we are very lucky to have with us live in the studios once again jonathan grant jonathan grant is executive director of the tenants union of washington he has held that position since two thousand and ten and he previously worked at solid ground a community action organization he has directly counseled over three thousand tenets on strategies in asserting their rights across washington and has successfully advocated for the expansion of tenant rights on the local state and federal level so start out tell us a bit about the tenants union well the tenants union has been in existence for thirty six years and our mission is to empower tenants and transform unjust housing policies and practices through direct action community organizing and tenant leadership so that can look like a lot of different things the tenet union has four different primary programs the one that most people are familiar with is our tenet education program which is a hotline and walk in clinics that are in seattle  so this is a hotline that renters can call when they're having a problem with their landlord to learn information about their rights if folks of want to reach that hotline it's two zero six seven two three zero five zero zero and there are ten  counselors and volunteers in line that are trained in landlord tenant law that can kind of give you strategies in the laws that can help you resolve your housing situation it's homelessness and increases public health and all these good things that a twenty four seven liners that business is not twenty first seven unfortunately you know resources are limited but we are constantly building resources to make sure that the hotline is as accessible as possible be the best thing to do is to for folks to go on the walk in clinics actually because people from all across the state are calling the hotline for information on those locations they can go to our website at tenet union dot org so that's the the hotline we serve over two thousand people   the other one of the other main programs of the tenants union is the section eight ten an organizing project or what we call stop stop is a statewide program we actually have an office in spokane where we have our eastern washington organizer and then we have our western washington community organizer and what these folks do is that they go into buildings or what are called section eight project based buildings and organize tenants who are facing displacement because that subsidy that keeps their rents low could expire or the landlord could opt out of it and so tenants form organized into tenet associations so they can collectively bargain with the owner to keep the building in the program keep runs affordable in the lifetime of the program to tenants union has preserved a different properties which are home to over four hundred low income found families one of the kind of offshoots of that which is another program is our tenant ownership program and this is where built tenants that are in subsidized buildings like a federally subsidized building if the owner is trying to opt out and displace those tenants we've been able to organize tenets to actually purchase the property and own the property so that the tenants can maintain affordability in perpetuity because obviously they would never opt out of the program so we were successful in doing that in washington state's first tenant owned property in kent washington  the benson east duplexes which is about thirty five different buildings next to it in one in one community and it's a very it's an amazing community it's very diverse people have these amazing gardens that now flourish there and it's there's about five or six different languages spoken in that community so you have these community meetings that have interpreters there and it's like the kickoff anie of different languages like vietnamese romanian russian and ten work together in their tended association to kind of maintain and make sure that the property continues and continues on in perpetuity as an affordable housing so then there's are our healthy homes organizing work  so the healthy healthy housing organizing has to do with when a landlord fails to make a repair and you know a pipe breaks or your roof caves in you've got a rat infestation or what have you usually we find out about people in that situation who come through our hotline and we have community organizers that can go and meet with tenants and actually have a tenant meeting to discuss what are collective ways that those renters can actually put  landlord to fix the situation so we're currently in the beginning stages of a campaign to organize with tenants in south king county where there are some of the were substandard conditions in in  county so the healthy housing campaign had a very huge victory in the city of seattle where tenants were living at substandard health housing organize with the tenant union to fight for a campaign to establish a pro active rental registration and inspection ordinance which is a sea change for tenants rights in the city of seattle and what was important about that that victory is that if you're a tenant living in substandard housing and you had a problem in the landlord refused to fix it you the onus was on you to enforce the city's codes the building codes right so you'd have to go and filed a complaint with the city and make yourself a target well we thought that that was backwards right we wanted rental housing to be established more as a business right and like if you go to a restaurant and you have an expectation that there's a regular health code inspection to make sure that this place is a safe place to eat right well that standard does not exist in rental housing so what this did is that it created a proactive program where properties will have to register and establish their own inspection that the meet the most basic health and safety standards so for example you know does the plumbing not leak is there a door you know things like this that are calls that we get hundreds of calls that we get every year on the hotline so that that was a big change in seattle and this is the first year that the program is just in this beginning phases in the cities just getting it up and running but there was a huge win for tenants rights to make sure that people can live in healthy and safe homes assuming that continues on in seattle you see expanding that to other cities in can county yes didn't county yeah and not necessarily specifically a proactive inspection program but you know one of the biggest impediments to tenants being able to assert their rights is retaliation and seattle has another on the books that the two you got passed a number of years ago called the just cause ordinance where you know the rest of the state if you have a problem their landlord or they don't like the way that you look they just give you a written notice with twenty days to get out a sensually and there's no justification for it so in seattle the just cause ordinance states there needs to be a reason you need to state a specific reason why you're terminating the tendency and there's you know has to be one of a thousand different reasons and if it's not on that list you can't just kick someone out that doesn't exist in the rest of the state so tenants  extremely real vulnerable to retaliation and we actually we get a lot of calls in the city of spokane where there are a lot of renters who are facing substandard conditions or and then when they try to get that situation addressed  either to you know get rid of the the mold their house or make sure that the plumbing is working that there is heat that the common response for many landlords who are unscrupulous is that they'll just give them a twenty day notice of like you know you don't like it here too bad and we think that that's really problematic because there is a fundamental power imbalance between landlords and tenants right so just causes a really important  policy to make sure that displacement like that doesn't happen and to ensure that city co's are in for so people feel better protected to actually go and file that complaint when there is a landlord is not following the law how many landlords are just people who own like a single property or a couple properties versus the landlords that own you know multiple large facilities have a sense for that yeah well in the city is seattle there are many many people who live in single family homes or mother in law units it's almost i'm not sure of the number but i think it's almost half of the real housing stock so when you take that into consideration there is an even smaller subset of housing that is publicly subsidized so that's like section eight or public housing or something of that nature and there are because there is such a limited pool of affordable housing that's subsidized in that way people are left to kind of be subject to the whims of the market right and that can be a real a real problem and not a hot market like seattle where it has these jumps and these dips in terms of costs and went over the market jumps in that way it displaces many people and lots of other municipalities actually have the ability to regulate when those rents jump like that and make sure that rents are tied to something  like the consumer price index and so there are many cities all across the country where they've been able to regulate run increases in this way c l can't unfortunately because of a state ban passed in the eighty's that basically prohibits local control over how to regulate the rental market and it's really a prohibited of in in the city of seattle and was that enacted from efforts by the landlord lobby yeah i think that's a that's a pretty safe assumption you know the landlords obviously don't like the idea of their profits being limited in any kind of way and you know this is a huge impact on communities particularly low income communities and communities of color because whenever a building is identified by a developer it's going to be in a low income neighborhood because that's where that's cheapest to purchase a property and so what we're seeing in seattle right now with when there is such a  limited supply of housing and a very limited amount of land to build that housing it's the housing market just kind of devours itself and these properties rental properties that were  at one point affordable but not subsidized get bought out and renovated and turned into high cost units or converted into condos right so this is a real problem that there is this myth about the housing market  that supply and demand will solve this problem let's just build more units more supply more supply more supply that to lower prices well we've been living in an unregulated rental market for well since forever and  i think anybody who's listening can say the rents aren't getting any cheaper you know i'm actually interesting only last year just in that year alone there were more units built than in the last two decades but seattle was number one in the nation for the highest run increases so you can't tell me of that supply and demand is the answer here because you have to consider the context that the market exists supply and demand works great for things like commodities like telephones and things like that right because you can make as many and or as few of them as as the market may need when you apply it to a market based economy to something like land there is a limited supply of land right seattle is bordered by two large bodies of water it's kind of like an hourglass in the middle of that hourglass where there are still affordable apartments those are the first ones to go they get bought up by these really large developers these multi billion dollar entities and there's no real benefit for example right now there's a huge problem at the lock apartments which is up in ballard and they've been in the news a lot you know the tenant self organize they actually formed an association when their building was in the process of getting bought out by goodman real estate and the tenants union has now been working with them  providing technical assistance to them to try to negotiate with the developer to make sure that not everyone is being displaced and what we see when these situations happen is that the developer i mean this this this building had decades of life left in it you know it didn't need a major capital it didn't the major capital you know work on it or anything like that but what happens is that the owners will sell it to a large developer the developer purchases it by getting a huge like a massive loan from a bank and then to you know in order to accommodate that financing the double or triple the rents just to service the debt on the loan they used to purchase the building right so who does this route who does this really help it it helps large banks and large developers and does nothing for in fact it decimates our community when we lose buildings like this because this these are the buildings where they are alo come workers where there are seniors where there are people with disabilities and there are these last few remaining pockets of affordability that again because of the limited nature of land developers will go in and just we call this a predatory acquisition right they'll just seize this property get a massive loan triple double the rounds and then everyone gets displaced out of the city now if we want to be  you know a community where we value inclusiveness were revalue diversity and unregulated rental market doesn't speak to those values and that's not the kind of city that i want to live and i don't think that's the kind of city that seattle considers itself to be you know i think that we need to be thinking outside of the box and creatively about how we can address some of these things and not worry so much about what the state limits our options to and we need to start community pressure and political pressure to change the status quo because in ten years from now the city of seattle is going to be a minority a very low income tenants in publicly subsidized housing and then extremely wealthy people and they'll be no where in the middle for people to live and that's what's going on right now building by building they're being bought out taken down made more affordable are not made out affordable and it's displacing people in mass in the city it's a housing crisis and we need to wake up to it there are several pieces of legislation that are proposed in olympia right now senate bill sixty one ninety two the fair tenant screening at can you talk about that yes so senate bill sixty to ninety one is the fair tenan screening act and you know before i jump into it i just want to make a request for all their early morning seattle tenants to go to our website at w w w dot tenants union dot org and right on the landing page is a link that you can click to learn more about some of these are really important tenant bills and how to contact your legislator and let them know that they need to both protect tenants rights and stop the landlord industry from repealing the rights that you already have so implore you go to the web site this is a really important legislative session for tenants to give you a sense of what's been going on you know last year when the majority coalition  control of the senate's it was a conservative majority that was really pushing hard on advancing the interest of the rental industry and the introduced twelve anti tenet bills that range from  you know making it harder to protect people from carbon monoxide poisoning to making it easier for the landlord to toss out your stuff if you if you if you're deceased and the state wants to try to like get your possessions back all sorts of terrible stuff well thanks to the the broader tenant community and the tenants union membership we pushed back on all twelve of those bills and were able to stop all of them from getting passed and it's when tenets contact their legislators act is a bill that the tenets union has been working with the washington low income housing alliance which were a member of which is a broader coalition of housing justice groups and we've been working on this bill for many years when we first introduced it  think four years ago it was a comprehensive kind of retooling of how the tenet screening process works and for those that aren't that aren't familiar when you go to apply for housing often you pay that thirty five to fifty dollars for a background check now the landlord doesn't actually do that that money gets forwarded to a tenant screening company in this third party company gobbles up all the publicly available data from the court database from you know getting criminal records to get your credit report and all this stuff so they compile it into a report send it back to the landlord and the landlord decides to rent you are not based on what they see well that information is all coming from the same public sources right so that the reports from from the different companies that produce that are more or less the same so what happens is that you go to apply for housing one pays place you pay the thirty five bucks or fifty dollars you get denied let's say you go to another place you pay another thirty five bucks you get denied another thirty five bucks you get denied it's this repetitive screening fees that are outrageous and totally unfair in terms of the tenant because you get the tenant is the one paying for this product right and then the never get to see it once they get denied you know they have a right to ask for it but they don't automatically get a copy of it and then if you wanted to use that report again the landlord that the next place you go to doesn't have to accept it so what this would do is that it would be a common sense solution that if a tenant pays for this product for this tenant screening report that they can ask the company that produced it to forward it to the next perspective landlord that they want to apply to so they pay once and then they can port it to like this many places they want to for a thirty day period it's a really simple solution we think that it's fair to the industry and you know it's it doesn't create this massive licensing scheme or anything like that and we're still getting pushback from i'm from the industry and they're crying bloody murder about it we would like to put this issue to rest and i think that it's time that the state legislature act and make this really important change because every you know when we talk to people they're paying hundreds of dollars in screening fees i spoke to a family that paid over six hundred dollars that's a first month's rent or part of it or part of a deposit for the place that would eventually accept you and with the red increases that are going on right now you know people just can't make can't afford to do is waste their money in this way so we think that it's a really common sense solution  and we really like to see it get passed we've had some success rather than pushing the comprehensive bill like in the first year we've been breaking the bill up into smaller pieces and so thanks to advocacy by by tenants and also by our broader coalition of housing advocates we were able to get a really important piece of the first and it's passed last year and this was a part of it that would protect domestic violence survivors and i think that's what's really shocking is but maybe not surprising is how much opposition even the most sympathetic parts of this bill gets from the rental industry what the what that part of the bill did last year was that if you were a survivor of domestic violence and got a protection order against your abuser that becomes a public record that anyone can see what screening companies do because the mine those public databases is the included in the report and that report goes to the landlord in the see that you've got what's called a d v d or domestic violence protection order so they see that and they say oh i want to that person that person's trouble well actually it's illegal to discriminate against devious survivors you cannot do that but it's not illegal to include it in the report so this was actually a result of you know there wasn't always like that it used to be legal to do this so in two thousand and four they passed legislation say no you know you cannot discriminate against d v survivors and part of that bill was prohibiting screening companies from including that information in the report but that part of the build and pass right and the reason that didn't pass was because the industry knew that with the you could say that it was illegal but then still clandestinely discriminate gain discriminate against devious survivors because they'll be able to see it on the report and then they can say for any reason or no reason that they're not going to run to this person so it was a really big victory  for not just tennant's but you know women in particular survivors that we finally prohibited that information from being included in screening reports so that was a really big win and i want to thank everybody who called their legislators to put pressure  on the on libya to make sure that that happened because you wouldn't believe it i mean i encourage people to watch the industry industries testimony against that bill it was appalling you know you have  associations sitting on going on the record saying you know it was it was great no senators would ask them well it's already illegal for you to use domestic violence records in your rental decision so why do you need that information in the report and they'd set there and say things like it's a first amendment issue we should be able to see whatever we want and you know you are sitting there my mouth open i'm like are you kidding me like this first of all that's like the most mind boggling like answer to just to begin with but then you'd even have other people going on the record being like well sometimes it's really important to know that kind of stuff and our our thing is well aren't you open yourself up to a liability by even having the report if it's illegal can you get sued which answer is yes c it more affordable and we think that by having the report be portable to be reusable for that thirty day period is a really great compromise all right just four minutes left s b sixty to ninety two so bill sixty to ninety two is an attempt to address the massive rate hikes that are going on across across the city of seattle and in other parts of the state you know as i was saying before there's no local control to regulate rents and so landlords and developers are making these insane profits and because we're preempted at the state level we're trying to figure out what are some other ways that we can at least mitigate the impact that that  that's happening to tenants with his running creases and so this bill would go a long way towards allowing people to save up money to move if they are actually being displaced so what this bill does is that it changes the state law from a thirty day notice to a ninety day notice so that if you get a run increase the landlord has to give you ninety days before it goes into effect so it's going to be a really hard push for this because it's in it's being currently being heard in the senate which again is very conservative and this is a very modest i think a very modest ask you know give people more time to save money to move i mean and they're already screaming bloody murder they're saying this is you know you're trying to you know direct intro you're going to do all these things we're that's not what this bill is it's just a reasonable amount of time that people need in today's rental market where you have to pay first month's rent last month's rent and a deposit to move somewhere else the other thing that it does is that it increases the eligibility limit for relocation assistance so that if you do get displaced the city can provide the landlord and the city can provide relocation assistance or tenant to make a moderate income now the area median income in seattle  is about sixty thousand dollars a year so we're asking that people eighty percent am i be able to be covered by this because of the particularly high costs in the city i mean you know i think it should be noted too that in the city of seattle if you were earning a minimum wage that you'd have to work ninety two hours per week in order to afford a standard to better my apartment in this town ninety ninety two hours a week so this is a very modest request right two minutes six s b sixty one forty three the rat bale ok again so this is this is the sixty one forty three is what we call the rat bills so this is a naked attempt strip tenants of their most fundamental right to live in healthy and safe housing now under current law when you move into a rental unit there is not just an assumption but by law it's implied that the landlord has to actually make sure that warranty the manufacturer has to replace the engine right well there is an implied warranty when you move into a rental home that it be habitable that's what the implied warranty of habitability is this would actually strip that right away from tenets and what it would do instead is that it would just default to the state statute in the state kind of the legislature created the residential or tenet act to kind of regulate relationships between landlords and tenants so for example there was a case that came out that kind of inspired this bill and the case basically said you know only the statutory law applies not the case law well the that was the argument that was being made by by the landlord industry well the justices disagreed and he said no the implied w ability is a fundamental right it exists separate from the state statute period this law would repeal that court decision and in that case it was a situation where the ten at least an apartment was in the process of moving in and there was dead rats  in the walls and a rat infestation in the unit and this is a public health issues so the tenant moved out and the landlord didn't give him back the money for for that situation so the justices no it's not that tenants fault for a living in doing it that you let be infested with rats right so this would overturn that decision and so we think that the legislature should strongly oppose this it's a very good chance that it might get through the senate and so the house of representatives really is going to try to stop this bill if you go to our website again please send an e mail this is a terrible repeal of tenet's rights and in particular it should be noted that  being sponsored by senator mike patton republican from the fourth district and also senator tim sheldon who's a democrat who is one of the democrats that turned and joined to form the majority coalition caucus so it's kind of  it's a very anti tenant bill and people need to vote no against rats and slumlords well if that were unfortunate time i want to thank you very much for coming to spend time with us thank you we are very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning and i'm guy and emily johnson is with rising tide seattle and emily johnston is with three fifty seattle and we're going to be talking about the the fossil fuels dilemma here in the seattle and washing worldwide so if you could each talk a little bit about your respective organizations emily if you would start out first sure three fifty the national organization was started by bill mckibben and a bunch of students from middlebury college in vermont  several years ago and they started it because none of the big environmental groups were focused exclusively on climate change and and bill as you may know wrote the first play persons book about climate change back in eighty nine called the end of nature  so he basically became disturbed enough after that that he became a major focus for for him and they started the group and it's got all sorts of international affiliates i think on every continent except antarctic of course and we started the group locally about a dozen of us in seattle just last may and many of us had been activists with other environmental groups or on our own  but we got started just in may and the the the the focus of both the national and a local group you know is just to bring public attention to issues around climate change and  well well i work with the seattle chapter our collective of the rising tide network rising tide is a global all volunteer grassroots network dedicated to confronting the root causes of climate change which we see is both systems of oppression political and economic systems that our society is structured which drive the fossil fuel industry and incorporating climate just this framework into the environmental community so it's a global network with collectives all across the world it was started actually by activists in europe in australia a strong rising tide chapters across the globe and here in seattle in north america we are a collective that works largely around fossil fuel infrastructure projects and building power through direct action and civil disobedience to build the grassroots movement to tackle climate change in north america  what is climate justice thanks so much that's a great question mike so climate justice is the concept that those who are most impacted by both climate change and the fossil fuel burning which leads to climate change are the people that are least empowered to take action to respond to or adapt to that climate change in and of itself is a social economic and racial issue so that's the fact that you know the people who are being displaced from their homes from climate related disasters largely come from the global south or come from economically or politically marginalized communities to here in the united states if you live next to a refinery and are breathing toxic air from the refining or so coal fired power plant you are far more likely to be of a low income community a community of color a marginalize community so those folks really need to be represented in the conversation around climate change and how we respond to it and actually be given positions of leadership and look to when we're looking at how to solve the problem of climate change  it also is a rejection of a lot of the big corporate solutions to climate change which ignore these frontline communities or marginalized communities so for example one of the solutions to the energy crisis in southern europe that's been proposed as a climate friendly solution is building massive solar farms across of north africa and displacing dozens of local communities so we see these kind of big corporate solutions to climate change that don't actually respond with a justice framework and look at the impacted communities to be really problematic and so we're trying to bring that into the conversation of climate change and actually make it a central focus so that as we move towards a more stable climate and as we move towards a world with a stable temperature we actually do that in a way that is just and sustainable for all peoples so you believe we actually will move towards a more stable  climate the work that we're doing and the movement that we're building is really inspiring to me i believe that yes we can definitely accomplish that so the keystone x l pipeline has been getting a lot of  w news coverage lately but you guys both are working with your respective organizations and pointing out that there's there's numerous projects besides that that are especially here in washington state that will impact us directly so i'm wondering can you briefly talk about the development of the keystone x l and then maybe expand on that and talk about some of the other projects that are going to affect us well it's not that i'm sure  l in which about seventy eight thousand people nationally pledged to either risk arrest or to support those risking arrest if it looks as though keystone is going to be approved but at the same time here in the northwest we're really at the choke point for all the fossil fuel that the fossil fuel companies want to leave north america and export so the projects that are currently on the table for infrastructure projects for coal and oil in washington and oregon alone add up to three times the carbon pollution of keystone x l so we can't take our eye off the ball of the local fight either because it's huge and that's gotten a lot less public attention and therefore we see it as our job in a lot of ways to just keep bringing that up and keep pointing out to people so the power pascall coalition and other related activist groups did a good job of putting the coal trains on the table and telling people that that the oil trains are much much more recent phenomenon just in the last year and a half or so and they also are a really big deal so you know there are three trains through seattle every week now of this back in shale oil and that's the stuff that's been four of those trains coming through downtown seattle every single week right by qwest field and centrelink and you know where seventy one thousand people are gathered and these things are incredibly explosive it's super dangerous so there's a you know many many reasons you know from the carbon pollution to the immediate dangers people really need to know about this and they you know need to we need to stop it basically and going back to keystone just  locally the seventy eight thousand people have signed a pledge of resistance to participate in peaceful civil disobedience if the president makes the first steps towards approving the keystone x l pipeline wot of those people are undergoing training in preparation to prepare for those actions right now about sixteen hundred people in the city of seattle and the surrounding area have signed the pledge and it's definitely not too late joined if this is an issue that you're particularly concerned about you can go to no k x l dot au argy and you can sign the pledge of resistance there get connected to local action leaders that are preparing a massive action in seattle if and only if president  moves on the first steps towards approving the keystone pipeline and that step for the purpose of the pledge of resistance would be if the state department determines over the next three months the pipeline is in the national interest of the make a determination of national interest in the next three months and that's what we'll be watching but more broadly i think the thing that keystone is done for the environmental movement nationally that's really interesting is you know five ten years ago the environmental movement in the united states was really a very washington d c beltway focused movement it was very much centered around big n lobbying congress lobbying the president around specific action there was some grassroots component to most of the leadership of the movement was in d c and what keystone did was force a lot of those big n g o s to broaden their reach and their scope beyond d c and begin taking leadership from communities in the heartland and forcing this idea of frontline communities those immediately facing possible feel projects as being leaders in this fight move the locus of the leadership of the fight away from d c to you know farmers in nebraska or landowners in texas who are doing the direct to resistance to the construction of the pipeline who are kind of the communities that were being highlighted to first nations communities up in alberta and it really made this you know took the environmental movement from being a d c focus issue to really a national movement to to a real movement of people  what rising tide has been trying to do with that with that in mind is to continue that work and continue putting the focus on these local fossil fuel infrastructure fights where there is an actual impacted community where you can see the tangible impacts that that project is going to have on a community as we see that's where the real leadership on climate is coming from we're not getting much out of our political leaders when it comes to you know a global national action and the real action is coming from local communities standing up and saying you know we're sick and tired of these refineries spewing sulfur dioxide into our communities we're sick and tired of living next to coal fired power plants or living next to massive you know mountaintop removal sites in west virginia are having our waters frakt and that's where the leadership has shifted in the northwest is a really prime example for that when you look at the resistance to the coal trains and other fossil fuel projects so that's i think like the real lesson in legacy we get from the keystone fight no matter which direction it goes in are those individuals in grassroots responses are they having significant impact on stopping some of these projects well once again going back to the northwest i think that yeah we can look at very direct and tangible results if we started with the six coal export proposals we're now down to three now i believe so you things keep coming online and offline so quickly sometimes it's hard to keep track but we've defeated half of the proposals and we're seeing massive resistance in states like new york ohio and pennsylvania to proposals to open up new lands to fracking and a lot of that is not coming in the direct way in terms of the leadership way from these beltway d c groups but they're coming from local community groups in philadelphia local groups in the marcellus shale formation in the in upstate new york folks you know put the coal trains fight was really locust around bellingham a community that is you know definitely far from the d c typical centers of power but there's also a bigger story going on here in the northwest that i think and i think i would agree with me that you know three fifty a rising tide of both i'm working on that isn't being talked about so a lot of attention has been given to these coal trains of these coal export facilities there's starting to be some attention about these oil export facilities which have  begun to crop up to take that place like i said these projects keep being proposed and defeated every couple of weeks so you know sometimes it's hard to keep track of what's out there but we're still often looking at each of these projects or each of these issues in isolation six call export facilities that were proposed now we have ten oil by rail facilities and the folks that are working on those are very siloed when you look at the big picture from british columbia the northern end of british columbia to the southern tip of oregon the northwest has about twenty five or more proposed major fossil fuel projects slated for our coast in the next couple of years it's a massive transformation it's just an absolutely mind boggling number when you look at it and very few people are talking about the cumulative impacts of all of these projects now that includes new terminals to export or refine oil bring brought in from the bokken shale formation that includes these coal export terminals both in the s and in canada that includes pipelines to bring tar sands materials from alberta both to british columbia and to washington refineries that includes new terminals to load barges and tankers and ship it through the puget sound that includes natural gas terminals so this is a really huge bevy of projects that are headed our way and when you look at it that's really the the  story of the cumulative impact of all these projects it's really a mind boggling choice that we're facing is here in the northwest we you know a lot of us and i came here three years ago for the quality of life here for you know the wonderful access to nature that you know beautiful coast that we have and that's i think why a lot of people really love this region and really feel a strong connection to living here and it's hard to imagine what it would look like living here with twenty five major fossil fuel terminals on our coast hundreds of tankers rolling through the puget sound every week  hundreds of trains rolling across our coast carrying the dirtiest a most dangerous fossil fuels on the planet that would radically transform the region and the irony of the northwest being considered one of the greenest places in the country  with that picture that i was painting is is enormous i mean the idea we have you know a very green mayor we also have an even greener governor who's very focused on climate change but it doesn't matter what the state plans you know for its own carbon emissions if we're busy shipping all of this coal and oil and anything else to other countries you know it's his though where you know they not taking the drugs but willing to sell them and you know it also so shell is also its ships that were getting ready it's tankers that were getting ready for arctic drilling were based in seattle you know a couple years ago when they were getting their repairs and so it you know there again as a geographical locus you know there's all kinds of things going on here that are relevant that people aren't necessarily aware of and all of them point to the fact that the fossil fuel companies are basically just incredibly irresponsible so what i was talking about in terms of the increase in tankers for example one has said you know i think it was about five years ago in a report that even a single spill of oil in the puget sound would wipe out the resident work a population even a single spill and that's of that was of conventional oil that they were talking about if there oil it would be far worse because tar sands but human is much heavier and it sinks there basically is no way to clean it up when it lands in water so these are the things that are at risk and we will be putting these at risk every single we already are putting them at risk massive amounts of carbon pollution and also the local effects you know could be dire with even a single accident and you know as adam pointed out this is people come here for the environment you know most people who live here just love the region and it needs to you people need to be aware of this so i wasn't aware there were so many of these projects on the table and potentially becoming a reality within a couple of years how do people track these different projects and how do they plug into the different grassroots groups that are resisting those well hopefully that will become much easier in the next few months right now it's actually quite difficult to keep a handle on all of the different projects given that they're happening in different jurisdictions and that's why a lot of people aren't aware of this part of it has to do with the way that nonprofits that work on these issues are structured you only ever hear about these projects or issues in isolation and that's because if i work for a nonprofit i'm funded to work on coal export terminals in the northwest the only thing i'm going to talk about or be allowed to talk about largely is coal export terminals if a whole bunch of oil export terminal so it's like a crazy idea a whole bunch of oil export terminals are proposed right next to the coal export terminal and i'm working on that have a lot of the same impacts and they're going to tie into enough cumulative impacts that my projects i can talk about them a little bit on the periphery but for the most part my funders aren't going to want me to talk about oil because that's a different issue that's not the work i'm being funded to do the same thing for the folks that are working on natural gas or working on oil and it gets even worse when you're crossing that national boundary the folks up in canada very very rarely talk about you know the projects happening in the united private folks in the united states very rarely talk about the projects happening in canada even though they directly impact one another the new proposed expanded coal terminals up in british columbia would be taking powder river bas coal from the united states the very thing that we're trying to keep in the ground by stopping coal export terminals in the u s those trains would roll from you know montana and wyoming through seattle through belling him on their way to these terminals up in british columbia those pipelines up in vancouver the one they're trying to triple is kinda morgan pipeline that they'd like to triple the size of the going up to about eight hundred sixty thousand barrels of tar sands bring almost i believe approximately four hundred tar sands tankers through the puget sound every year almost a tanker a day those tankers would be traveling near washington communities if they spilled would be on the u s and canadian side of the border but you know honestly unoiled spill doesn't really care which side of the border it's on so those projects directly affect us here in washington but because of that border you don't get a lot of communication so on the one hand it's a big challenge on the other hand it's a huge opportunity because folks in the northwest at the grassroots level have begun to have a really unprecedented level of coordination instead of fighting these projects one by one both from groups like three fifty and the work that rising tide which has the opportunity because we have rising tide chapters on both sides of the border there are collectives up in vancouver and the sailors territories their collective here in washington they're left as that in oregon we have a unique opportunity because we're all volunteer and we're not tied to these funders to talk about these projects in in two tally and look at the cumulative impacts of all this so we're putting together a mapping project which analyzes all of these projects we're going to be launching a website shortly called none shall pass dot org it's not online yet but it will hopefully be up in the next few months and that'll have constantly updated which will be showing what projects are on line what's been defeated and what you can do to take action of the projects in your local community so that'll be a resource to help people get a better perspective on the totality of this all along with  mapping project which will be both in a physical form and on line that folks will be able to take a look at and see you know as projects pop up as they're defeated what is actually on the landscape that's why i say about twenty five projects because you know like i said a few months ago there were you know six oil terminal apparent six coal export terminals on the table now there are three you know in prior to six seven months ago there were ten coal export terminals proposed in the northwest so the are constantly being proposed being defeated a new proposal comes to the table that's changing and that's why are you using that crowdsourcing way that wiki to monitor these projects where you also be sharing what the  strategies were for the defeat of the different projects because that seems like that's a key piece to relay well it is the strategies are happening at every level basically i mean so from everything from giving testimony at hearings we know for example is some of the cold terminals had to be approved through department of ecology so people showed up on mass to give testimony against the cold terminals to civil disobedience absolutely we've got things you know not only the the pledge of resistance going but there's also you know sort of plans in the works for civil disobedience on a number of of the projects and there are already been people who've been getting arrested in oregon you probably heard about this with the mega loads going from oregon indicated to the tar sands development so you know really is everything i mean there's going to be a lot of letter writing there's going to be petitions signing there's going to be sort of you know political pressure of that kind and then there's going to be lots of people showing up and putting their bodies on the line and maybe risking arrest and you know everything like that so and i want to speak a little bit more about the direct action and civil disobedience component of that because direct action is a core value and tactic used by the rising tide network all over the world and it's another thing that we've really seen a shift that the keystone fight has caused in the environmental movement is the number of people around the country talking about the need for direct action physically using one's body in a civil disobedient or nonviolent way to block the construction or facilitation of some of these projects and i think that's for a couple of reasons one campaign against key senators very prominently and very successfully used both symbolic civil disobedience at the white house and other places as well as more direct physical blockading impediments down in the southern leg of the keystone pipeline to great success to delay this project for the last five years but also you know as people in this country become more and more concerned about the real existential threat of climate change you know the fact that were headed towards  four degree or six degree celsius increase in average global temperatures and what that means is a world in which a grow arjan mount of the landmass is physically too hot to live on a world that is radically different in a way that our society would look nothing like it looks like today and people become really concerned with this existential threat the act of signing a petition or making a phone call to congress and forgetting about it really doesn't seem to be a response that is commensurate with the actual threat we are facing and people are really looking for a way to make a more bold and more propre it response to the threats of climate change in the the impacts that these projects are having to regularly right now even you know on people's lives and direct action provides an avenue for people to feel that in a real tangible way that is strategic and as effective  southern leg of the keystone x l pipeline one we see a very successful action in terms of a massive delay in that project costing trans canada millions of dollars in lost profits in additional construction and security costs and also these direct action campaigns build some of the most beautiful unique in unlikely coalitions the tar sands blockade down in east texas was a coalition of students and environmental zz and radicals from the university of texas and from austin who teamed up with tea party groups and landowners in small ranchers in east texas and together stood side by side and tea party members walked on with anarchists from the university of texas to blockade construction equipment coming in to a local landowner a local ranchers land in east texas and these beautiful coalitions are what is actually the key to beating these projects and it provides an opportunity when we focus on these impacts and focus on the communities that are for on the front lines of these projects an opportunity to build these coalitions which don't really happen elsewhere and which are really unthinkable in other circumstances and that coalition that project the tar sands blockade was thrown together in a matter of a couple of months by students from east  texas and the university of texas and it had a massive impact cost these companies millions of dollars that it delayed the project for months up here in the northwest we have years before many of these projects w finally finish going through environmental review we have two to three years to build the infrastructure to do a tar sand style action set up a permanent blockade of one of these projects and to do that on a scale that is so much larger and so much impressive that any more impressive than anything the fossil fuel industry has seen so far i mean if they could get hundreds of people down to a permanent action camp in the dregs of east texas in a hot summer imagine what we could do in bellingham with three years of preparation well with our unfortunate time i want to thank you very much for both coming in this morning thank