URGENT: phone your CA rep to prevent industry amendments to fracking bill

Your call urgently needed: We have four days to stop a bill that could frack California

SB 4, an already weak fracking bill, was amended Friday to exempt fracking from California's most important environmental law: the California Environmental Quality Act. The amendments could even block Governor Brown's authority to ban fracking should he determine it is unsafe. We only have four days to kill this bill—call your Assembly member today and tell him to vote 'NO' on SB 4. Click below for a sample script and the number to call:

Dear Karin, We want to update you on what’s happening with a bill that could open the floodgates to fracking in California without review under our state's most important environmental law. This email may be longer and more detailed than usual, but our fight to stop fracking in California is facing a watershed vote in the Legislature. We feel it’s imperative to share our thinking on what’s happening with you immediately. On Friday, dangerous, last-minute amendments were attached to Senator Fran Pavley's fracking bill, SB 4. With these added amendments, the last fracking bill left standing in the California Legislature just got a whole lot worse. Shockingly, the amendments give state regulators authority to exempt fracking from California's strongest and most important environmental law: the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The new amendments could even block Governor Brown's authority to ban fracking in California should he determine fracking is unsafe and want to take executive action to protect our citizens and our water. Call Assembly Member Reggie Jones-Sawyer: Vote 'no' on Senator Pavley's dangerous fracking bill and support a ban on fracking. Click here to call. Senator Pavley has long been one of our greatest environmental champions in the California Legislature. But SB 4 falls far short of the standard of uncompromising advocacy that she's set. Groups like CREDO, MoveOn.org Civic Action, Food & Water Watch, Friends of the Earth, the Center for Biological Diversity and dozens of others oppose this bill. We cannot support a bill that would allow fracking to move forward in California, endangering public health and the climate, and providing political cover to the fracking industry to claim that fracking is safely regulated. In this case, an incredibly weak bill is worse than no bill at all. CREDO knew that the bill would be further weakened during the legislative process and that earlier support for the bill from environmental groups could be used by legislators as an excuse for voting for the bill even after it was further compromised and those groups withdrew support. What happened on Friday was even worse than we could have predicted. The amendments added on Friday make it even more urgent that environmentalists unite and kill this bill. Call Assembly Member Reggie Jones-Sawyer: Vote 'no' on Senator Pavley's dangerous fracking bill and support a ban on fracking. Click here to call. Even before it was amended on Friday, SB 4 was a dangerously weak bill. It allows the fracking industry to keep secret the volumes and concentrations of the dangerous chemicals it injects underground by designating them "trade secrets." That means Californians won't know whether the industry is trucking teaspoons or tons of toxic chemicals through our communities. And SB 4 won't stop fracking from expanding rapidly in California while polluting our air, contaminating our water, and accelerating climate change. But Friday's amendments are by far the worst part of the bill. The California Environmental Quality Act, also known as CEQA, is California's environmental safety-net. It requires the government to notify the public about any environmentally destructive project, thoroughly analyze and mitigate its environmental risks, and provide the public with an opportunity to voice concerns about the project. The new amendments to SB 4 could be used by state regulators to make an end-run around CEQA’s bedrock environmental review and mitigation requirements and could also prevent our state’s air and water boards, local land use jurisdictions and other agencies from carrying out their own CEQA reviews of fracking. Under existing law, the governor and state regulators can deny approvals for wells that involve fracking or place a partial or complete moratorium on fracking. The new language states that state regulators "shall allow" fracking to take place until regulations are finalized in 2015 provided that certain conditions are met. This could be interpreted to require every fracked well to be approved between now and 2015, with environmental review conducted only after the fact and could be used to prevent the governor or state regulators from issuing a moratorium on fracking prior to 2015. Call Assembly Member Reggie Jones-Sawyer: Vote 'no' on Senator Pavley's dangerous fracking bill and support a ban on fracking. Click here to call. The California Legislature is legendary for last-minute shenanigans, so we can't know what will happen to SB 4 in the next few days. It could change dramatically—probably for the worse. What we do know is that Friday's amendments make SB 4 a must-kill piece of legislation, and we only have four days before the end of the legislative session to stop it. It's time to pull the plug on the Legislature's dangerous push to pass fracking legislation before things get any worse. Our friends in Sacramento are telling us that it's possible to stop SB 4 in the Assembly, where it's currently awaiting a floor vote. Call Assembly Member Reggie Jones-Sawyer: Vote 'no' on Senator Pavley's dangerous fracking bill and support a ban on fracking. Click here to call. The bottom line is that SB 4 would actually pave the way for more fracking in California and roll back existing legal protections, leaving us worse off. The legislative session ends this week and the Legislature has a lot of important issues left to resolve. What happens next for SB 4 is impossible to predict, but here are the most likely scenarios: The Assembly doesn't vote on, or votes against SB 4, which would mean the bill doesn't become law. The Assembly passes SB 4 in its current form, it goes to the Senate for a final up-or-down vote, and then off to Governor Brown for his signature, making SB 4 law. The Assembly sends SB 4 back to a policy committee for amendments. That could mean the CEQA loophole is removed, but it would also give pro-fracking lobbyists another shot at amending the bill and making it even worse—which we know they want to do. After that, the bill would either pass or fail. Assembly leadership and moderate democrats decide that SB 4 is untenable, so they "gut and amend" an entirely unrelated bill (which means they strip a bill of everything but its bill number and amend it with totally new language) to produce a last-minute fracking bill even worse than SB 4. What happens this legislative session may depend on whether we put enough pressure on our elected officials not to vote with the fracking industry. The chaotic last days of the legislative session often privilege powerful interests like the oil industry, who have the clout in Sacramento, and the armies of trained lobbyists swarming the Legislature, to get what they want while the public isn't watching. To make sure that doesn't happen, we need to make it clear that we are watching and that we will hold our elected officials accountable if they pass a bill that kneecaps our efforts to ban fracking in California. Call Assembly Member Reggie Jones-Sawyer: Vote 'no' on Senator Pavley's dangerous fracking bill and support a ban on fracking. Click here to call. Thanks for fighting fracking. Zack Malitz, Campaign Manager CREDO Action from Working Assets Click below for a sample script and the number to call: