Bring it Home: The Build Back Better Act is headed to the Senate

Will Senator Tester help get the Build Back Better Act across the finish line with strong climate and environmental justice provisions intact?For the first time in a generation, people-powered movements have gotten some meaningful climate legislation-- the Build Back Better Act-- past the defenses of the fossil fuel industry and to the doors of the US Senate. Call Senator Tester at 1-844-906-0777 to help seal the deal!

Now that the Build Back Better Act (aka the budget reconciliation bill) has passed the House of Representatives, we are about to enter what is hopefully the final stage of this saga. The result, we hope, will be that the Senate passes substantial climate legislation that could help us lay the foundation we need for bold transformations in our society to come. This latest version of the bill includes a sweeping array of investments aimed at making our communities healthier, improving access to clean energy, public transportation, and fair wages, and making some of the big investments we need to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels as a society while creating good jobs and addressing some long-standing inequities in the process. The $600 billion in climate action and environmental justice (to be spent over the next decade) would reduce average household utility bills by about $500 per year, create a Civilian Climate Corps, make it less expensive to install solar on rooftops and electrify buildings, and replace lead pipes across the country. This bill is supported by a wide array of groups in Montana, including both environmental advocacy groups and groups that advocate for working families.

The Build Back Better Act would be the first truly substantial climate legislation ever passed in the US, and it is meant to address economic inequality in tandem with efforts to transition to clean energy. It would help us make significant strides to reverse the trend of growing greenhouse gas emissions, invest in resilient communities that can weather the storms to come, and help shore up community members who have been struggling in a nexus of failing social and economic systems. The bill expands access to Medicare, affordable prescription medication and pre-K, along with substantial investments in an affordable clean energy transition. This current version would be paid for by raising taxes on big corporations and the ultra-wealthy.

Getting to this point was no small feat. Corporate polluters have long invested billions of dollars into propaganda and ads meant to confuse the public and redirect blame for the climate crisis. These efforts have prevented any serious climate legislation from passing in Congress up until now. However, we’re in a new wave of awareness and momentum for climate action, and Montana has a deep stake in winning on this one. Will people power overcome the fossil fuel lobby this time? 

Grassroots Power in Montana for the Build Back Better Act 

Montanans across the state, from urban centers to rural areas, have been lobbying for months to support this bill. Per recent polling done for Colorado College’s 2021 State of the Rockies Report, a majority of Montanans across the state support transitioning to 100% clean, renewable energy over the next 10-15 years. In the summer, however, Senator Tester said in an interview that he wasn’t hearing a clear call from Montanans about climate change. Since then, Montanans have made hundreds of calls to his office and taken many other actions to make sure the Senator knows we Montanans do care about the climate crisis and want federal action. 

In Billings, Bozeman, Missoula, and Helena, Sierra Club members and supporters arranged meetings with Senator Tester’s staff and expressed the importance of this bill. 

In September, community members from Stevensville, Polson, Kalispell, Great Falls, Billings, Helena, Missoula and Livingston stepped up for a big statewide day of action and showed up at six different in-district offices of Senator Tester, delivering a petition and care package representing the priorities we were asking him to fight for in the budget reconciliation bill. Just a few days later, several of the folks who participated landed a meeting with Senator Tester himself over Zoom where they shared why this bill means so much to them.

Later in September, the three cities in Montana with commitments to 100% clean electricity by 2030 sent a joint letter to Montana's Congressional delegation to advocate for federal climate action to help Montana communities reach their goals. Montana Sierra Club also worked with Gallatin County Sunrise Movement, Families for a Livable Climate, Interfaith Power and Light, and 350 Montana to spread awareness about this bill (check out MT4Climate.com). Our partner organizations have also hosted rallies, attended lobby meetings, and sent letters to Senator Tester and Senator Daines.

And many more environmental, social justice, and public interest organizations (collectively representing thousands of Montanans) co-signed a letter to Senator Tester in October, asking for him to advocate for the strongest bill possible.

Folks have written Op-Eds and letters to the editor, participated in social media livestreams, talked with friends and family, shared their stories on Facebook and Instagram, and carved pumpkins to raise awareness and keep up the drumbeat of support. Community members have been showing up from both urban centers and rural areas to show that we’re united by concern for our communities and our support for clean air, clean water, and clean energy for all.  

Montanans know that we’re too deep into the climate crisis to kick the ball down the field and wait several more years; we need to lay the foundation for a transition out of the climate crisis in the next couple of years in order to make serious reductions by 2030. It’s been over fifty years since scientists have been warning the public that greenhouse gas emissions were reaching a high enough level to upset the climate systems that allow humanity to thrive. In Montana, we’ve seen historic drought on our farms and ranches and increasingly intense wildfire seasons, along with a declining snowpack that feeds our rivers, streams, and drinking water supply. At the same time, we live with a regulatory structure that unfortunately incentivizes for-profit monopoly utility companies like NorthWestern Energy to build new fossil fuel infrastructure rather than investing in renewables. On the federal level, we still pay out billions of dollars in subsidies to fossil fuel companies. And now that the climate crisis has begun to hit home, we’re dealing with the need to work on both harm reduction (mitigation) and adaptation. What we, as a society, set in motion in the next few years will shape the impact of this crisis on humanity (and all the ecosystems and other species we depend on) for decades to come.

Although the majority of Montanans recognize the importance of maintaining a stable climate and taking immediate action, two out of our three members of Congress are vocally opposing the best chance we have at passing substantial climate legislation. And we know that Exxon and other fossil fuel companies are also lobbying Senator Tester hard to maintain federal policies that favor corporate profits over the health, resilience, and a clean energy transition in Montana. 

How did we get to this moment? 

On the federal level, this bill has undergone a number of iterations. In 2020, a large coalition of grassroots organizations across the country that have been working for climate justice, economic justice and environmental justice for years helped draft the THRIVE act. This bill called for a set of investments in care, climate action, and jobs that would directly confront the long-time simmering crises of economic inequality and racial and environmental injustice. It highlighted the need for substantial action to set our nation on a path out of the climate crisis. President Biden adopted a slimmed-down version of this set of priorities as a cornerstone of his economic agenda. 

As the bipartisan infrastructure bill shaped up this spring, it became clear that there was not enough bipartisan support to pass the substantial climate and social investments we needed through traditional channels. Because it takes a supermajority to pass anything through the Senate (due to the filibuster, which Senators can only override with 60 votes), progressives began to pin their hopes on the budget reconciliation process, which only requires a simple majority to pass both chambers of Congress. Unless an additional Republican Senator gets on board, the budget reconciliation process still requires the alignment of all 50 Democratic Senators (and the tie-breaking vote of the vice president). The Democratic Caucus in the Senate is a diverse group that ranges the gamut from progressive leaders to moderate Democratic senators famous for their ties to the fossil fuel industry, like Senator Joe Manchin. 

At the same time that the grassroots momentum was building for the transformational investments in the Build Back Better Act, corporations like Exxon Mobil were also hard at work lobbying members of Congress to weaken the bill and some of the originally proposed policies, such as increasing taxes on corporations.

For a while, progressives successfully called on Democratic leaders to hold the line and refuse to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill unless the more conservative Democrats agreed to pass the Build Back Better Act as well, hoping that this move would provide enough leverage to get the BBB across the finish line. In September, this effort succeeded in prompting the first round of serious negotiations over the substance of the bill. As negotiations among the Democratic caucus continued through September and October, we lost the CEPP, a program meant to help set us on track to 100% clean electricity by 2035. However, the Democratic caucus reached an agreement on a new version of the bill that redirected funding previously reserved for the CEPP into other clean energy investments. This most recent version of the bill would still be a historic step in the right direction to tackle the climate crisis in the US, complete with over $600 billion in climate, clean energy, and environmental justice investments.

In November, Democratic leadership in the House and Senate brought the bipartisan infrastructure bill up for a vote, promising to get the budget reconciliation bill through both chambers next. And a couple of weeks later, President Biden signed the bipartisan infrastructure bill into law. The bipartisan infrastructure bill contains a wide variety of investments in more traditional infrastructure (like highways and roads), along with some significant investments in water infrastructure and clean energy. While there are several components of this bill worth celebrating, Sierra Club has expressed disappointment about the industry concessions in the bill and called for Congress to go bigger and bolder with the Build Back Better Act. And that’s what we need to do next.

What happens now? 

Now that the House has passed the Build Back Better Act (over the opposition of Montana Representative Matt Rosendale), it could use all of our support to get it over the finish line and bring home all the investments in clean air, clean water, and a more equitable future for all Montanans.

Although Representative Rosendale and Senator Daines continue to demonstrate their opposition to the Build Back Better Act (and using scary buzzwords to warp people's understanding of the bill in their statements of opposition), we luckily don’t need their support to pass it.

We do need to make sure that Senator Tester stands firm in support and advocacy for this bill. Make sure to call Senator Tester at 1-844-906-0777 and tell him you want to see him fight for this bill (you’ll hear a sample call script before the line connects you to one of Tester’s local offices). You can also help by sharing information about this bill with friends and family and urging them to make a call, write a letter to the editor, or otherwise continue building momentum for this bill in Montana. You can find some great explainers and social media graphics about what’s in the bill here.

Montanans concerned about the climate are in the majority, and this is our moment! Will you help push this bill across the finish line?

By Caitlin Piserchia, Montana Chapter Community Organizer