Last night, Food & Water Action endorsed candidate Sarahana Shrestha won her Democratic primary election for state assembly (AD-103) in the Hudson Valley. Her primary opponent, Kevin Cahill, had been in power for 23 years, taking thousands of dollars in fossil fuel industry campaign donations, and standing as a roadblock to progressive climate policies in Albany.
Sarahana is a staunch supporter of the All-Electric Building Act, Build Public Renewables Act, and a moratorium on fossil fuel powered cryptomining, all of which Speaker Heastie killed last session despite overwhelming public support. A progressive wave of climate activists, led by Sarahana is coming to Albany, ready to listen to the people, not deep pocketed fossil fuel industry lobbyists.
Food & Water Action Hudson Valley Organizer Emily Skydel issued the following statement:
“Speaker Heastie, this is what happens when you don’t pass climate bills. When Heastie killed the All-Electric Building Act, we mobilized. We’ve doorknocked and phonebanked with Sarahana and know full well that she is the progressive climate champion we need in Albany. With only a handful of years remaining to meet our state climate goals, we need to get serious about moving off fossil fuels — Sarahana is helping lead the movement to make it happen.
“The Hudson Valley said no to Danskammer’s fossil fuel power plant scheme last year. This year, we’re taking it one step further and bringing our local climate activism to the state level. We are proud to stand with Sarahana in her fight for a bolder, more progressive New York State Assembly. We’ll be fighting alongside her in November to ensure Speaker Heastie has his directive set on day one of next year’s legislative cycle: climate can’t wait.”
On Saturday, the Iowa Democratic Party voted to ratify a new party platform, taking a bold stance against carbon capture, pipelines and factory farms.
Polling in March by Food & Water Action found that 73% of Iowa voters (including 78% of Democrats) would be less likely to vote for a candidate that supported eminent domain for the carbon pipelines proposed across the state. With Saturday’s platform vote, Iowa Democrats became the first confirmed state party in the nation to formally oppose carbon capture and its associated carbon pipelines.
While many party activists met in Des Moines, over 50 Iowans gathered in Ames on Saturday, giving two hours of testimony at a People’s Hearing against the expanding factory farm crisis plaguing the state. 2019 polling found that nearly two-thirds of Iowa voters stand behind legislation to stop factory farm expansion, but absent state legislative action on the issue, Iowa continues to see rampant growth of the destructive industry. From 1982-2017, Iowa lost nearly 90% of its hog farms, while nearly 10,000 factory farms have moved in, taxing local economies, water supplies, public health, and the climate. With Saturday’s platform vote, Iowa Democrats once again threw their weight behind a moratorium on factory farm construction and expansion.
Food & Water Action Senior Iowa Organizer John Aspray issued the following statement:
“The Iowa Democratic Party has adopted a bold platform reflecting many of the demands coming from their constituents who want meaningful change. Iowans know that our land, air and water are worth more to us than the empty promises of prosperity offered by Big Ag and Big Energy. Our state is more than a dumping ground for factory farm manure and a corridor for pipelines to pass through.
“At the grassroots level, Iowa Democrats are taking a stand against the corporate abuses that have run rampant in our state for too long. We urge Democratic candidates and elected officials to follow suit. With midterm elections right around the corner, we look forward to ushering in a new wave of elected officials that stand up to carbon pipelines and the extractive corporate agriculture industry.”
The national environmental advocacy group Food & Water Action is endorsing Maxwell Alejandro Frost in the primary for Florida’s 10th Congressional district.
The group was in the midst of considering an endorsement in the contested 10th Congressional District when State Senator Randolph Bracy, one of Frost’s opponents in the race, sided with Republicans and the fossil fuel industry in voting to undercut the state’s net metering rules. The law, which passed with Gov. DeSantis’ support, will make it harder for Floridians who have invested in solar for their homes to sell electricity back into the grid, giving more power to utility corporations and fossil fuel power plants.
Food & Water Action Political Director Sam Bernhardt issued the following statement:
“Sending Maxwell Alejandro Frost to Congress won’t just win another vote for climate action; it will send a movement builder to DC. Maxwell is an organizer focused on building the power of progressive movements. We look forward to building the climate movement together with him.”
Food & Water Action, the political and lobbying arm of the national advocacy group Food & Water Watch, mobilizes people to build political power to move bold and uncompromised solutions to the most pressing food, water and climate problems of our time. We work to protect people’s health, communities and democracy from the growing destructive power of the most powerful economic interests.
2020 was a historically important election. But the 2022 midterm elections could have an even bigger impact on American democracy and the health of the planet.
Our opponents understand what’s at stake, and will use their corporate coffers to influence the outcome of the election. They’ll spend millions of dollars blanketing the airwaves with ads and filling our mailboxes with misinformation. We don’t have their cash. What we do have are community leaders around the country ready to mobilize their neighbors to vote.
There are three main components to our strategy for electing candidates who won’t trash our public resources for profit.
Defending The Majority In Congress For A 2022 Victory Over Climate-Deniers
Corporations will be spending millions of dollars to elect Republicans who will put profit before people. However, we can defeat them if we work together. Food & Water Action has been building power in key areas around the country, in places like Johnson City, Iowa, Broward County, Florida, and Pittsburgh. We will use our grassroots infrastructure to elect progressive Democrats in these battleground Congressional districts and beyond.
This spring Food & Water Action will announce the Congressional districts where we can have the most impact on the general election. This will happen after redistricting has settled, to best inform our decisions.These will be districts we already have a strong grassroots presence in. This way we know our continued investment will have a big impact.
With your investment, we’ll deploy time-tested tactics to effectively mobilize voters and win these important races, such as:
Voter registration
Door-to-door canvassing
Handwritten letters
Strengthening The Progressive Block With Climate Champions In 2022
Nobody fought harder for President Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda than progressives. We need more climate champions working to get our country to 100% renewable energy. We have already endorsed three climate champions, Summer Lee (PA-12), Jessica Cisneros (TX-28), and Rep. Andy Levin (MI-11). We are excited to support these candidates because they have stood so strongly with us. For more information and background about these candidates, visit our Endorsements page.
The Secret Weapon For Winning In 2022: Empowering Activists Like You To Join The Fight
Now more than ever, it is critical to protect the progress we have made for a livable climate for us and future generations. For that reason, we have many ways to get involved. You can sign up for events in your area, volunteer to be a part of our texting team, or make a gift. By joining Food & Water Action in electing climate champions, you can help us fight for food we can trust, water we can drink, air we can breathe…and a democracy we can believe in. Donate to Food & Water Action today to be a part of steering these midterms on the right course.
Power our work together in the midterms and beyond!
2020 was a historically important election. But the 2022 midterm elections could have an even bigger impact on American democracy and the health of the planet.
Our opponents understand what’s at stake, and will use their corporate coffers to influence the outcome of the election. They’ll spend millions of dollars blanketing the airwaves with ads and filling our mailboxes with misinformation. We don’t have their cash. What we do have are community leaders around the country ready to mobilize their neighbors to vote.
There are three main components to our strategy for electing candidates who won’t trash our public resources for profit.
Defending The Majority In Congress For A 2022 Victory Over Climate-Deniers
Corporations will be spending millions of dollars to elect Republicans who will put profit before people. However, we can defeat them if we work together. Food & Water Action has been building power in key areas around the country, in places like Johnson City, Iowa, Broward County, Florida, and Pittsburgh. We will use our grassroots infrastructure to elect progressive Democrats in these battleground Congressional districts and beyond.
This spring Food & Water Action will announce the Congressional districts where we can have the most impact on the general election. This will happen after redistricting has settled, to best inform our decisions.These will be districts we already have a strong grassroots presence in. This way we know our continued investment will have a big impact.
With your investment, we’ll deploy time-tested tactics to effectively mobilize voters and win these important races, such as:
Voter registration
Door-to-door canvassing
Handwritten letters
Strengthening The Progressive Block With Climate Champions In 2022
Nobody fought harder for President Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda than progressives. We need more climate champions working to get our country to 100% renewable energy. We have already endorsed three climate champions, Summer Lee (PA-12), Jessica Cisneros (TX-28), and Rep. Andy Levin (MI-11). We are excited to support these candidates because they have stood so strongly with us. For more information and background about these candidates, visit our Endorsements page.
The Secret Weapon For Winning In 2022: Empowering Activists Like You To Join The Fight
Now more than ever, it is critical to protect the progress we have made for a livable climate for us and future generations. For that reason, we have many ways to get involved. You can sign up for events in your area, volunteer to be a part of our texting team, or make a gift. By joining Food & Water Action in electing climate champions, you can help us fight for food we can trust, water we can drink, air we can breathe…and a democracy we can believe in. Donate to Food & Water Action today to be a part of steering these midterms on the right course.
Power our work together in the midterms and beyond!
We saw big wins nationwide for our plan to curb the worst of climate change. It goes far beyond just electing Biden. Here’s what we did and what comes next.
by Sam Bernhardt, Political Director of Food & Water Action
The movement for a healthy future played a big role in defeating Donald Trump.
President-elect Joe Biden has served in public office for nearly five decades, and he’s got his ways of doing things. However, Biden will enter office with one of the most progressive Congresses in history, and he will need to govern with them. Among the 117th Congress will be a set of new climate champions like Mondaire Jones (NY17), and Jamaal Bowman (NY16) who we helped elect, and who will go to work every day fighting for a COVID recovery that creates millions of renewable energy jobs and bans fracking.
Biden will also need to govern with a powerful climate movement which this fall rallied behind him to defeat Trump, but which will pivot to pressuring Biden to transition our country off of fossil fuels now.
A monthly contribution of any amount helps power our work to protect our planet!
Climate Movement Activists Helped Elect Biden And We Plan To Get Bold Climate Action
Food & Water Action played our part in defeating Trump. Our leaders drove a massive campaign to get voters in Pennsylvania signed up to vote absentee. In the last two weeks of the election, we pivoted to getting voters who weren’t registered to vote absentee to instead vote early or vote in person on election day. In total, we made 700,000 phone calls to voters around Pennsylvania, and engaged 25,000 voters in conversations to talk through their options for voting safely and securely. Food & Water Action volunteers also wrote 5,000 handwritten letters to voters in swing districts around the country, and sent hundreds of thousands of peer-to-peer text messages encouraging people to get out and vote, and to mobilize their friends to vote.
Our effort was part of an enormous mobilization of organizations fighting to protect our planet, with the understanding that defeating Donald Trump was step one. Not only did the movement to ban fracking do the work, but our messaging worked too. Trump tried to frame Joe Biden as the leader of the movement against fracking. We now know that Trump’s messaging pushed voters in Pennsylvania’s heavily-fracked counties towards Biden.
Now that that’s accomplished, we turn our focus to pressuring President-elect Biden to follow through on his campaign commitments, like banning fracking on public lands. And we need to prioritize electing a majority in the Senate that will act on climate change. That work starts in Georgia’s January 2021 Senate runoff elections, but we know that the path towards meaningful climate legislation also runs through states like Pennsylvania and Iowa, where we need to utilize power we’ve been building on the ground for years to elect climate champions to the U.S. Senate.
Nationwide Support For Bold Climate Action Resulted In Important Regional Wins
We also know now more than ever that our movement is more than just groups like Food & Water Action and the community leaders we work with. We know that we have broad-based support nationwide for climate action, because in races around the country where the main issue was climate change, voters sided with the science to vote for a livable future.
New Jersey
The township of East Brunswick, New Jersey passed a ballot measure to create a clean energy program that will transition every household in the community to 100% renewable energy by 2030. Food & Water Action brought this policy to East Brunswick after we passed a similar ballot measure in neighboring Piscataway in 2019. We collected 1,000 signatures to qualify it for the ballot in East Brunswick. Then, we engaged in hundreds of conversations with East Brunswick voters through phone-banking, texting, and friend-to-friend organizing. On election day, over 70% of voters cast their ballot in support of the measure, making East Brunswick the sixth community Food & Water Action has worked with to adopt this policy, called Community Choice Aggregation, since 2018.
California
Meanwhile, in California, two county races pitted people against the profits of fossil fuel corporations, and we came out on top. In Los Angeles County, the third-most drilled county in the state, we helped elect Holly Mitchell to the County Board of Supervisors, who will be the deciding vote to enact setbacks to keep oil wells away from homes. With Holly’s vote, we’re ready to kill the dangerous practice of urban oil drilling in LA.
In Ventura County, the second-most drilled county in California, we helped elect Carmen Ramirez, who will be the deciding vote in keeping recently passed setbacks in place. The oil industry didn’t go quietly. They spent nearly one million dollars to try to roll back our progress. But we out-organized, out-strategized, and out-mobilized them.
Pennsylvania
Even in Pennsylvania, where fracking spokespeople would have us believe that opposing their industry is political suicide, we made progress, roughly doubling the caucus of state legislators who support transitioning off of fossil fuels while defending our most vocal leaders against hundreds of thousands of dollars in attack ads funded by the fracking industry. In 2022, we will flip the Pennsylvania State House with the most progressive Democratic majority to ever hold power in Harrisburg, so stay tuned for ways you can help build toward that goal.
We have so much more work to do, but I know that by working together to make the most out of these important wins, we can build the power needed to get our country to a renewable energy future.
