon Kings: A Statistical Analysis of Nuclear Power Incidents and Accidents, Risk Analysis, Vol. 37 Issue 1, 99-115, 2017,  https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.12587

10 Nuclear Power and the Environment – Energy Explained, U.S. Energy Information Administration, https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=nuclear_environment., 2019

Graham Street: A Community Driven Neighborhood Vision

“We found ourselves here in many different ways. Some of us came a long time ago. Some of us came recently. Many of us grew up in Seattle. Many of us grew up across the globe. We are black, brown, and white. We are Filipino/a, Somali, Ethiopian, Vietnamese, Cham, African American, Latinx, American, and much more. We are Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, and more. We speak many languages, but share the same home.

We do many things in our community—raise our families, go to school, work, worship, celebrate, do business, shop, build, care-give, and hope for the future. We are youth, elders, and everyone in between. We are strong and resilient together.

Some of us no longer live here because rent became too expensive or we didn’t own land. But we frequently return because our families, businesses, schools, cultural cen¬ters, and places of worship are still here. We have roots here.

For all of these reasons, and despite increasing economic pressure to make us leave, we intend to stay.”  - Graham Street Community Action Team

We set out to plan differently.

We're proud to have worked over the last year alongside community groups in the Graham Street Neighborhood to develop a shared vision for the future. Together we imagined what development without displacement could look like for our neighborhood after the new light rail station is opened in 2031.

We aren’t waiting, though, for property values to rise and rents to go up – we are planning now to ensure that the communities who are here can choose to stay here.

The full vision may be accessed here.

Stopping displacement in the Graham Street neighborhood, especially with a new light rail station, won’t be easy. We needed a different approach than the usual community design process that emphasizes physical improvements to a neighborhood, like open space, lighting, public art and facades. What is the point of those improvements if the community is no longer here to benefit from them? We need a more fundamental shift in the planning paradigm that includes creating the power and resources to drive development and investment ourselves.

Over the last year, the Graham Street Community Action Team formed to both envision the future of the neighborhood and start building the capacity and infrastructure needed to make the vision a reality. This was our strategy:

Invest in organizing and building power: Puget Sound Sage and the CAT shared resources to ensure we could do the community organizing needed to engage our neighbors in multiple planning workshops and tap into a wealth of community expertise. With many languages and cultures in the community, we knew that building a shared sense of identity would make a stronger vision and create more power to advance it.

Center leadership of people of color: People of color, low-income people, immigrants, and refugees are the most vulnerable to displacement in our region and, thus, the experts in both understanding the problem and developing the solutions to thrive in place.

Build on existing assets: Despite decades of disinvestment in the Graham Street neighborhood, our communities have built and sustained multiple institutions, faith centers, homes, gathering places, and green spaces. We can build on these assets and experiences to as we take our vision to scale.

Plan for systems change: Building a few community projects won’t be enough to stem displacement. Our planning also must emphasize the systemic racial inequality that leads to displacement. By weaving in a racial justice analysis, we can advance solutions to undo systemic racism in housing and economic opportunity by creating new, more just policies

Plan for self-reliance: To implement community-ownership, we will need both public and private sector partnerships. But, we start with an assumption that we will drive development ourselves. This includes how to own land, find climate resiliency solutions, grow food, and build strong communities.

What’s next?

Over the next year, Sage and the CAT will learn together how other communities have driven and created resources for their own development projects We will combine this with existing expertise to develop a policy, finance, and ownership plan for the next decade.

We are proud of the work we have done together. Stay tuned for more updates from the Community Action Team throughout the next year!