Environmental Justice
Environmental Justice
Climate change, environmental destruction, and economic injustice are bound together. The same corporations and political networks driving the climate crisis are the ones polluting low-income communities and communities of color, extracting wealth from public lands, dismantling worker protections, and buying the political system that enables all of it. We cannot solve any of these problems in isolation, and we will not solve them at all without bold federal action that treats them as the linked emergencies they are.
I will push for a thorough, massive-scale program designed to cut emissions rapidly, create millions of good union jobs, restore the ecosystems that have been ravaged by decades of corporate extraction, and ensure that the people who have shouldered the heaviest costs of petro-capitalism benefit the most from systemic reform.
The current administration has spent the past year accelerating environmental destruction with breathtaking speed. The United States has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement for the second time, signaling to the rest of the world that this country no longer considers itself bound by even the minimum standards of international cooperation on climate. The EPA has gutted regulations on vehicle emissions, methane leaks, and power plant pollution, among others. Many of these rules took decades of public health advocacy to put in place. Public lands have been opened to drilling, mining, and logging at unprecedented scale. The administration has personally targeted offshore wind, killing approved projects already under construction while actively promoting fossil fuel infrastructure. Climate research at NOAA, NASA, and the Department of Energy has been defunded and politically purged. The clean energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, already inadequate to the scale of the crisis, are being rolled back aggressively.
This is a coordinated effort to ensure that the fossil fuel industry can extract every last dollar of profit before the bills come due, with the rest of us forced to pay them. Treating it as a legitimate policy disagreement is itself a political choice. There is no long-term benefit to the United States and its people in shunning renewable energy in favor of more drilling and more burning.
Wildfires have ravaged much of California in the last few years, including across this district. Whole towns and forests have burned down. Insurance companies are pulling out of entire counties. Smoke days have become a regular feature of summer life across the West, with serious public health consequences for kids, elders, and outdoor workers. The federal government's response has been chronically underfunded, fragmented across agencies, and dependent on a wildland firefighting workforce that has been treated with shameful disrespect.
In Congress, I’ll fight to protect our district and our people through a variety of policies that:
Pay federal wildland firefighters fairly. The people who run toward fires for federal agencies have been working with temporary pay, persistent understaffing, and brutal conditions for years. Permanent professional pay scales, full benefits, healthcare for the long-term respiratory and cancer risks they take on, and union representation are the absolute minimum. We cannot keep asking these workers to save communities while paying them less than the cost of living near the forests they protect.
Invest in science-based forest management, including prescribed burns, ecological thinning where appropriate, and the restoration of fire-adapted ecosystems. A century of fire suppression has produced overgrown, fuel-laden forests that burn hotter and faster than they would have under natural fire conditions. Returning fire to the land carefully, on our terms, is far better than waiting for it to come on the climate's terms.
Support and fund Indigenous fire stewardship. Indigenous nations practiced careful, intentional burning across these landscapes for thousands of years before colonization, and the ecological wisdom embedded in those practices is some of the most effective forest management available. Federal policy should fund and partner with tribal fire programs as a matter of both ecological policy and treaty obligation.
Strengthen prevention infrastructure for at-risk communities, including defensible space programs, home-hardening grants for working-class homeowners, updated building codes, evacuation route improvements, and reliable emergency communications in rural and mountain communities that often lack basic broadband and cell coverage.
Address the wildfire insurance crisis. Major insurers have pulled out of California and other Western states, leaving homeowners unable to find affordable coverage in fire-prone areas. The market alone will not solve this, and the families who built their lives in these communities should not be left to bear the full cost of a crisis they did not cause. Federal action is needed, including federal reinsurance programs, aggressive enforcement against discriminatory insurance practices, and direct support for affected homeowners.
Reform federal disaster response. FEMA aid is too slow, too bureaucratic, and too often denied to the people who need it most. Recovery aid should reach communities in days rather than months, and rebuilding support should prioritize the people who lived in those communities before disaster over the developers looking to remake them afterward.
Hold accountable the corporations whose negligence sparks fires. PG&E and other utilities have caused some of the most destructive wildfires in California's history through deferred maintenance, ignored warnings, and infrastructure decisions made to protect shareholder returns rather than public safety. Holding these companies legally and financially accountable, including through criminal sanctions, is crucial.
Underlying all of this is the climate crisis itself. Hotter summers, severe storms, longer fire seasons, and increasing forest stress are direct products of fossil-fueled warming. No amount of forest management will outpace those drivers if we do not also cut emissions on the timeline the science demands. Wildfire policy and climate policy are the same fight.
The science is unambiguous: limiting warming to anywhere near a livable level requires rapid, aggressive cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, with the wealthiest countries leading the way. The United States is by far the largest historical emitter of carbon dioxide and remains one of the largest current emitters. We have an obligation to lead the transition rather than to impede it, as the Trump administration has done.
Congress must:
End all new federal leases for oil, gas, and coal extraction on public lands and waters. There is no scientifically defensible case for opening additional fossil fuel reserves at this point in the climate crisis.
Phase out fossil fuel subsidies, which still total tens of billions of dollars per year in direct subsidies and far more when externalities are counted. Public money should not be propping up the industry doing the most damage.
Set binding emissions reduction targets aligned with science: rapid declines through the 2030s and full decarbonization of the power sector and most transportation by 2040 at the latest.
Restore and strengthen EPA authority over greenhouse gases, vehicle emissions, methane, and power plant pollution, and fund the agency at a level that allows it to actually enforce the rules on the books.
Rejoin the Paris Agreement and lead the negotiation of a more aggressive international framework that holds wealthy countries to their obligations and supports developing nations in their own transitions.
Cutting emissions requires building a world that replaces fossil fuels. That means massive public investment on the scale that the climate crisis demands and that no purely private effort will deliver.
In Congress, I will demand:
Massive federal investment in clean energy infrastructure, including solar, wind, geothermal, and storage, paired with the transmission build-out required to actually move that energy to where it is needed and battery storage to balance power loads.
Public investment in climate research and clean technology development, restoring the funding the administration has slashed and expanding it dramatically. The basic research that produced solar panels, lithium batteries, and dozens of other clean technologies came out of public investment, and the next breakthroughs will too.
Subsidies for working-class families to afford zero-emission vehicles, heat pumps, induction stoves, energy-efficient appliances, weatherization, and rooftop solar panels. The transition has to be accessible to people whose budgets are already stretched, not just to households that can absorb upfront costs.
A federal Civilian Climate Corps offering good union jobs in ecosystem restoration, clean energy construction, infrastructure resilience, and disaster response. This was part of the original Green New Deal vision and remains one of the most direct ways to put people to work on the work this country actually needs done.
Public investment in a modernized, resilient electric grid. We cannot decarbonize on infrastructure built for the 20th century.
Public lands and waters are a shared inheritance, held in trust for everyone in this country, including future generations. They are not corporate inventory.
I will fight to claw back the public land and natural resource extraction rights handed out to private companies by the Trump administration, including drilling leases, mining claims, and logging contracts that should never have been issued. I will support expanding national parks, monuments, wilderness areas, and marine protected areas, with particular attention to ecosystems critical for climate resilience and biodiversity.
Beyond protecting what is already public, I will push to:
End old-growth and mature forest logging on federal lands. These forests are irreplaceable carbon sinks and ecological treasures, and once lost they cannot be recreated on any human timescale.
Restore and expand the Endangered Species Act, reversing recent rollbacks and providing the agencies enforcing the act with the funding they need to do the job.
Address the freshwater crises across the West, including the Colorado River system, with policies that prioritize ecosystem health, tribal water rights, and equitable access over corporate agricultural and industrial use.
Ban new offshore drilling and phase out existing offshore production on a timeline aligned with climate science.
End the federal subsidies that prop up factory farms and industrial agriculture, which are major sources of methane, water pollution, and ecosystem destruction.
Indigenous nations have been protecting this land for far longer than the United States has existed. The federal government's history with Indigenous peoples is one of stolen land, broken treaties, forced relocation, and environmental devastation, and that history is not over. From Standing Rock to Line 3 to Mauna Kea to Oak Flat, fossil fuel and extractive industries continue to push pipelines, mines, and infrastructure through Indigenous lands and sacred sites, often with the active assistance of the federal government.
As a member of Congress, I’ll advocate for:
Free, prior, and informed consent for any federal action affecting Indigenous lands, sacred sites, or treaty rights, in line with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Honoring all existing treaty obligations and ending the federal practice of overriding tribal sovereignty whenever extractive industries demand it.
Tribal co-management of federal lands within ancestral territories, building on the models that have already been piloted at Bears Ears and elsewhere.
Returning federal lands to tribal nations where appropriate and requested. Land Back is not just a slogan–it’s a crucial framework for repairing centuries of wrongdoing.
Pollution does not fall evenly. Low-income communities and communities of color in this country are systematically located closer to highways, refineries, factory farms, hazardous waste sites, power plants, and other sources of toxic exposure. Children in these communities have higher rates of asthma, cancer, lead exposure, and developmental harm. The neighborhoods around Cancer Alley in Louisiana, the Port of Los Angeles, the South Side of Chicago, parts of the Central Valley, and countless other places across the country have paid the cost of an economy that doesn’t focus on human health and wellbeing.
This has to end. I will fight to:
Direct federal investment to clean energy, infrastructure, and pollution remediation in the communities that have shouldered the heaviest pollution burden, with binding commitments to community benefit rather than the corporate handouts that have too often been falsely packaged as environmental justice.
Fund the EPA and state agencies to enforce existing pollution laws in frontline communities, where lax enforcement has produced concentrated harm for decades.
Replace lead service lines nationwide, finally finishing a project that should have been completed long ago.
Phase out PFAS and other forever chemicals from consumer products, industrial processes, and military applications, and fund cleanup of contaminated sites.
Treat air pollution as the public health crisis it is, with serious investment in air quality monitoring, asthma treatment, and pollution source enforcement in the communities that need it most.
Recognize a federal right to clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment, as a growing number of states have already done.
Corporations that knowingly destroy the environment and accelerate the climate crisis must face real consequences. The current system imposes minor fines on companies whose business models are built on extracting wealth and leaving the cleanup to taxpayers. I will push Congress to focus on:
Ending the greenwashing tax subsidies that companies use to disguise their harmful activities while collecting public money. Public subsidies should support the transition off fossil fuels, not the fossil fuel industry's PR campaigns. A polluter-pays framework, in which the costs of climate adaptation, ecosystem restoration, and pollution cleanup are paid by the corporations that profited from creating the harm.
Climate-related financial disclosure requirements for major corporations, so that investors, regulators, and the public can see what these companies are actually doing.
Personal liability for executives who direct illegal environmental conduct, including criminal sanctions where warranted. If the people deciding to pollute know they will face individual consequences, the calculation changes.
The corporate death penalty for the worst offenders. When a corporation has demonstrated through its conduct that it cannot operate without committing serious environmental crimes, revoking its corporate charter is a legitimate tool of public protection. Corporations are not people. Their continued existence is a privilege, not a right.
The transition off fossil fuels has to work for the workers and communities currently dependent on the industry. We have seen what happens when economic transformation is imposed on working-class communities without support: deindustrialization in the Rust Belt, the collapse of coal communities in Appalachia, and the resulting human costs that have shaped American politics for two generations. We can fix these problems through:
Federal wage replacement, healthcare continuation, and pension protections for fossil fuel workers displaced by the transition.
Targeted federal investment in fossil fuel dependent communities, building new economic foundations rather than abandoning the people who built the old one.
Union-scale wages, project labor agreements, and prevailing wage standards on every federally funded clean energy project.
Robust support for climate refugees, including the millions of Americans already being displaced by wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, and heat. The federal government has obligations to these people that it has so far refused to meet.
The funding for this support should come primarily from the corporations whose products created the crisis. Polluter-funded climate adaptation is a basic application of the principle that the people who cause harm should bear the cost of addressing it.
The climate crisis is the defining challenge of this century. How we respond to it will determine what kind of country, and what kind of planet, we leave for the people who come after us. We are not yet too late, but we are nearly out of time, and the people responsible for the delay are not the ones who will suffer the consequences first.
I am running for Congress because I believe a just, livable future is still possible, but only if we act swiftly and firmly. The work ahead is hard, but it is feasible if we are willing to organize, fund, and demand it at the scale this moment requires.
My Checklist for Congress
Invest in scientifically-backed forest management
Pay firefighters fairly
Support Indigenous land stewardship
End fossil fuel subsidies
Invest aggressively in renewable energy
Modernize power grids and expand battery storage
Keep public lands public
Ban the use of forever chemicals
Ban new offshore drilling