Senator Becker and Mary Creasman – what are their roles in the climate transition

Senator Josh Becker is the California State Senator for District 13. His district represents roughly one million people from the border of San Francisco, down to Sunnyvale, with all of Silicon Valley is considered to be his constituency. Climate has been a tremendous focus of Senator Becker for many years: he launched Cleantech For Obama in 2007 and co-founded Full Circle Fund to work on climate and other issues as well. Having started his career at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington D.C., climate policy has been a core theme for what Senator Becker works on everyday. 

Mary Creasman is the CEO of California Envirovoters, a statewide organization that has multiple entities including 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) political action committees. Believing that we have the solutions to solve the climate crisis is at the core of what her organization does. Mary explains that we are 95% there on technology – we know how to make clean energy, how to make our communities and landscapes more resilient, how to transition our buildings and our transportation to electrification. Those are the things that are going to protect us from the worst of the climate crisis and protect us from what’s happening right now. Mary emphasizes that what we don’t have, the real problem for us solving the climate crisis, is the political will or power to make investments in these solutions at the rate and scale that science tells us we have to. In turn, Mary’s work with CA Envirovoters is to build that political power. She believes that California is the global catalyst to solving the climate crisis and advancing justice. With her years of expertise, Mary and her organization work to elect environmental champions, expand who has the right to vote, hold people who are in elected office accountable, and pass and implement policy solutions at the local, state and federal levels.

The importance of local, state, and federal policy

Mary points out that federal action is essential, but it will never be burst and it will never be the boldest. When you look at any movement, any big shifts from a societal or economic perspective, it never happens from the top-down in the US. It usually starts in the states and movements are first seen at the grassroots level. Once there is enough support for proven models and replicable and scalable policy solutions, then federal adoption and implementation takes place. So while we all should be putting extreme pressure on federal forces, we can’t be distracted by that as the only way we’re going to address climate challenges, because that will be how we lose. If we forget to invest in state and local jurisdictions, regions that are proving these models, they can push harder and faster than we can federally. The quicker we adopt locally and statewide, the quicker we’ll get massive federal action. For hope and inspiration, to find out where the future of climate action is, Mary says we need to look at states and local regions first. 

According to Senator Becker, federal policy can be great for financial support and incentives, but there’s not really a regulatory role for Congress to play. Cleantech for Obama was able to galvanize the clean energy community nationally to support the President, leading to executive orders and some policy developments, but greater and necessary changes ultimately got stymied. Senator Becker explains that it’s very hard to get policy work done, or even garner support at the federal level for market-based solutions like cap and trade. At the state level, there’s greater authority. For example, all the government agencies are at our disposal here in California: we’ve got the Energy Commission, the Air Resources Board, the Public Utilities Commission, and all of these agencies can influence the legislature, helping us to pass laws that directly impact people’s lives and help move us forward.

The most important actions and ideas for influencing others

Senator Becker’s take: First, it’s critical to keep in mind that we need to show that we can achieve climate goals while also growing our economy to provide for our citizens. According to Senator Becker, this is what California has done by reducing our emissions by about 20% overnight standing levels and growing our economy by 60%. Second, as California represents the fifth-largest economy in the world, we have an impact on CO2 ourselves through reduction – but if we’re going to do more than that, then we have to reduce in a way that provides models for the rest of the world. And third, we can create markets and use our market power to bring down the cost of technologies so that others can adopt more quickly. In the case of solar, the price of adoption has come down 90% over the past 10 years, and 300% over the last 35 years, thanks to states like California, New Jersey, and others who installed more to create this economical value.

Mary’s take: When California puts in rules, regulations, and demands on companies to change, it has a ripple effect globally because the state is too big of a market for companies to change their business just for California. We need to leverage that in every single way. Further, not only do we want to prove we can solve the climate crisis, but we want to define how we solve the climate crisis. We are going to get to a place where we won’t have to convince people that everybody’s running for higher ground, but at that point, communities will be left behind – communities of color, women, children, vulnerable communities, the elderly will be left behind in suffering the worst and even more than they already are in exponential ways. What we want to do in California is prove we can solve the climate crisis and use it as a large-scale tool to address economic, social, and racial disparities. The opportunity to act on climate to be able to advance equity is huge and cannot be understated.

Resources Mentioned

• California Environmental Voters

Connect with Senator Josh Becker and Mary Creasman

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