Well before last year’s election, Climate Solutions board and staff rolled up our sleeves to explore our strategic direction. We asked ourselves lots of questions, including: what is the best path to stop global warming at its earliest point? What are the most important things we can do in our corner of the world to make a national and global impact to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis? How can we most effectively build a diverse and powerful movement to accelerate solutions at the scale required?

We dove into these questions. We engaged stakeholders and allies; reviewed the science, possible policy approaches, and what is working in other regions; and assessed the lay of the political landscape in the Northwest.

In the midst of our work, a seismic shift occurred with the election of Donald Trump. The Trump administration and Republican congressional leaders have signaled their intent to dramatically roll back the climate and clean energy progress already on the books at a time when we need to dramatically accelerate action, adding even more urgency and importance to our answers.

So we're focusing here to catalyze action.  The best leadership opportunity for the Northwest is to swiftly transition the Northwest electrical grid to 100% clean energy, faster than anywhere else in the nation, and to leverage our clean grid to electrify as many energy uses for the built environment, industry, and transportation that we can.

This will be the exciting guiding vision that will animate and align our work moving forward. If we are successful, we will demonstrate that it is possible for a large region to power its economy with clean energy, and that we can make transformative progress in rapidly transitioning away from oil by electrifying our cars, our buses, and other forms of transportation that we depend upon. And we will demonstrate that it can be done in a just and equitable way.

To make this all happen, Climate Solutions and our partners are in the early stages of an emerging  regional, multi-year campaign to move our states to 100% clean energy. We aim to align communities and networks doing important work in this space so that we can consider together existing efforts already underway by business, government, NGOs, and local community members; identify new opportunities and means to accelerate the transition; and turbo-charge our collective work into a unified, powerful movement to bring the  change we need to solve the climate crisis.

We are all in this together and together we are strong. We look forward to working together for climate action.