Issue Position: Environmental and Climate Justice

Issue Position

Khanh played a lead role in passing the Portland Clean Energy Fund, the nation's first successful climate justice initiative that raises $50 million a year to fund energy efficiency, renewable energy and job training programs focused on low-income families and communities of color. She is now ready to champion a Green New Deal for Oregon.

The Portland Clean Energy Fund confirms that diverse communities, working together, can create a successful local model for transforming our economy, protecting and restoring our environment, and creating family-wage jobs for underserved people, while holding corporations accountable to paying their fair share. Khanh was a founding leader in the coalition that developed the Portland Clean Energy Fund. She was instrumental in soliciting and incorporating input from our community to ensure that the program was equitable and responsive to the needs of frontline communities. She also helped lead outreach and build one of the largest intersectional coalitions Portland has ever seen, made up of communities of color, social justice and environmental organizations, small businesses, housing and houseless advocates, students, labor unions, faith communities, neighborhood associations and many more. This resulted in voters overwhelmingly approving the Portland Clean Energy Fund ballot measure, despite opposition from powerful large corporate interests.

With Khanh, communities in our district and across the state will have a true and proven movement champion for climate justice and a Green New Deal for Oregon.

Communities across Oregon are struggling. It's hard to find a living-wage job that can support a family. We have an affordable housing crisis. Meanwhile, a changing and increasingly chaotic climate is hurting our farms, our forests and communities across the state, as well as driving in-migration from other areas. In reaction to these issues, certain reactionary forces want to scapegoat immigrants, poor people, and people of color, and go back to when Oregon was considered a state for whites only. But Khanh is part of a growing inclusive grassroots movement that is drawing the connections between these issues and proposing bold solutions that address racial, economic, and environmental justice.

A top priority for Khanh will be to pass a bold and comprehensive Oregon Green New Deal that creates tens of thousands of good jobs and moves us away from an extractive economy that exploits workers and exacerbates the climate crisis to one that instead helps build thriving, healthy, caring and resilient communities and protects a livable planet for our children.

Khanh envisions an Oregon Green New Deal that will include: a rapid transition to community-controlled 100% renewable energy; moving investments away from mega highway projects and toward affordable or fareless public transit; banning new fossil fuel infrastructure; replace polluting and cruel mega-factory farms with smaller family farms that move us toward a healthy and just food system; and building the resilience of communities already being impacted by the climate crisis. We need to fund this just transition to a renewable energy economy by making polluters and corporations pay their fair share.

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