In Washington State, we organized. And we won.
Sometimes, if you want to get something unpopular passed, you hide it inside something that sounds a lot better.
That's exactly what the fossil gas industry and its allies tried to do in Washington.
As Washington moved toward cleaner, more efficient homes and buildings, the gas industry has fought to keep people dependent on its product. With Initiative 2066, that fight was packaged as something much friendlier: "energy choice."
Backers warned voters about a supposed "gas ban." But Washington wasn’t banning people from buying gas appliances. And buried inside the 21-page initiative was a much bigger agenda.
I-2066 went after clean air protections, zero-emission goals, building efficiency standards, and policies designed to help Washington move away from fossil fuels. It took a whole lot of pork and wrapped it in a message about protecting consumer choice.
Sierra Club's Dylan Plummer called it a classic example of "logrolling": packaging different issues together in an attempt to push through policies that would have been much harder to sell on their own.
And that gets at what is so dishonest about the campaign. The gas industry and its allies weren’t simply asking Washingtonians whether they wanted to keep their gas stoves. They were using people's understandable concerns about cost and choice to help preserve a system that keeps families and communities dependent on dirty, polluting methane gas.
Sierra Club and our partners organized to tell a different story: clean energy isn't something to fear. Moving away from fossil fuels can mean healthier homes, cleaner air, more efficient appliances, and an energy system that works better for people.
Sierra Club staff and volunteers have worked for years to support the transition off of gas in Washington, while advocating to keep energy costs low. Across countless venues, we have pushed (and will keep pushing) for clean air protections, energy-efficient building codes, greater oversight from the Utility and Transportation Commission, expanded incentives for electric appliances, and more.
When Initiative 2066 was filed, it posed an existential threat to our work, and threatened to undo so much of what we had accomplished in Washington. So we were one of the first organizations to fight back. We helped to lead the effort to oppose the initiative, mobilizing our resources and our partners to build the No on 2066 campaign. From organizing phone banks to writing press releases, to spending hours dialing for dollars, Sierra Club left it all on the field to oppose this misleading initiative.
And when I-2066 narrowly passed, we kept fighting. Sierra Club joined public health advocates, clean energy organizations, local governments, and others to challenge the initiative in court.
That means Washington can get back to the work the gas industry tried to derail: making homes and buildings more efficient, expanding access to clean energy, protecting our air, and moving away from fossil fuels.
The gas industry will keep trying to convince people that dependence on its product is the only practical or affordable choice. It isn't.
The real choice is whether we keep investing in a fossil fuel system that pollutes our homes and our climate, or organize together for something better.