Alessandra de la Torre and Bob Jenks
De la Torre is an energy justice organizer with Rogue Climate and lives in Talent. Jenks is executive director of the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board and lives in Portland.
Oregon has had a difficult year in which the climate crisis has been felt more and more severely in our communities. It can be challenging to feel hopeful about the future of our state and our planet. But on June 26, the start of the hottest three days in Oregon’s recorded history, the Legislature passed House Bill 2021 – 100% Clean Energy for All. We celebrate this achievement because HB 2021 will help mitigate the impacts of the climate crisis while building more resilient and thriving communities.
Our organizations, Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board and Rogue Climate, are two of the many stakeholders that shaped HB 2021. As an advocate for residential utility customers, the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board has helped shape decades of our state’s energy policy, while Rogue Climate represents a new and needed direction – one grounded in energy justice led by and advocating for rural residents, low-income Oregonians and communities of color. This bill gives us hope because it shows our pathway toward greater transformation.
HB 2021 has a big but achievable vision to move Oregon’s two largest utilities and its electricity service suppliers to 100% clean energy by the year 2040, the most ambitious timeline of its kind. It is also the first legislation in any state to ban new fossil fuel power plants.
There are many firsts in HB 2021, but what excites us most is how it centers environmental justice and benefits for communities. The bill explicitly states that the strategies we utilize to achieve 100% clean energy must minimize burdens on Black, Indigenous and other communities of color; rural and low-income communities; and especially tribes, which continue to experience significant harm through our current dam-powered system that has decimated salmon populations. Those strategies must also create opportunities across Oregon through good jobs with strong labor standards and community-wide projects that spur economic development and provide localized, resilient energy generation. HB 2021 also protects vulnerable people, like seniors, by ensuring uninterrupted access to energy at affordable rates.
We celebrate the passage of HB 2021 not only because it is a momentous climate policy achievement, but because it is also an achievement in community organizing, policy development and collaboration. Through strong core values and leadership from environmental justice and community-led groups like Rogue Climate, we built the largest and most diverse coalition to have ever supported clean energy legislation in Oregon’s history, with climate activists, utilities, local governments, labor groups, independent power producers, legislators and customer advocates like the Citizens’ Utility Board. Many stakeholders who had never worked together -- or worked together well -- built trust that will be vital to carry out the practical, community-centered and frontline-led approach in HB 2021.
We need this bill now more than ever. In the past year, more than a million acres and many neighborhoods burned in catastrophic fires. Oregonians sat for days without power after a winter storm. As HB 2021 passed, the state was devastated by a deadly heat wave that experts now indicate was a direct result of human-caused climate change. All these events speak to the need for solutions that shift us to a cleaner and more regenerative economy – one that ensures community resilience, with the aid of reliable and affordable electricity to power a more equitable future. But it also speaks to the need to do this work in a way that is justice-driven and bold. We celebrate HB 2021 as a step in that direction.
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