Groups with the Brown’s Last Chance campaign rallied outside the National Press Building in Washington, D.C., Tuesday to demand that Gov. Jerry Brown freeze new fossil fuel extraction in California and devise a plan to phase it out entirely. The rally preceded Gov. Brown’s scheduled appearance at the National Press Club.
“In Jerry Brown’s own words, the climate challenge is about life itself. If we still believe in a climate-safe future, there is no more room for new fossil fuels in California,” said Janet Redman, U.S. policy director at Oil Change International. “For Governor Brown to claim a legacy of climate leadership, he has to start a managed phaseout of oil and gas drilling, starting with wells that most impact Californians’ health.”
The Brown’s Last Chance campaign is a coalition of over 750 community, environmental justice, faith-based and climate organizations urging Gov. Brown to value the health and wellbeing of Californians and vulnerable communities everywhere over oil industry profits before he hosts September’s Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco.
The coalition has sponsored billboards in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sacramento; placed a full-page advertisement in the Sacramento Bee, and launched a thermal airship over San Francisco Bay to challenge Brown for falling short on plans to limit fossil fuels in California, one of the nation’s top oil-extracting states. A billboard on Interstate 80, near downtown San Francisco, quoted Brown’s own words to urge him to act: “Governor Brown, if dirty oil has us ‘on the road to hell,’ turn us around. See you at the Global Climate Action Summit.”
Liz Butler, vice president of organizing and strategic alliances at Friends of the Earth, called out the Governor for talking “a good game on climate, but he is making sweetheart deals behind closed doors with some of the planet’s worst polluters,” she said. “Brown’s false climate solutions are a disgrace to a nation that is desperately looking for climate leadership. Instead of offering fossil fuel companies fig leaves for our climate crisis, Governor Brown should be holding them accountable for destroying our planet.”
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