WA Healthy State Building Codes Threatened by Lawsuit

For Immediate Release: May 24, 2023

WA Building Codes Council Acts to Keep New Construction Codes on Track for Clean and Efficient Heating and Cooling

Move comes as gas industry marshals its national playbook locally in Wash. with lawsuit aimed at unwinding state action for healthy homes and buildings 

Washington’s State Building Code Council (SBCC) took action today to keep its recently updated construction codes for new homes and buildings on track to continue to drive the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy for space and water heating. The council’s action comes on the heels of a new gas industry lawsuit, just filed earlier this week, aiming to block updated the construction codes approved last year that were supported by thousands of Washingtonians. 

SBCC members voted to start a process to make several minor changes to both the commercial and residential codes to safeguard the policies from legal challenges. The gas industry’s suit, filed on behalf of plaintiffs including Northwest Natural and Avista, appears to be an attempt to leverage the recent 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision which found that a policy to restrict gas infrastructure by Berkeley, California, was preempted by federal law.  

“The SBCC is taking no chances and adding extra insulation to the new construction codes in the face of underhanded and deeply self-interested tactics by the gas industry to use the 9th circuit's over-reaching decision to undo any and all state and local actions to ensure new buildings are climate-friendly,” noted Dylan Plummer, senior campaign representative with the Sierra Club. “The gas industry’s lawsuit is an insult to Washingtonians who overwhelmingly want action on climate change.” 

The lawsuit on Berkeley’s ordinance was financially backed by SoCalGas, the largest gas utility in the country. An industry analyst has called the 9th Circuit ruling a “playbook” opportunity for the gas industry to “storm the walls” of local policies. 

"Washington's State Energy Strategy found that electrification is the lowest-cost pathway to achieving our statutory climate targets, and accordingly, the Washington Legislature directed the State Building Code Council to pass codes that achieve the goal of building zero fossil-fuel greenhouse gas emission homes and buildings by the year 2031,” said Deepa Sivarajan, Washington Local Policy Manager for Climate Solutions. “Upholding the intent of Washington's clean codes is crucial to ensuring that new buildings in Washington aren't digging us deeper into a fossil fuel future, as well as reducing air pollution and increasing resilience by preferring electric heat pumps that offer both heating and cooling." 

The SBCC is moving the codes to a performance standard approach, which uses an efficiency benchmark that is based on the top-flight cost-effective performance on the market. Heat pumps, which provide both AC and heat in the same unit, run up to three times more efficiently than gas furnaces, and will save Washingtonians $1,000 a year according to the Department of Commerce

“Heat pumps are already the go-to in new construction today for performance, efficiency, lower energy bills and clean air, and updating building codes accordingly is common sense,” said Rachel Koller, Managing Director with Shift Zero. “Nearly 5,000 people submitted public comments or testified in support of the updated building codes. It’s only May and we’ve already had days of record-breaking heat. Washingtonians want to transition to clean, electric heating and cooling in their homes.”

Jonny Kocher, Manager at RMI stated, “Most new homes in Washington are already being built with heat pumps for space heating because it's the most cost-effective and climate-friendly solution. Even with minor revisions by the SBCC to reduce legal risk, the next code will push the market for clean electric heating and cooling even further. RMI is confident that an all-electric future for new homes and buildings in Washington is here to stay and that Washingtonians will benefit from the clean air, energy savings, and fewer climate-warming emissions that building electrification delivers.”

The industry representatives participating in the lawsuit have attempted to fight the transition away from polluting gas in buildings for years. Northwest Natural has previously sued Oregon over its climate change policies, and has been preparing to run a $4 million ballot measure campaign in the small city of Eugene, OR over that community’s commitment to all-electric new construction. The New York Times reported this year that Northwest Natural hired a mercenary toxicologist in an attempt to downplay the health risks of gas stoves. Last year, current and former Oregon lawmakers and 32 organizations submitted a petition to the Oregon Department of Justice calling for an investigation into NW Natural for false advertising and advertising to children. The Spokane Home Builders Association previously attempted to run a ballot measure in Spokane that would have preemptively prevented any requirement to move to more efficient, electric new buildings, before the measure was thrown out in court.

The SBCC’s action today will prompt a couple-month process for the changes to the residential and commercial building codes to be proposed and go through public comment. Code updates could then go into effect after the SBCC votes, likely this fall.
Contacts: Tiffany Cain, tiffany@resource-media.org; Stephanie Noren, stephanie.noren@climatesolutions.org; Sage Welch, sage@sunstonestrategies.org

Read more in this Politico article on the legal threat to the WA SBCC codes.

March 2023 Legislative Update

In this post: The WA Legislative session is (still!) in full swing and WPSR is working tirelessly to advance legislation that will make our state a safer, more just, and healthier place for all. We are bringing the health voice to bear on important bills that make our upside-down tax system more fair, address our housing and climate crises, and mitigate the threat of nuclear disaster. Read on about what we are up to, and please: join us in our work to address the gravest threats to health!

Economic Inequity & Health

We are working hard to create a more equitable tax code and a state where everyone has a safe, affordable home:

  • The Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC) went into effect this year! Over 100,000 people have claimed the credit and over $25m has been sent to working families throughout WA. Now, we are pushing to make the credit more accessible.

  • The Wealth Tax has a second hearing today! Sign in PRO here by 3pm to support the wealth tax and help make our tax code more equitable. Polling shows broad support among Washington voters for a state wealth tax.

  • Unfortunately a bill to create a Guaranteed Basic Income (GBI) pilot has stalled, but made it further in the legislative process than it did last year, which is promising!

  • WPSR is also supporting the Estate Tax and the Affordable Homes Act, which is a real estate excise tax (REET) that would fund housing efforts. 

  • We have been advocating for tenants' rights by supporting Rent Stabilization and a 6-Month Notice of Excessive Rent Increases. Unfortunately, neither bill passed the House, but we will continue to advocate for rent fairness and support these bills next year.

  • The Covenant Homeownership Account - supporting first time homebuyers affected by Washington's history of discriminatory housing practices - has passed the House and is currently in the Senate awaiting a hearing.

Climate & Health

We have made historic strides in climate action in the past year, but our work continues! With funds coming in from the newly implemented Climate Commitment Act, our legislators must invest in climate through funding healthy homes and clean transportation. Specifically, our legislators must:

  • Invest in and expand the Weatherization Plus Health program, which is instrumental in creating energy efficiency in our buildings and for improving our health through necessary home upgrades;

  • Create a High-Efficiency Heating and Cooling Program to help low and middle-income families in Washington make necessary upgrades to their homes such as funding of heat pump installations;

  • Fund the electrification of our medium and heavy duty vehicles, including trucks, vans and school buses

Now is crunch time for budget negotiations, and our legislators need to hear from you! Send a letter to your legislators, telling them to invest wisely in climate in this year's budget

Nuclear Weapons Abolition

Many of our nuclear abolition priorities have now been introduced into Congress, but a majority of Washington's Congressional Delegation remain silent. We need your help reaching out to your representatives and senators in Congress to sponsor these important pieces of legislation:

  • H.R. 77 Embracing the Goals and Provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons

  • H.R. 669 Restricting the First Use of Nuclear Weapons

  • H.R. 1134 People Over Pentagon Act 

With New START - the last remaining Nuclear Arms Control Treaty in jeopardy, we must urge a return to diplomacy focused on securing and reducing nuclear arsenals. And, with the ongoing specter of a nuclear accident or exchange in Europe,  and the increasing toll on human life in Ukraine, we must also push on Congress to negotiate an end to the conflict. You can help by signing our petition for an Immediate Transition Away From Nuclear Weapons. 

Needless to say, we are taking on many critical issues that impact the wellbeing of Washingtonians and people everywhere.  And given the magnitude of the challenges, we simply can't do it alone. Please, join us as an advocate, and as a supporting member and be a part of our work to make the world a safer, just, and healthier place for all.

Health Professionals Urge FERC to Deny a Controversial Plan to Expand a Fracked Gas Pipeline

Press Release: Health Professionals Urge FERC to Deny a Controversial Plan to Expand a Fracked Gas Pipeline

  • More than 500 physicians, nurses, and other public health officials signed onto a petition calling on FERC to deny TC Energy's proposed fracked gas pipeline expansion

  • Pipeline passes through rural, low-income and Indigenous communities in Oregon, Washington and Idaho

WHAT

More than 500 physicians, nurses and community members signed onto a letter urging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to deny a proposed bid to expand shipments of fracked gas through an aging Northwest pipeline. 

As soon as mid-March, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, could vote on whether to approve a bid from the Canadian-owned natural gas company TC Energy, the owner of the infamous Keystone Pipeline, to expand the amount of fracked gas exported through the aging Gas Transmission Northwest (GTN) pipeline. The pipeline runs through communities across Idaho, Washington and Oregon, including low-income neighborhoods and lands important to indigenous communities.

Physicians and other medical professionals, including members of Physicians for Social Responsibility, are joining other community members in sounding the alarm about the impact the pipeline’s expansion could have on local communities. More than 500 people have signed onto the letter.

WHY

Pipelines and expansion projects are frequently approved at higher rates in rural, Indigenous and low-income communities, which force these communities to bear the health disparities such projects are associated with: air, water and noise pollution. 

Should TC Energy’s bid be approved, the proposed expansion would include the construction of expanded or new compressors which vent methane and other volatile organic compounds like formaldehyde, particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide. All of these air pollutants have serious health impacts, including increased risks of stroke, cancer, asthma and low birth weight and premature babies. 

QUOTES

“We are in a climate crisis, where we are already experiencing the devastating effects of rising temperatures, the direct result of burning fossil fuels, including so-called “natural gas” i.e., methane,” said Ann Turner MD, a member of Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility. “As medical practitioners, we see the impact the climate crisis has on people each and every day. And we have a responsibility to sound the alarm. We urge FERC to prioritize the health of our most vulnerable communities over profit.” 

“States in the Northwest have made great strides in reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and creating healthier communities,” said Dr. Mark Vossler, board member at Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility. “I urge FERC to consider the human health impact of the proposed pipeline expansion and respect the leadership of local, state and Tribal governments in addressing the climate crisis. FERC should deny the permit for this  pipeline expansion proposal which is both unnecessary to meet our energy needs and harmful to people in our communities.”

"Idahoans dread FERC approval of the GTN Xpress expansion project, which would force greater fracked gas volumes and hazardous emissions through the aging GTN pipeline. This expansion project would further threaten and harm the health and safety of rural communities, environments, and recreation economies for decades," said Helen Yost of Wild Idaho Rising Tide. "This proposed expansion does not support the best interests of concerned Northwesterners living and working near compressor stations and the pipeline route."

ORGANIZATIONS

ADDITIONAL DETAILS AND CONTACT

To coordinate interviews: Contact Byron Kimball, Byron@gomixte.com, 619-732-0789 ext. 297

Link to use in your story:

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About Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility

Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility works to protect human life from the gravest threats to health and survival. Learn more. 

About Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility

Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility engages the community to create a healthy, peaceful, just and sustainable world. Learn more. 

About San Francisco Bay Physicians for Social Responsibility

San Francisco Bay Physicians for Social Responsibility works to protect human life from the gravest threats to health and survival. Learn more. 

About Wild Idaho Rising Tide

Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) confronts the root causes of climate change, water degradation, and air pollution, by asserting direct actions and promoting locally organized solutions, in solidarity with frontline communities of resistance and an international, volunteer, grassroots network of activists. Learn more. 


Climate Change is Making Us Sick in Washington

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
Contact:
Max Savishinsky, WPSR                                                
Phone
: 206.547.2630
Email: Max@WPSR.org

Impacts and Solutions are Focus of WPSR's Climate/Health 2022 Report

Seattle, July 14, 2022 - Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility released its  2022 Climate and Health Report, detailing the harms of climate change to human health. The report enumerates the opportunities for improving the quality of life for millions of Washingtonians through climate action, including actionable steps that individuals, businesses, and policy-makers can take. 

Climate change and human health are inextricably linked, and the worsening effects of climate change are already having real, documented impacts on the health of Washington communities. The report finds that the 2020 wildfire smoke in Western Washington led to as many as 179 excess deaths from respiratory illnesses. From wildfire smoke to extreme weather events, Washington residents, especially low-income and BIPOC Washingtonians, are facing increasing rates of asthma, heat related illness, and threats from infectious diseases, among countless other health concerns.

“The longer we wait to act, the more the earth will warm, the more the climate will be disrupted, and the more dire and widespread the impacts and harms on people will become,” writes Ken Lans, a founding member of WPSR and a member of the Climate and Health Task Force.

This report serves as a guide for tackling climate-related health factors in our policies, in our healthcare providers’  offices, and in our homes. Download the 2022 Climate and Health Report.

Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility (WPSR) is a health professional-led advocacy organization working to create a healthy, just, peaceful and sustainable world. For over 40 years, WPSR has taken on the gravest threats to human health and survival, including advocating for nuclear abolition, economic equality, and climate justice.

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For more information, contact Max Savishinsky at Max@WPSR.org

WPSR Calls for Peace in Ukraine

As health professionals and people concerned with peace, we must call for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine.

WPSR joins PSR National and members of our Washington Against Nuclear Weapons Coalition in strongly condemning Russia’s attacks on Ukraine. Intentionally taking lives - whether military or civilian - is unconscionable. We must not give in to violence and war at a time in history when we must work cooperatively to end a global pandemic and focus our resources and attention on meeting the challenges of a climate crisis, exploding inequality, and other threats to health and wellbeing.

We call on all parties to protect and respect Ukraine and its people, sovereignty, and territorial integrity. We call on Russia to immediately withdraw from Ukraine, and engage in a ceasefire. We call on our own government to earnestly work for immediate and long-term diplomatic solutions that will provide for true security, both at home and abroad.

We are deeply concerned about the myriad, heightened risks of nuclear harm that this conflict could trigger, whether by accident, or on purpose. No country has the right to imperil Europe and the world with nuclear weapons. Today, more than ever, it is clear that we must work together for true security, and finally and permanently eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons.

If you are a member of an organization in Washington state and believe that our nations should reduce and eventually eliminate our reliance on nuclear weapons to ensure security, please join us by signing this letter to President Biden to issue a Nuclear Posture Review that prioritizes restraint, safeguards, and health and wellbeing of our country, rather than profits for nuclear weapons industries.

You can also take individual action by signing this medical alert through the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

Together, we must act to restore peace and prevent the harms that cannot be cured.

Congress must seize this moment...

In early August, 60 healthcare and public health organizations from around the nation signed a letter to Congress, insisting that their infrastructure bill and budget reconciliation bill (both in progress on Capitol Hill as of our writing this) include specific and robust investments in solutions to the climate crisis.

Join the below-listed organizations in taking action against the climate crisis with a donation to WPSR’s Climate & Health Task Force HERE.

Dear Members of Congress:

As health organizations, we represent physicians, nurses, mental health professionals, public health and health care professionals, health scientists and researchers, patients and advocates all dedicated to promoting health and saving lives. Climate change is a health emergency. Addressing it by transitioning the nation to clean, renewable electricity and clean transportation will avoid the worst health impacts of climate change and achieve immediate improvements in air quality and health at the same time. Congress’ current work on legislation to invest in infrastructure and other priorities must yield a package of climate change measures that meet the urgency of this moment by achieving a roughly 50% reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

Air pollution and climate change are impacting the health of millions of Americans now, and those impacts will only get worse without action. Emissions from fossil fuel or other combustion-based operations are worsening air quality, which is especially harmful for children, seniors, pregnant people, people with respiratory illnesses and people who work or play outside. These same emissions are also driving climate change and with it, sweeping and dramatic health harms. More intense and frequent wildfires, strong storms and persistent extreme heat are already causing physical and mental harm.

As a result of numerous current and legacy racist policies and practices, people of color are disproportionately more likely to have multiple pre-existing health conditions, to face social disadvantages and environmental risks that make them more vulnerable to climate change. Communities of color are also three times more likely than white communities to live in areas experiencing the worst air pollution.

Congress must seize this moment to make major investments in climate and health solutions. By cleaning up the nation’s electricity and transportation, you can not only slash greenhouse gas emissions but also improve health by cleaning up other dangerous air pollution.

As you debate investments in infrastructure and consider the American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan, our organizations ask you to approve legislation to:

  • Invest in clean, non-combustion renewable energy. A clean electricity standard that achieves 100% renewable electricity by 2035 and rapid reductions in natural gas and coal use are necessary to drive a nationwide transition to pollution-free sources like wind, solar, geothermal and tidal. To protect health equity, clean energy legislation should not include offset credits that would allow for increased pollution in communities already experiencing poor air quality.

  • Establish long-term clean energy tax incentives. Paired with a clean electricity standard, ten-year tax incentives for clean electricity, energy storage, transmission will help drive innovation and deployment of pollution-free energy.

  • Rapidly transition to zero-emission vehicles, buses and ports. Include historic investments in electric vehicles and buses and the necessary charging infrastructure. Specifically, please include $40 billion in electric vehicle manufacturing, $40 billion over the next decade in charging infrastructure, and at least $20 billion to help transform the nation’s diesel school bus fleet to electric, zero-emission buses. As part of a transition to a pollution-free transportation sector, include investments to electrify the nation’s ports, which have some of the poorest air quality in the country.

  • Commit to environmental justice by ensuring 40% of investments in clean air go to frontline communities. Any efforts to reduce air and climate pollutants should not worsen existing inequities and should direct benefits to the communities that have been disproportionately burdened by air pollution and climate change.

Investing in infrastructure is an opportunity to protect health from climate change – particularly for underserved communities – that Congress and the nation can't afford to miss. The below organizations urge swift and bold investments towards a healthier future.

Sincerely,

Allergy & Asthma Network

Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments

American Heart Association

American Lung Association

American Psychological Association

American Public Health Association

American Thoracic Society

Arkansas Public Health Association

Association of Public Health Nurses

Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health

Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America

Children's Environmental Health Network

Climate Psychiatry Alliance

Colorado Public Health Association

Delaware Academy of Medicine/Delaware Public Health Association

Florida Public Health Association

Georgia Clinicians for Climate Action

Georgia Society for Public Health Education

Health by Design

Health Care Without Harm

Illinois Association of School Nurses

Illinois Public Health Association

Indiana Public Health Association

Interfaith Public Health Network

Kansas Public Health Association

Maine Public Health Association

Medical Society Consortium on Climate & Health

Medical Students for a Sustainable Future

Michigan Public Health Association

Missouri Public Health Association

Mothers & Others For Clean Air

National Association of Nurse Practitioners in Women's Health

National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners

National Association of School Nurses

National Environmental Health Association

NC Public Health Association

Nevada Public Health Association

New Hampshire Public Health Association

New Jersey Association of Public Health Nurse Administrators

New Jersey Public Health Association

New Jersey Society for Public Health Education (NJSOPHE)

New York State Public Health Association

North Dakota Public Health Association

Oregon Public Health Association

Pennsylvania Public Health Association

Philippine Nurses Association of America

Physicians for Social Responsibility

Physicians for Social Responsibility/Florida

Preventive Cardiovascular Nurses Association

PSR Colorado

Public Health Institute

Respiratory Health Association

San Francisco Bay Physicians for Social Responsibility

Society for Public Health Education

Tennessee Public Health Association

Utah Public Health Association

Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility

Washington State Public Health Association

Wisconsin Health Professionals for Climate Action

Wisconsin Public Health Association

A Debt of Gratitude

Written by Tara Villalba, August 2021

On Tuesday August 3, days before the 76th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, representatives from Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Washington Against Nuclear Weapons Coalition (WANW) joined Seattle IndivisibleSeattle Anti-War Coalition350 Seattle, and Washington Poor People’s Campaign for a demonstration at Seattle’s Henry M. Jackson Federal Building.

Together we called on Washington state’s Congressional Delegation to cut the Pentagon’s bloated budget and divest from nuclear weapons development.

The issue of demilitarization is deeply personal and a central pillar of my work and life. I am a single mom to three young people and I live and work on the beautiful traditional territories of the Lummi Nation, in what is now known as Bellingham.

I owe Lummi Nation a debt for their primary relationship with their place and for protecting it for generations. I’m bound and governed by the treaty they signed with the US government, that allows me and my kids to live here.

I also owe the Lummi people an obligation to protect their homelands so they can continue to live and practice their life ways. My grandmother taught me that this is what it means to be human. To be human is to make and maintain, and when necessary, to repair mutual relationships. 

I grew up on an island across the Pacific. My grandmother and the saltwater both taught me about keeping balance in an always-moving ocean. If I wanted to move through the ocean, she and I needed to have a mutual relationship.

I was taught that the ocean makes all life possible. We now know that 50-80% of the oxygen production on Earth comes from the oceans and that the ocean sequesters exponentially more carbon than the land does.

In Tagalog, we have the concept of “utang na loob”. This roughly translates as “debt of gratitude”. It’s not a debt we can pay back with money. But it can be paid in kind. I’m alive because people before me and the planet today extended mercy, generosity, and hospitality, allowing me to make my home and instilling within me the obligation to pay that debt forward.

One my responsibilities as a human is to reciprocate that generosity. Our main defense against isolation, destruction and ultimately, death, is to extend a generous welcome and mutual support to each other. Utang na loob reminds us that we are each other’s best defense from harm and each other’s source of security.

At eight years old, my dad taught me about nuclear weapons by telling me about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I couldn’t understand how any country could invent anything that would deliberately kill so many people and poison the planet. It was the ultimate act of avarice. 

I grew up under a dictator supported by the United States. I grew up under what’s called low intensity conflict where military forces were trained, funded, and armed by the United States to wage war against their own people using abductions, torture, and extra-judicial killings. They especially targeted poor people. My own dad was disappeared when I was 13. He was held and tortured for eight days before my mother found him.

The United States’ military industrial complex makes it unlikely to make and maintain mutual relationships. Faced with constant war and attacks, the war machine forces us into dominant and defensive postures.

The war machine threatened to take my father’s life away, and further threatens other families across the world and particularly across the global south. The war machine then empowers those with the bombs (particularly in the global north) and allows them to force their ways, agenda, and will on others.

State violence makes life harsher and makes us less mutually human with each other. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate threat of state violence, the most horrible manifestation of our cruelest ambitions and imaginations.

Most may think that the "deterrent" nature of nuclear weapons means we will never use them. However, even if we hadn’t instantly killed over 130,000 by detonating atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there would still be hundreds of thousands of lives lost to nuclear weapons research, production, testing, and to negligent and shortsighted radioactive waste disposal.

In the meantime, the US military remains the single biggest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases, and their carbon footprint doesn’t even factor into the calculations for US emissions. The military is not being held accountable for their enormous share in causing the present and future climate catastrophe. Instead the first and most severe costs will be the burden of the nations they have helped to impoverish. Like the Marshall Islands, and my home islands of the Philippines. 

I have a responsibility to the generations after me to fix the deadly messes that people far away from our islands made generations before I was even born. I have inherited a legacy of violence, cruelty, and the increasing likelihood of an unlivable future. So have each of you.

Our children and grandchildren are forced to live with a polluted, heated up mostly unlivable planet… but the generation after them… our children’s grandchildren might see things get better.

If we act on the recommendations of the IPCC report published on August 9 and make the big changes we need to make now, then we can build a mutual relationship with our planet and a joyful, healthy, and vibrant future.

When we resist the existence and modernization of nuclear weapons and invest in immediate solutions to the climate crisis we can find the balance with our oceans, lands, and each other needed to simply live.

Within 20 miles of Seattle, a couple of thousand nuclear warheads are actively deployed at Naval Base Kitsap. Nuclear-armed submarines patrol the Salish Sea, endangering all our lives and spending millions of dollars that could go to shoreline & salmon habitat restoration, the construction of more solar panels, and a just transition for workers in the fossil fuel and weapons industries into green & livable jobs.

We can’t wait. We must be the generation that finishes this fight and dismantles all nuclear weapons so our children, their children, and their grandchildren can practice the welcome and generosity our ancestors intended for each of us. 

Please join Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility and Washington Against Nuclear Weapons with a donation today and as an advocate for a livable future.

Together, we can bring about an end to the extractive economy and state violence that ruined so much of the present moment and that threatens every moment yet to come.

Thank you for partnering with me and our friends and colleagues at WPSR in this work.

A letter from Dr. Joseph Berkson: WPSR Board Member and Co-Chair of the Nuclear Weapons Abolition Task Force

My name is Dr. Joe Berkson, and it is my esteemed honor to serve both on the Board of Directors of WPSR and as Co-Chair of WPSR's Nuclear Weapons Abolition Task Force. I wanted to take some of your time today to discuss where we've been as a Task Force these last few months and how we hope to draw on the work of those who have come before to build the best possible future for us all.

Seeking inspiration from my predecessor as Co-Chair of the Nuclear Weapons Abolition Task Force Dr. Bruce Amundson, I reviewed an essay he wrote in 2019: 

“As an organization of health professionals, here is what we see: the most urgent threats to the safety of the planet and to human health today are an overheating planet, nuclear war, epidemics, poverty, and destructive levels of inequality. None of these threats can even remotely be addressed by military means.

Within months of his having written that we were plunged into the worst global pandemic in more than a century. Bruce’s concerns with our resource-hogging military budget and the impact of this on our ability to protect human health were characteristically prescient. 

I wonder how we might have fared through 2020 and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic if we had invested in our public health infrastructure with even a fraction of the effectiveness with which our government supports our military spending. 

I stepped into the role of Co-Chair of the Nuclear Weapons Abolition Task Force in summer 2019 and have since been consistently inspired by Bruce’s clear-eyed commitment to human health and his forward-thinking work as an activist. None of the threats of which Bruce spoke will be addressed by military means. We cannot bomb our way out of the climate crisis, economic inequity, or any pandemic. To that end, we have kept very busy pushing for a future free from the threat of nuclear warfare

Early this year, we all took a huge step towards that very goal: WPSR and the other 50+ member organizations of the Washington Against Nuclear Weapons (WANW) Coalition were delighted on January 22 when the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) went into force after 50 countries ratified the treaty. 

As of my writing this, 54 countries, including some major economies like Ireland, Mexico, and South Africa, have ratified the TPNW which bans the use, possession, development, deployment, and transfer of nuclear weapons under international law. Although no nuclear weapons-possessing states have signed the treaty, nations that are party to the treaty have been given a mechanism to pressure nuclear-armed nations. 

The TPNW also allows party states to pressure arms manufacturers like Boeing. If, for example, Boeing wants to do business with the Irish government, the TPNW puts an onus on Boeing’s leaders to demonstrate that they are not engaging in prohibited activities.
Boeing's Memphis Belle IV, a central tool in the United States' invasion and occupations of Iraq

Eventually, assuming all parties hold to the letter of the TPNW, Boeing and its peers (Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, etc.) will either need to divorce themselves from any work supportive of nuclear weapons or from being able to do business in at least 54 nations. 

I should note that WPSR has accepted donations from Boeing as recently as this summer but these gifts are part of an Employee Gift Match program. It is stated WPSR policy to not accept any direct donations from arms manufacturers or those who enable the manufacture of nuclear weapons.

We strongly urge all Boeing employees and shareholders to leverage their position in the company to direct Boeing away from its work in nuclear weapons development.

Other strategies for pressuring the nine nuclear nations into the TPNW may emerge this August with the 5-year Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The purpose of this conference is to gather nuclear nations and work for disarmament. It was after the failure of this conference in 2010 that the movement for the Treaty on the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons started in earnest. This resulted in the TPNW being passed in a UN vote by 122 countries and so we are optimistic that there can be progress at this summer’s conference. 

Moving from global to domestic matters: we have been pushing back on proposals by the federal government to increase spending on our nuclear weapons infrastructure. The Biden Administration’s recently released a disappointing budget, that would increase spending on nuclear weapons, including so-called Advanced Nuclear Weapons, and fully replace the current arsenal.

There are, as we expected, inflated projections of the cost to replace the current U.S. nuclear stockpile. The budget includes money for a new Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD), new weapons to replace current Minuteman III ICBMs, $5 billion for a new nuclear missile submarine, as well as money for a new Long Range StandOff (LRSO) cruise missile.

WPSR and WANW Coalition continue to engage Members of Congress (MoCs) on national security policy and defense spending. Because of the support of WPSR Members, we are able to bring the health voice to this debate. Military spending is a matter of grave concern to public health. In allocating $715 billion to fund the Pentagon, the Biden Administration has to not spend $715 billion on pandemic preparedness, vaccine equity, healthcare subsidies, and student loan forgiveness for the next generation of healthcare professionals.

We are working to halt funding for new (or “modernized”) nuclear weapons and to eliminate funding for the Ground-Based Strategic Defense. We think the strategy of advancing a policy of “No First Use” (introduced by Rep. Smith and co-sponsored by Rep. Larsen) is a good opening to begin the negotiating process to eliminate the ICBM leg of the nuclear triad. We are working to build our audience and corps of activists in every corner of the state and to educate the public on the evolving and increasingly concerning the relationship between investment in “military means” and health outcomes.

In Congress, we are tracking several recently introduced bills of interest in addition to the “No First Use” Act. We are focusing on lobbying MoCs to support the “Invest in Cures Before Missiles” (ICBM) Act and the Nuclear-Sea Launched Cruise Missile (N-SLCM) Ban.

Beyond bills, we worked with a lobbyist and the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) this spring to engage Representatives Jayapal, Smith, & Kilmer, and Senator Murray to urge support for the resumption of the “Iran Nuclear Deal” or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

The work of building a healthy and safe future is no small thing and we, at WPSR, are so grateful to have such a robust cohort of partners in the Washington Against Nuclear Weapons Coalition.

WANW is managed, in part, by WPSR but is a mighty coalition representing dozens of organizations from various backgrounds and communities across the state including faith groups, student groups, and others. At WANW, we have recently set up Teams on Advocacy, Education, Media, and Undoing Systemic Violence.

WANW is managed, in part, by WPSR but is a mighty coalition representing dozens of organizations from various backgrounds and communities across the state including faith groups, student groups, and others. At WANW, we have recently set up Teams on Advocacy, Education, Media, and Undoing Systemic Violence.

WANW’s Advocacy team is leading the Coalition in its opposition to Nuclear-Sea Launched Cruise Missile (N-SLCM) funding. They have been enthusiastic in using WPSR’s new advocacy resources, which include new tools to (with just one click) connect concerned citizens and activists to their MoCs (more on that below).

There are many lingering questions about the identity of the WANW. With new tools available and more muscular operations, how should WPSR and WANW interact? Is one beholden to the other? How should we think about collaborative projects, funding, and those areas in which our priorities may diverge? Does the WANW Coalition, now with over 50 organizations, need to be its own incorporated organization? These and many other questions about WANW’s identity and its relationship with its partner organizations linger and are encouraging to me. As Dr. Amundson worked with an eye to the next opportunity or question, WANW is doing its business with an eye on the moment and on the future. This seems to be a sign of maturation and that WANW has a long, productive, and sustainable future ahead of it.

I mentioned our new advocacy tool kit: in 2020 we rolled over all communications, fundraising, and advocacy assets to a new system called “EveryAction”. This amazing tool allows us to build and distribute “One Click” actions (like petitions, direct engagement, etc.) to our Members. We now have the ability to mobilize hundreds of WPSR supporters and get thousands of messages to policymakers and others. This tool and the growing operational muscle of WPSR and WANW will help us to “show up” in a more impactful way as we engage with our MoCs. 

In the short term, the Nuclear Weapons AbolitionTask Force is working on an event to explore common ground with those in the climate crisis movement (time and date to be announced shortly). I see many opportunities for our work to intersect and for our cohorts to join forces for mutual benefit. 

I want to end with a matter very close to my heart.

This spring, we had a major staff change. Carly Brook, our long-time Nuclear Weapons Abolition Program Organizer left WPSR after two years of exceptional service to pursue a Master’s Degree in Public Health.

WPSR owes Carly a tremendous debt of gratitude for their amazing work as an activist, advocate, and organizer. Their commitment to intersectionality, nuclear justice, anti-racism, and to frontline communities is an inspiration.

Following this, we were fortunate to hire Tara Villalba for the position. Tara comes to WPSR with a breadth of experience as an organizer at Bellingham Tenant Union and as a consultant at Western Washington University.

In her first three months with us, she has added tremendous value to our work both internally and in the community. She also is helping to ensure that we never lose sight of the issue of nuclear justice and of justice for frontline communities immediately impacted by nuclear weapons development, testing, and use. 

To borrow a turn of phrase from an organization I admire greatly, we have to think “beyond the bomb”. Yes, we need immediate denuclearization and for all nuclear weapons to be dismantled. We also need to address the health concerns and issues of justice related to those communities who have borne the brunt of nuclear-related work for nearly a century including folks in the TriCities, Indigenous communities near to New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Marshallese diaspora in Arkansas, south King County & Eastern Washington, the people of the Spokane Tribe impacted by the Midnite Mine, and so many others. There is no true path to a future free from nuclear warfare without nuclear justice and nuclear justice is a matter of racial justice.

I am honored to call both Carly and Tara friends and trust that as Tara works from the foundation laid by Carly, we will do tremendous work!

For over 40 years WPSR has been at the forefront of the fight for a world free from the threat of nuclear warfare. I follow in the footsteps of Bruce and so many of our members whose passions and legacies are an inspiration. I am further inspired by the work of Carly and now of Tara and my colleagues on the WPSR Board and in the WANW Coalition. For over 40 years we have been doing the work and while it may look different in many ways and be focused on different heads of the hydra, it is towards the same end: peace.

Together, I am certain that we can rise to meet the challenges of our time. As we “emerge”, as it were, from under the blanket of a pandemic, we can build a better world. We must. We can build a better WPSR that works in more earnest service of its community and I am so excited to partner with you on this.

To that end, I need your help. There is a place in this work for you no matter who you are and no matter your level of expertise.

If you seek what we have sought for over 40 years: get involved today Join WPSR as a Member with a donation today and follow WPSR across social media.

Help us to build a WPSR that will be an inspiration to those who follow. We cannot wait to build the future and present that we need. Now is the moment to gather, pool our resources, and be the best versions of ourselves and better.

Thank you,
Dr. Joseph Berkson

WPSR Board Member
Co-Chair WPSR's Nuclear Weapons Task Force

#FrackOffPSE

From Nick Manning, Climate & Health Program Organizer

On 4/30, Indigenous leaders and “kayaktivists” gathered on South Lake Union in front of the lakeside home of the Puget Sound Energy CEO.

Demonstrators held a vigil in solidarity with the Puyallup Water Warriors and all those gathered in opposition to PSE’s Liquefied Natural Gas facility on the Tacoma Tideflats (the permits for which are being disputed in court by WPSR and a coalition of organizations).

WPSR’s Climate & Health Program Organizer, Nick Manning was among the demonstrator:

“On one of the first warm days of the spring, I was excited to be invited to meet face-to-face with organizers at 350 Seattle and Sierra Club with whom I have worked for a year but never actually met. They told me they were going on a sunset walk around Lake Union and asked if I wanted to join because tonight was going to be particularly pretty.

It was one of those Seattle spring days that feels like the heart of summer. I was admittedly nervous and excited for a casual stroll with folks who I felt like I knew but whose faces I had never actually seen in person… who isn’t just a little nervous to finally be in the same physical space with someone you’ve only met from behind a screen and with whom you’ve formed a year-long digital friendship?

I went down to Eastlake and it was immediately apparent I had misunderstood the nature of this outing.

A small group had started to congregate by the water, and from the signs, drums, clothing I quickly decided to leave the beers I had brought in my car. This was not the time to rest, this was a time to be present and add my body to a grassroots rally.

I was looking out at a group of kayaks on Lake Union idling in front of a row of floating homes, easily identifiable as a group of Puyallup Tribal Members in traditional regalia. When we turned back to help hoist a giant banner it revealed the message "Respect the Puyallup, Keep LNG Facility Off".

What followed was a magical evening. As it turns out, the CEO of Puget Sound Energy lives right on Eastlake in a floating home (incidentally these are often valued at up to $5.7 million).

Organizers had found the CEO's address and hastily rallied members of the Puyallup tribe and activists up from Tacoma to peacefully demonstrate on kayaks outside their front door.

It was breathtaking.

As the sun slowly faded behind Queen Anne Hill, traditional flute music and singing could be heard like low fog over the surface of the water.

Everything else was silent.

When the light was low enough, the kayaks lit salmon-shaped paper lanterns and waved them around in the air, like tiny fish made of light swimming just above the surface. Neighbors came and sat on their decks in silent appreciation of the serenity.

No words were spoken, none had to be.

The flute music and low singing continued into the encroaching darkness until the lake felt like it had been engulfed in a shared dream. One that we only woke up from when the music stopped, and the kayaks carefully navigated out of the water.

What differentiates this demonstration from so many I have participated in is the silence, the wordlessness. No megaphones, no hot and heavy words to the crowd, nothing even calling Ms. Kipp out specifically.

Just a sign, and a beautiful moment of serenity. Which, if you think about it, almost says more than a speech could. PSE knows that the right thing to do is to honor the rights of the Puyallup people to the Tacoma Tideflats. PSE knows that their facility is likely to cause harm to public safety and our long-term climate goals. PSE knows how to do the right thing and to actually work in service of its community and planet. They just won’t do it… yet.

And while no words were spoken, the message was impossible to miss.”

- Nick Manning, WPSR

Want to take action?

Learn more about how PSE is fighting to preserve the status quo, PSE’s failed efforts to support families during the pandemic, their tobacco industry-style tactics in marketing to young people, and then act!

Send a message to PSE CEO Mary Kipp and demand that she halt the operationalization of the Tacoma LNG facility, consistent with the demands of the Puyallup Tribe of Indians and the Tacoma Human Rights Commission.

A letter from Mark Vossler, MD: WPSR's Board President

I am hopeful. This hope stems from changes for the better that we are seeing just recently in our state and in our country. This hope also stems from the growing influence of WPSR in making positive changes in policy for the benefit of human health. When I last wrote to you, we were in a time of chaos and uncertainty. Elected officials and agencies at nearly every level of government were failing to meet the most pressing health, social, and economic needs of our nation and Washington state. Since then, we bore witness to an all-out assault on the foundations of our very democracy: both rhetorical and literal.

The chaos has not subsided. The uncertainty remains. For example, it wasn’t until this month that the losing candidate in the Governor’s race withdrew his case against our voting system and excessive force by over-militarized police was on display again at the end of January in Tacoma.

This chaos and all our work happens against a backdrop of the threat of nuclear war, an accelerating climate crisis, decreasing life expectancy driven largely by economic inequity, an uncontrolled pandemic, white supremacy, and police violence.

It is easy to fall into the trap of despair. There are days that I find myself overwhelmed and I’m sure I’m not alone. But I am hopeful. We have turned a corner, with a new administration in the White House, a new Congress, and a state government taking seriously the issues that affect human health, coupled with higher levels of citizen engagement than I have seen in my lifetime.

With this change in government, we have a unique opportunity to advance the type of social and policy change required to improve the health of our state, nation, and world. The issues that WPSR is working on with your support & engagement are top of mind right now for both the general public and many of our elected officials.

Our Governor and state legislature named climate change, economic inequity, progressive revenue, and racial justice as priority issues for this session. Based on the bills submitted to date, they appear to be quite serious about this mission. We are delighted to know that WPSR’s top priority issues for state-level actions are what they are working on. This is no accident: WPSR, along with its partners have been working assiduously for years to make our policymakers aware that these issues are truly urgent for the health of Washingtonians and our communities, and - literally - for human survival on this one planet that we have.

At a federal level, President Biden’s advisors and cabinet picks, including John Kerry and Gina McCarthy, convey a seriousness about climate change and a more diplomatic approach to foreign policy. Additionally, he is taking public health seriously and empowering an aggressive, science-based COVID response. He specifically called out the problem of white supremacy in his inaugural address and seems keen on promoting racial justice and combating economic inequity. The United States is back in the WHO and the Paris Agreement. There is a serious willingness to address the climate crisis by executive order, and a slow but steadily growing awareness in Congress that this crisis is real.

After years of frustration, the movement to abolish nuclear weapons is also gaining momentum. The Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) has just entered into force, a treaty recognized in over 80 nations that bans any engagement with, development of, or use of nuclear weapons in any nation around the world. This puts the United States and other nuclear-armed nations in violation of international law and increases the pressure for us to make serious reductions in our arsenals.

The NewSTART treaty has been renewed with Russia after coming dangerously close to expiring. Yet the danger remains, and we cannot take our foot off the pedal while one person’s finger is on the button. As we have long advocated, no single person should have sole discretion to destroy life on this planet. With nuclear weapons on the policy agenda again, we must push for re-engagement with Iran, a no first use policy, redirecting absurd levels of nuclear spending to critical social needs, and ultimately on reducing our nuclear arsenal.

We have our dedicated core of health professionals and others working on our three task forces uniquely positions WPSR to make the cause of human health and survival a driving rationale for necessary social change. The depth and influence of our bench is what enables us to be present when our partners in advocacy need the health voice, positions us for frequent publication in the media, and equips us to have a meaningful impact on elected officials.

For our volunteers to be maximally effective we need staff to organize the effort. For the first time in our history, we have five full-time staff members, including an organizer for each of our programs and task forces. Our work is made possible in part by the generosity of our membership and donors. Thanks to your ongoing financial support, we find ourselves on solid ground and we are in a position to expand our advocacy efforts at a time when they are needed more than ever.

What's next for WPSR in 2021? For the next six months, expect WPSR to be focused on full-court-press advocacy in Olympia on legislation that will promote economic equality, environmental justice, and racial justice. Right now, there are important bills in the legislature that could establish a clean fuel standard, a building electrification standard, and an update of the growth management plan that includes a mandate to include environmental justice for low-income communities and BIPOC communities. We are also tenaciously advocating for a capital gains tax and an expanded Working Families Tax Credit. Following our victory stopping the world’s largest methanol refinery in Kalama, we will continue to oppose dangerous fossil gas projects such as the fracked gas plant in Tacoma in public testimony, in print, and in court.

On the heels of nuclear policy wins including the TPNW, New Start renewal, and securing Medicaid access for Marshallese victims of nuclear testing, we will continue to serve as the financial sponsor and operations lead of WANW, the Washington Against Nuclear Weapons coalition.

WANW is the largest coalition of its kind in the country, and we will continue adding member organizations in every Congressional district in our state to push elected officials to be proponents of nuclear abolition. Through the coalition and our task force, we will meet with each of our Members of Congress to advocate for reductions in the nuclear arsenal, a no first use policy, and an end to presidential sole authority. We will continue to be an ally to the many frontline communities who continue to suffer the brunt of the legacy of nuclear weapons production and testing, including the Spokane and Yakima Tribes, victims of radioactive pollution and radiation poisoning from uranium mining, weapons production, and waste storage right here in Washington. This also the large Pacific Northwest Marshallese population, whose health and native home have been irreparably harmed by US weapons testing.

We, at WPSR, are finding ourselves broadening our sphere of influence and our ability to effectively advocate for policies that address the social determinants of health. In order to continue this work, we will need your continued partnership as donors, contributors, and advocates.

I hope that you will all be able to join us at the Health Justice Gala on March 6 and make a generous contribution so we can continue to bring the health voice to bear on the gravest threats to human health and survival.

We invite you to be a part of this effort. Your time, talent, and financial support make the work of WPSR possible.

Thank you to everyone who supports our efforts with your time, talent, and financial support. I am deeply grateful for all that you do. You give me hope.

Mark Vossler, MD
Board President
mark@wpsr.org | 206 547 2630

Comment: UN nuclear weapons ban is a small step toward sanity

Published in the Everett Herald 01.31.21
By Dr. David C. Hall

It’s one small step for global sanity! Nuclear weapons have now joined chemical and biological weapons and land mines as internationally banned weapons.

On Jan. 22, the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons entered into force to cement a categorical ban on nuclear weapons for the 50 nations signing and ratifying the treaty, 75 years after the United States became the first and only nation to use nuclear weapons in wartime.

Despite this huge step for the safety and survivability of human civilization, supporters of this treaty face a mountain of opposition led by the United States.

Our country has waged an aggressive campaign to thwart this prohibition with its immense power and resources while maintaining an ever-present threat to use nuclear weapons whenever we say “All options are on the table.”

Up until now we have pressured potential signers and kept all NATO allies from signing. The other eight nuclear weapon states have also refused to sign. Austria, Ireland and Lichtenstein are the only European nations to sign. The other nuclear nations — Russia, China, Great Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea — have boycotted the treaty process. Kazakhstan and South Africa are former nuclear weapon states to sign and ratify the TPNW. Brazil dismantled its nuclear weapons program and has signed but not yet ratified it.

None of the nuclear states or NATO countries are bound by this treaty. What this treaty does, however, is establish a first-ever international precedent for outlawing nuclear weapons. Hopefully this will pressure the nuclear weapon states and their allies to finally negotiate the elimination of these horrific weapons. The United States, Russia and China all agreed to do so when they signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970. Nonetheless nuclear-armed arsenals keep getting faster, more accurate, more usable and more deadly despite fewer warheads.

Going forward, conventional war-fighting capabilities will need to be included in these negotiations. Nuclear weapons have helped less powerful countries fend off the conventional military and nuclear threats from their more powerful adversaries. North Korea will not give up its nuclear deterrents unless the overwhelming conventional war-fighting capabilities of China and United States are on the table. Negotiations to replace nuclear weapons will require credible safeguards for survival of less powerful countries.

This treaty is so important. Nuclear weapons violate international laws that protect innocent civilians and the environment. Even a small nuclear exchange could blacken the skies and starve billions of people.

The U.S. still has nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, hypersonic missiles are coming, nuclear command and control systems are vulnerable to cyber attacks, retaliatory responses are disseminated down the chain of command, and under current U.S. law the president of the United States has absolute power to order the launch of nuclear weapons even if he or she has only minutes to distinguish a real attack from a false alarm. Our military chain of command is built to follow the president’s orders or to launch if the president is incapacitated.

We have a new U.S. administration. President Trump had sole authority to start a nuclear war. Now is the time to seriously push to eliminate these ecologically devastating weapons of mass murder. Call President Biden to sign and our senators to ratify the TPNW. Nuclear weapons are repugnant to the values of decency, democracy and the sacredness of life.

Dr. David C. Hall is past president, of Physicians for Social Responsibility and Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility.

WPSR Statement in Opposition to SB 5244

Prepared by WPSR’s Climate Crisis Task Force

Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility (WPSR) is a 40-year-old, physician-led organization concerned with the social determinants of health representing approximately 1000 health professionals across the state of Washington. We are opposed to SB 5244 (a bill to encourage the production of advanced nuclear reactors, small modular reactors, and components).

The climate crisis gives us little time to act to reduce emissions by shifting our economy off of fossil fuels.  We at WPSR are highly concerned about the health impacts of climate change and air pollution and therefore applaud our legislators for the efforts to promote means of electricity generation that lower emissions and consequently reduce health risks.  This bill, unfortunately, fails on three counts: 1) It would worsen economic inequity 2) It is not a cost-effective means of reducing emissions. 3) It would harm indigenous communities who already suffer disproportionately from our current nuclear programs.

Our state has an extremely regressive tax system and currently faces a revenue shortfall.  Cutting taxes for big businesses in a pandemic-induced recession, thereby increasing economic inequality, further exacerbates this problem.  Since economic inequity is a driving cause of health disparities we oppose any further shifts of our tax burden away from the wealthy and on to low-income workers and consumers.

Solar and wind-generated electricity is now cheaper than coal and cost-competitive with gas generation even prior to consideration of the social costs of carbon and other pollutants.  At this point, the solutions to the climate crisis are more dependent on regulating and/or pricing carbon, promoting public transportation and fuel efficiency standards, and improving transmission than on subsidizing low-carbon generation. Additionally, there are simply not enough potential jobs to warrant subsidizing the construction of machinery that might never even be used. We favor taking a more cost-effective and rapidly applicable approach to emissions reduction.  Several bills under consideration — including the clean fuels standard, the building electrification bill, and the update to the growth management act — would be more rapidly effective at lower costs than this proposal.

Nuclear energy requires the mining of uranium and the storage of radioactive waste both of which cause disproportionate harm to indigenous communities. This bill contains no regulations of the waste, no provisions to protect vulnerable communities. As such it is completely unacceptable to us.  

This proposal is a special interest giveaway that would do little to improve the lives of Washingtonians while posing grave risks to some and would be woefully inadequate as a means of reducing emissions.  We will gladly support serious proposals that reduce greenhouse gasses while improving health and well being.  This bill fails on all counts and we ask that you oppose it.

Comment: All-electric homes would clear air we breathe

Published in the Everett Herald 01.17.21
By Mark Vossler, Jon Witte and Nancy Johnson

With each new year comes a clean slate; an opportunity to start again by resolving self-improvement, often focusing on our health.

Traditionally, after a season of indulgence, there are resolutions to “clean up our act” regarding diet and exercise. But did you know the gas stove you’ve used to bake those delights is more harmful to your health than the snickerdoodles you consumed?

Health is at the top of everyone’s mind during this challenging covid-19 pandemic. There has been a wide-ranging focus on public health as well as our own personal well-being. The response to this pandemic has been far-reaching and multi-faceted: scientific research, policy-making, education, communication, outreach to vulnerable communities. With vaccines FDA approved and starting to be administered we can begin to breathe a sigh of relief, but this endeavor will also take determined effort, effective organization, and commitment of resources both human and financial to vaccinate millions of Americans.

Playing out in parallel is the crisis of climate change, presenting challenges even greater than those we currently face with the covid-19 pandemic. A multi-faceted approach is needed here too.

The World Health Organization considers climate change to be the “greatest threat to global health in the 21st century.” It is responsible for the increase in wildfires and the visible, choking smoke that fills our local skies every summer. Climate change causes more frequent and severe heat waves; it warms our oceans creating conditions for more violent storms; it has been linked to the emergence of new infectious diseases including novel viruses such as covid-19. Additionally, the evidence is overwhelming that rapid climate change is human caused. The burning of dirty fossil fuels has resulted in a dangerous rise in levels of carbon dioxide and other air pollutants in our atmosphere. These pollutants not only exacerbate climate change, but pose direct and immediate negative impacts to human health. Years of research and clinical experience have shown that these pollutants are responsible for lung and heart disease, mental health stress, heat-related injury and other physical ailments.

While we see and feel the immediate effects of an acute deadly illness, we often overlook the more subtle effects that accumulate over time. Our fossil fuel use is a good example of this phenomenon. The very buildings we live and work in are the fastest-growing source of carbon pollution in Washington state. The stove in your kitchen and the heat in your home, if powered by gas or oil, creates invisible pollutants. Nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, fine particulate matter, ultra fine particles and formaldehyde are emitted into your “clean” indoor air making it anything but healthy. In fact the nitrogen dioxide levels indoors after one hour of cooking on a gas stove would be illegal if found outdoors. These pollutants are linked to multiple serious medical problems including acute and chronic lung diseases, cardiovascular disease and premature death, various neurologic conditions, lung and breast cancer, and type 2 diabetes. The incidence of asthma in children is 42 percent higher in homes that use gas stoves for cooking.

Efforts are underway to work toward all electric homes, schools, workplaces and commercial spaces. Gov. Jay Inslee recently announced wide-ranging climate priorities that include a state-wide effort to phase gas out of residential buildings, the first of its kind nationally. Cities and counties in Washington can join the movements of cities in other states like California to ensure new construction is all-electric. Some have already done this, including Bellingham, Seattle, Issaquah and Thurston County.

Washington is blessed with some of the cleanest and cheapest electricity in the nation, making 100 percent fossil-free electricity attractive to builders, homeowners and investors. Clean energy jobs will flourish as we make the transition from fossil fuel-powered construction to electric building standards. All-electric homes are less expensive to build upfront and there is no expensive need to pay for connections to gas pipeline infrastructure. All-electric appliances are readily available and popular, often coming with rebates for highly efficient models.

A resolution to make this year is to encourage the Washington state Legislature and your local decision makers to aggressively transition to all-electric buildings. Included in Inslee’s environmental priorities for this year’s legislative session is HB 1084, the first legislation in the U.S. to address fuel switching state-wide. Additionally, municipal governments across the state are beginning to follow the examples set by Bellingham, Seattle and Olympia to mandate all-electric new buildings.

The benefits are many, yet despite landmark efforts to remove fossil fuels from our state’s energy grid in 2019 and to update our emissions reductions goals to match the latest climate science in 2020, we are not on track to meet those goals. Just as we hope to stick to our personal resolutions this New Year, we must resolve to renew our focus on reducing carbon emissions to promote a healthier environment in 2021 and every year going forward.

Dr. Mark Vossler is a cardiologist practicing in Kirkland and serves as the president of Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Dr. Jonathan Witte is a retired rheumatologist from Everett. He is an active member of WPSR and other climate action groups.
Nancy Johnson is a retired registered nurse from Edmonds currently working on climate and environmental justice issues with WPSR, Sno-Isle Sierra Club and other organizations.

Doctors should address patient medical debt

By Daniel Low
Special to The Seattle Times

The year 2020 was an inspiring year to be a doctor. I saw colleagues tired, understaffed, fearing they might contract COVID-19 and nonetheless persevering to provide care to those most in need.

Alongside social justice leaders, doctors mobilized to collectively address enduring racial inequities in health care, with the American Medical Association proclaiming racism a threat to public health. Locally, doctors were in the streets, leading powerful marches through downtown Seattle against racialized police brutality.

We bore witness to doctors like Anthony Fauci espousing important public health messages, despite political pressure to do otherwise. My colleagues have made me proud to identify as a physician this year. But as we enter a new year, there is a glaring hole in doctors’ pursuit of medical justice — health economics. This year physicians and health care administrators must defend the economic well-being of our patients.

Even before COVID-19, nearly one in three Americans delayed medical care because of fears of medical costs. COVID-19 has only made this problem worse. As a family medicine doctor caring for patients in the hospital and in the clinic, I’m all too familiar with this conundrum. Last week, a patient, dreading medical debt, refused my recommendation to visit the emergency department when her usually high blood pressure was dangerously low, a serious signal that she needed medical attention. Another patient had the same cost-conscious rationale when explaining why he waited until the brink of intubation before going to the hospital, despite being short of breath with a known COVID-19 infection.

These anxieties are not unfounded. An estimated half million Americans file for bankruptcy each year because of medical bills, accounting for two-thirds of all bankruptcy filings. Even when not filing for bankruptcy, countless Americans face economic ruin when they return from visits to health care facilities with surprise medical bills charging thousands of dollars. The sinister “surprise medical bill” is so commonplace, it has inspired a national investigative news program — the National Public Radio / Kaiser Health “Bill of the Month.” Why do we allow this treachery?

Historically, it has been in large part because hospitals and doctors, who often benefit from the existing system, have fought against laws banning the practice. This may be why the American Medical Association lobbied Congress to alter language buried in the recently passed $900 billion relief package that would ban surprise medical bills.

While hospitals position themselves as beacons of community support, and doctors swear an oath to “do no harm,” these promises ring hollow when we continue advocating for health care practices that economically ruin those whom we serve. It isn’t enough that we are good at demonstrating acute compassion — comforting a sick child or protesting an immediate act of racial injustice — we need to improve our longitudinal empathy for the economic well-being of our patients. We need to put our money where our mouth is; failing to recognize our contribution to economic inequity threatens the integrity of our profession itself.

As doctors we must acknowledge the collective power we possess to change the economic structure of medicine. It is time we stop exclusively relying on the heroic philanthropy of folks like those at RIP Medical Debt, a brilliant nonprofit that has eradicated nearly $3 billion in medical debt via group debt purchasing. With medical debt continuing to balloon — it has risen another 7% since last year alone — philanthropy is insufficient. We need policy change. And this is one of the few areas with bipartisan support. If Republicans and Democrats were able to come together on the new legislation that bans out-of-network medical providers from charging beyond the in-network cost for services provided in emergency departments and some nonemergent settings, starting next year, then health care providers can and must play an active role, too. Our patients deserve honesty. We need to demand hospitals, clinics, insurance companies and administration provide cost transparency.

As we enter a new year, my dream for 2021 is for my profession to acknowledge the economic inequities that we help drive and to act justly for restitution. May 2021 be a year that not only limits the spread of COVID-19 but also limits the spread of medical debt.

Daniel Low is a family medicine physician at HealthPoint in Renton, member of the Board of the King County Medical Society, and member of WPSR’s Economic Inequity & Health Task Force

Celebrating a Historic Step Toward the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons

Written by Mona Lee

The following piece is to be published in the upcoming Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action newsletter.

            This is a historic time of celebration for Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action and other organizational members of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).  On October 24, 2020 Honduras became the 50th nation to ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (Note: is was passed in July).  With that, the treaty will enter into force on January 22, 2021. Ground Zero will celebrate this event during its annual Martin Luther King birthday weekend activities January 15-17.

            The passing of this Treaty marks a significant milestone in a long effort to abolish nuclear weapons. 75 years ago, in response to World War II and the horrific nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United Nations was founded to develop cooperation among nations and prevent such a catastrophe from ever happening again.

Article VI of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty nuclear weapon states to  "pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” Additionally, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty signed in 1991 limited the number of warheads that could be deployed.  Even so, today nearly a dozen countries possess a total of  13,410 nuclear  warheads with Approximately 91 percent of all nuclear warheads owned by the U.S. and Russia.  These weapons are many times more powerful than the bombs that wiped out Hiroshima, killing and maiming thousands of innocent citizens.

            More recently, ICAN organized a series of three international anti-nuclear weapons conferences: one in Oslo, Norway in 2013; the second in Nayarit, Mexico in 2014; and another in Vienna, also in 2014. These meetings focused upon the horrific health effects of nuclear weapons testing upon downwinders: Utah residents down wind of the Nevada nuclear testing; the Marshall Islanders in the Pacific; and the villages of Kazakhstan down-wind of Soviet nuclear tests. Hundreds of bombs have been dropped, and their radiation has caused widespread cancers and untimely deaths of thousands of people in those parts of the world.

At the 2014 conference in Vienna, the Austrian government promised to develop a nuclear weapons ban treaty.  The result was the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons which was adopted in 2017.   Because of this accomplishment, ICAN was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in that year.  But it was not until October of this year that enough nations had  ratified the treaty. The  Ban Treaty will enter into force on January 22, 2021.

            So, what are we celebrating?  Not one of the dozen nuclear-armed countries that possess the thousands of nuclear weapons has signed onto the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.  Because they are not signatories to the Treaty, neither the US nor Russia, nor any of the other nuclear armed nations, can be called before the Hague Tribunal because they are in violation of international law.  However, according to Dr. Ira Helfand of the ICAN Steering Committee and many other experts, this Treaty will give the rest of the world a “powerful tool” to stigmatize the nuclear armed nations that own these weapons as well as the corporations that build them. We all have a role to play in doing the persuading.

Although Ground Zero has persisted in its resistance to nuclear weapons over the years, the general public has largely forgotten them since the end of the Cold War in the late 1980’s. However, recently there is growing awareness of nuclear weapons and the dangers they pose to humanity.  More people are waking up to the reality that the possibility of nuclear war is greater than it has ever been.  A wider grass roots campaign called “Back from the Brink” has been endorsed by many cities and several state legislatures.  They call for the US to lead a global effort to take such actions as:

●      Renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first

●      Ending the sole, unchecked authority of any president to launch a nuclear attack

●      Taking the U.S. nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert

●      Cancelling the plan to replace its entire arsenal with enhanced weapons

●      Actively pursuing a verifiable agreement among nuclear-armed states to eliminate their nuclear weapons.

Therefore, while we are celebrating, we will take action to use the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as leverage to pressure our government to come into compliance with international law and with its moral obligation to rid humanity of its gravest threat.


Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons Op-Eds

Dr. Joseph Berkson

Op-Ed for the day of TPNW (Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons) Ratification

When will we listen and act on extreme peril to our country? On October 24, the ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons today should be a warning to the United States and the other eight countries who possess them. The majority of Americans believe any use of these weapons of mass destruction is unacceptable. The 84 signatories to this treaty wish to completely ban nuclear weapons. On October 24, the 50th country ratified the treaty. By the rules of the treaty it will be in force by international law in 90 days. By ratifying this treaty, the signing countries agree not to acquire or threaten the use of these bombs which threaten our survival in this country and worldwide. 

The treaty is the result of decades of  frustration that the nuclear powers have not disarmed, despite pledges to do so in the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. 

The world’s nuclear arsenal is nearly 13,500 warheads, the U.S. has 5,800.   

Worse, Russia and the United States have recently deployed “low yield” nuclear weapons, sometimes called “tactical” nuclear weapons. Some politicians and military leaders look at these weapons as more usable, but that is an extremely dangerous idea which could lead to a large-scale nuclear weapon exchange. It has been the policy of U.S. administrations for the past 18 years that the U.S. reserves the right to use nuclear weapons first, not just in retaliation for a nuclear attack on us, but also if a conventional war is getting “out of control.” These “limited” nuclear weapons make us less secure. 

Nuclear weapon accidents have happened here in the U.S., also in Russia. As Eric Schlosser wrote in his definitive book, Command and Control, an accidental liquid fuel explosion of a Titan missile in Damascus, Arkansas in 1980 was an extremely close call. One military officer was killed and 20 more injured, the nuclear warhead was missing for hours, and would have detonated if a single simple switch had failed. There have been innumerable incidents of near misses with our nuclear arsenal over the past 75 years. 

The world celebrates the International Day for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons on Sept. 26. This commemorates a 1983 incident when a nuclear war was almost launched due to malfunctions in the Soviet early warning system. The Soviet officer, Stanislav Petrov, was told there was an incoming missile strike seen on radar, and then told five more missiles were on their way. He was obliged to launch a retaliation, but he disobeyed orders. He decided it could be a false image and did not launch the Russian nuclear weapons. Now he is celebrated as “the man who saved the world,” with the commemorative holiday on the date of the incident.

The results of an actual nuclear exchange in war are so horrible, many of us become  emotionally traumatized contemplating these results: hundreds of millions (or more) people dead, environmental collapse of crops for over a decade, shortages of most goods. We cannot prepare for or prevent nuclear catastrophe unless we think about the unthinkable. 

How do we act on this “low probability” risk? As a nation, we have not yet faced our current climate crisis, and had a bad record of acting early on the current COVID-19 pandemic. Imagine hearing that nobody could have predicted the coronavirus pandemic, if you wrote a book and gave talks warning about it 5 years ago. That happened to Bill Gates, philanthropist and co-founder of Microsoft Corporation, and Michael T. Osterholm, epidemiologist and infectious disease expert. They both predicted a pandemic with a new or “novel” virus to which nobody would have immunity. Many infectious disease and public health doctors warned we were not prepared for it. Bill Gates told Donald Trump in December, 2016 that we needed to get ready for dealing with a pandemic. 

It is clear we are not good at dealing with nuclear dangers either. Albert Einstein sent a telegram in 1946, warning, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Let’s overcome this tendency to do nothing about impending risk, by making real changes in policy and act. We must start taking seriously the threat of the collapse of our country and human civilization if nuclear weapons are used. The best way to improve our security is for our country to negotiate now with other nuclear powers to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons. 

Dr. Dave Hall

Tired of COVID-19? Tired of communities burned to the ground? Tired or smoke-filled summers? These are harbingers of our growing susceptibility to natural disasters fueled by a warming planet and indolent efforts globally to arrest the major causes. 

But these tragedies and inconveniences will pale before even a tiny nuclear disaster. 

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons received the 50th ratification vote from a member nation, on October 24, 2020 meaning that it will go into effect in 90 days. It’s powerful condemnation of nuclear weapons, but it’s still just a formality until nations like ours with nuclear weapons acknowledge the world’s condemnation of their dangerous arsenals. 

History can teach how important it is to recognize the harms that we are courting by building and possessing nuclear weapons. 

You may remember the Chernobyl nuclear reactor incident. Well, the Soviet Union had three major disasters well before Chernobyl that warn us what disregard for nuclear consequences will cost us. 

The Techa River near their plutonium production plant became uninhabitable. They evacuated hundreds of villages after the river residents had been radiologically contaminated for years. When ? a delegation from Washington Physician for Social Responsibility? Or who? visited there in 1993, our geiger counter buzzed at a rate extreme enough to give a child cancer in three to four months. Russian officials dumped high level nuclear waste in the river after filling single shell tanks like we have at Hanford. Then in 1957 one of those tanks exploded like one of ours nearly did and there was a 180 kilometer plume that created a “nuclear preserve” that was still uninhabitable when we were there. 

But that wasn’t all. Officials  had been dumping hot nuclear waste in Lake Karachay, which like the Dead Sea, had no outlets. Safe place to put it, right? Well a drought and windstorm in 1968 dropped the lake level and the windstorm dispersed radioactive sediment from the exposed lake bed over a huge downwind plume that created another “nuclear preserve.”  Along with nuclear testing and engineering use of nuclear explosives to build canals and the like, Soviet physicians calculated that 15% of the Soviet landmass was radiologically contaminated at levels unsafe for human life. All three disasters were as big or bigger than Chernobyl. 

We in the United States are lucky our country has the wealth to manage nuclear waste better. But we, too, have huge downwind contamination from nuclear testing and nuclear waste. The Hanford Reservation in Eastern Washington is the largest Superfund site in the Western Hemisphere. That’s where we processed uranium to create plutonium for the Nagasaki atomic bomb. There are 177 nuclear waste tanks there and more than half of them are leaking radioactivity toward the Columbia River. Uranium mining on Native American land near Spokane and throughout Arizona has left thousands of Native American workers with multiple health problems. Same for U.S. servicemen who were detailed to witness nuclear tests in the 1940s and ’50’s. 

So that’s a brief summary of what happens during the production of nuclear weapons, and it pales by comparison to what has already happened when nuclear weapons are exploded.

The U.S. has tested atomic and hydrogen bombs on the Marshall Islands in the Pacific with the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb every day for 12 years and whole communities, like on the Techa River, had to be relocated. Radiological contamination from the Nevada Test Site reached Troy, New York. The Soviets had similar testing contamination from Novaya Zemlya in the arctic and Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. 

That brings us to the Damocles sword that hangs over all of us every day. In the 1960s the U.S. plan for responding to a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union called for destroying both Russia and China at the calculated cost of 600 MILLION lives lost. 

Despite all the efforts at reining in nuclear proliferation, we still have 15,000 nuclear weapons shared between nine nuclear nations with 90% held by the U.S. and Russia. We in the Puget Sound region live within 20 to 50 miles of the largest concentration of deployed nuclear weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Roughly a thousand nuclear weapons roam the world’s oceans on our Trident warships home based at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor on Hood Canal. 

If any one of these thousands of nuclear weapons is used in perceived hostility against a country allied with Russia or the U.S., retaliation designed to mutually destroy the aggressor is the threatened war plan of response. India and Pakistan have fought five wars already and both possess atomic bombs sufficient to block the sun with fallout and debris and starve out billions of people. 

The notion that “fire and fury” is in any way sane exposes the ignorance of real consequences of using nuclear weapons.  It’s on all of us to demand diplomatic reduction of these horrific weapons toward elimination. Soon we will see these weapons outlawed by the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. If we don’t stand up now to ensure the treaty comes into full force, none of us will be standing if this genie is unleashed. 

Ash Maria

The 50th Country Just Ratified the United Nations’ Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons – What Now?

I am writing this letter to both celebrate a monumental step in nuclear disarmament, as well as make a plea on behalf of young folks everywhere. Having attended Shorecrest High School and grown up in Lake Forest Park, I am now a current first-generation student at Pomona College in Claremont, California hoping to pursue an M.D./Ph.D. program in Medical Anthropology. Instead of college classes over Zoom, I instead chose to spend my fall semester supporting Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility’s anti-nuclear weapon advocacy work. With October 23rd’s historic milestone of 50 countries ratifying the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), I wanted to share from a pre-med student’s perspective the importance of acting upon this moment’s momentum to best ensure the health and safety of nuclear-affected communities in our country.

As you may be aware, in 2020 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have determined we are “100 seconds to midnight”, the closest the clock has ever been to “doomsday” in the organization’s 75-year history. Given the threats of present climate change and potential nuclear war amplified by corrupt political desires and technology-enabled propaganda, we as a global people are closer to the eradication of civilization than even at the height of the Cold War (for reference, the clock was 120 seconds to midnight in 1953 after the U.S. and U.S.S.R. tested thermonuclear weapons for the first time). 

These growing threats have largely been met with near meaningless measures taken by the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, especially China, Russia, and the U.S. Knowing that leading world powers would not adequately step up to the challenge of maintaining a habitable Earth, on July 7, 2017, a UN conference adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Now with the 50th country ratifying it, the treaty will begin to take effect in 90 days, a momentous step in the global denuclearization effort. This historic treaty was led by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which received the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for their work. 

The TPNW was created with both the short and long-term goals of providing a legal instrument to hold countries accountable in denuclearization efforts and fully abolishing these weapons of mass destruction respectively. According to ICAN’s website, the treaty specifically “prohibits nations from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, transferring, possessing, stockpiling, using or threatening to use nuclear weapons, or allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory…[as well as] assisting, encouraging or inducing anyone to engage in any of these activities.”

Even if the importance of this unprecedented treaty’s ratification is not something that can be overstated, there are still other aspects of the anti-nuclear struggle that need to be urgently addressed. All of the nuclear-weapons states have to join the rest of the world in the effort to ban the bomb. 

Here in the U.S., we have communities that have/are at high risk of experiencing nuclear violence that we must prioritize political and social support for going forward. These include the Marshallese and other Pacific Islander Compact of Free Association (COFA) migrants whose homelands were used for nuclear weapons testing, people living in the area around Washington State’s Hanford Site, and those inside the “nuclear sponge” regions of the American heartland.

In 1996 under a federal “welfare reform” act, COFA communities lost their access to Medicaid leading to poverty-driven extreme health disparity. Greatly impacted by COVID-19, diabetes, and high cancer rates caused by radiation poisoning from U.S. nuclear weapon tests in the Marshall Islands, Marshallese activists and allies have worked tirelessly to both cleanup remaining nuclear waste on the atolls and regain access to federal healthcare programs.

Cleaning up the Hanford Site in southern Washington State is critical. Many experts have deemed it a ticking time bomb with the potential to far exceed Chernobyl’s nuclear fallout. The facility storing 56 million gallons of radioactive material originally designed for the atomic bombs is decaying, the only way to prevent this impending disaster is to move the waste from wet to dry storage. Without our action, the area around the Hanford Site would become uninhabitable for upwards of 800 years.

The central states of Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming are considered by the U.S. military as our “nuclear sponge”. The Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) stored in these states serve the primary tactical use of absorbing any incoming attacks, greatly putting nearby communities at risk. Instead of removing the bait for Russia and protecting civilians, the U.S. has recently decided to replace and modernize our ICBMs via a brand new $13.3 contract with Northrop Grumman to be completed in 2029 and remain until 2075.

Nuclear weapons pose one of the greatest public health crises globally. It is a public health issue that may not pose an everyday threat to many of us (although an accident, miscalculation, or unhinged leader could change that instantly), but is inseparably intertwined with ones that do such as the climate crisis and economic inequity. If there is one issue young people like me cannot afford to be defeatist on it is this –the fate of our species is depending on it. This November I not only implore you to vote for candidates against nuclearization, but also to use the momentum of the TPNW’s ratification to educate others about these issues, organize anti-nuclear lobbying events in your area, and take part in organizations led by frontline communities like the Marshallese, who do live with the dangers of nuclear weapons every day

Dan Worthen

The  U. N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has just been ratified by the governments of 50 nations – a key threshold in the treaty’s advancement toward becoming international law. The treaty “prohibits nations from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, transferring, possessing, stockpiling, using or threatening to use nuclear weapons, or allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory.” In a year full of bad news, this is most welcome.

The nations currently possessing nuclear weapons have made it clear that they will not recognize the treaty. However, the ability to stigmatize those nations – officially singling them out as rogue states operating outside the norms of the world community – is perhaps the treaty’s greatest power. The nine nations must be named: the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.

Most of us (those born after 1945) have been living under the threat of nuclear annihilation for our entire lives. I remember participating in “duck and cover” drills in primary school in the early 1960s. And I recall, during that same period, seeing the fear in my parents’ eyes as they watched the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold.

Today I see that same fear in the eyes of the younger generation — but the fear is not about nuclear annihilation, which, for most of them, is an issue that has faded tragically into the background. Their fear is about that other great existential peril: climate change.  

My own children are young adults. One is in college and the other just had a baby.  They are good, purposeful people whose lives brim with possibility, and they deserve every opportunity to live full, happy lives. But, more than with past generations, the earth’s accelerated warming is forcing them to face an ominous, uncertain future. 

Sadly, the continuing presence of nuclear weapons on our planet makes that future exponentially more ominous. Indeed, in an awful twist, it makes the future more, not less, certain, for this I know: The longer nuclear weapons exist, the more inevitable is their use. It is how the world works. Sooner or later, the dumb luck that has helped to save us since 1945 is going to run out. 

How will it happen? The spark will come intentionally as a result of a flareup between nations, or it will strike as a sudden accident — a bolt out of the blue — through a false alarm or technical malfunction. Then, as nearly all creditable response/retaliation scenarios tell us, the spark will ignite a conflagration that initiates nuclear winter and plunges the world into darkness.

The inevitability is stunning. It constrains us to act with all urgency to eliminate the hazard. If we do not, once the event takes place, the notion of combating climate change will lapse into sudden, archaic irrelevancy as nuclear winter fast tracks humanity down the road to extinction.

Nuclear weapons and climate change share this in common: They each threaten the entire planet-wide ecosystem and our own species’ survival. But climate change, vast in scope, is as intractable as it is global; there is nothing we can do to stop it in its tracks. 

Nuclear weapons, in that sense, are different. While they have proven extraordinarily difficult to contend with since their inception 75 years ago, they are a puzzle that can be solved in the comparatively near term. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, I believe, is the place to start. It presents a feasible way forward in humanity’s quest to bury something that should have never seen the light of day. Therein lies hope.

WPSR's Summer 2020 Newsletter

The Summer 2020 WPSR Newsletter is full of articles, news, and updates on our recent work, focused on our response to the COVID crisis, the polemic of racism and police violence, and our ongoing work to address the public health threats of nuclear weapons, climate change, and economic inequity.

WPSR Statement on George Floyd

This week, our national organization, PSR, issued a statement on police violence and the killing of George Floyd, on behalf of the national network of PSR chapters. WPSR echoes these words, condemning violence and racism in all its forms, and mourning the death of George Floyd and all people of color who have suffered and died at the hands of a racist and overmilitarized police. 

“PSR stands with health professionals who have long argued that police violence and systemic racism are a public health issue. We call on PSR members, who are devoted to fighting climate change and eliminating the threat posed by nuclear weapons, to be every bit as active in dismantling institutional racism in their communities. No just solution to the climate crisis or the nuclear threat will be possible unless we do so.”

The full PSR statement can be found here:ttps://www.psr.org/blog/2020/06/01/statement-on-the-killing-of-george-floyd/

Washington PSR will continue our commitment to work towards equity and social justice as an organization, and through our programs. As an organization working for climate justice, economic justice, and nuclear justice, we are obligated to speak out against systemic racism and to work with our coalition and community partners, and other PSR chapters, to help dismantle systems of white supremacy that perpetuate violence and against all forms of discrimination, injustice, and harm against people of color.

We recognize that climate justice, economic justice, and nuclear justice cannot be achieved without racial justice. We also recognize that statements are not enough to effectuate the change needed, and that - as with the major challenges to health that we work to address on a daily basis - action is required at every level of our unjust society. As such, WPSR is committed to go beyond these words, and to take concrete actions that will help dismantle the inherently inequitable systems that stand in the way of a peaceful, healthy, and just society.  We call for fundamental reform of our police forces, which needs to include demilitarization, training in implicit bias, and early decisive disciplinary action for acts of racism.  We call for redirection of funding for policing toward efforts to build resilient communities and break down economic inequity as methods to reduce violent crime. 

We stand in solidarity with the protesters and urge our supporters to do the same. We also recognize the additional risks protesters are incurring in the midst of a pandemic, and we strongly encourage all to protect their own health and the health of their loved ones at home by maintaining a safe distance from one another and wearing masks and washing hands frequently, so that this important act of protest does not result in more sickness and death from the virus.

If you are able, we urge you to support the organizations working on-the-ground right now to fight racial injustice. Our movements are inextricably linked, and our mission to build an equitable and inclusive climate movement is only possible if we continue to fight for the health, safety, opportunity, and basic human rights of all people.

Finally, as an organization dedicated to finding policy solutions to the greatest threats to human health, we encourage you to visit https://www.joincampaignzero.org to learn about - and become an advocate for - proven policy approaches to reducing police violence.

Washington State Unready to Take a Stand Against Nuclear Weapons: The Path Foward for the Movement is Clear

By : Lauren Zawacki and Carly Brook

Unfortunately, the full state Senate isn’t going to vote before the end of session on March 6th on a measure that would have asked Congress and the President to establish smarter policies that would reduce the chances of nuclear war. 

As of February 24, the Senate Joint Memorial 8006, was officially set aside after the powerful Senate Rules Committee took no action on it, indicating that the bill will not become law during this legislative session. We thank the co-sponsors, Rep. Gael Tarleton and Sen. Bob Hasegawa whose courageous leadership raised the issue of nuclear weapons in the legislature for the second time in recent history, offering the opportunity for Washington State to take a stand against one of the most serious threats to human survival. While this is disappointing news for both our coalition, as well as many other grassroots movements across the nation aiming to prevent nuclear war, there were still tremendous gains for the movement. And, encouragingly for the future, it did receive a recommendation for passage by the full Senate from a majority of the State Government, Tribal Relations and Elections Committee.

SJM 8006 urges that Washington “has a local responsibility to lead a national conversation about reducing and eliminating the threat of nuclear war and revamping our federal strategy.” The memorial goes on to urge the U.S. to lead a global effort to prevent nuclear war by laying out several policies aimed at reducing the extreme risks from these weapons as well as reducing our arsenals. If passed by the Washington Legislature, these memorials would be sent to President Trump and the leaders of both houses of Congress. Two of the memorial’s key sections urged a commitment by the United States never to be the first to use nuclear weapons and the creation of a system to ensure that a President doesn’t act alone in launching a nuclear attack. 

Since the last legislative session in 2019, when the House and Senate joint memorials were introduced for the first time, the Washington Against Nuclear Weapons Coalition has gained 50 member organizations. Additionally, our coalition diversified its support by engaging national and local organizations 350 Seattle, Women’s Action for New Directions, and the Union of Concerned Scientists to add their voices to the fight against nuclear weapons.

Furthermore, the joining of different grassroots movements signifies that nuclear weapons and war is not an isolated issue, but a complex problem that affects a broad spectrum of problems such as health, the environment, human rights, and income inequity. Making these connections only strengthens our argument and makes lawmakers, and the general public, more aware and supportive of urgently addressing our efforts to prevent nuclear war.

The Coalition also received an outpouring of support and action taken by these organizations and their partners. Thanks to everyone’s support, our coalition met with over 10 legislators, sent over 50 call to action emails, made hundreds of phone calls and had a record number of individuals testify at the general hearing on February 7, in which 12 individuals testified. 

That said, neither SJM 8006 and its House companion measure, passed in the 2019 or 2020 legislative sessions. Bills of more immediate r relevance and significance to voters and the legislators were prioritized over the nuclear weapons joint memorials in this year’s short legislative session. We want to thank our endorsing organizations, partners and constituents who helped to grow the grassroots movement and helped educate and elevate the issue amongst lawmakers and the general public.  We can claim the victory that more people are now educated about the dangers of nuclear war, more people are engaged in the movement and we have gained new friends in this struggle, even though we were not able to pass the joint memorials in the Washington Legislature this time. 

What should be the path forward for Washington State’s growing anti-nuclear weapons movement? 

  1. Pass city level and county level “Back from the Brink” resolutions, embodying the original points of the two memorial measures. That would give support to the national Back from the Brink movement while building stronger support for future state resolutions.

  2. Advocate to you Representatives and Senators in Congress to take urgent action to support No First Use and the extension of the New START treaty — policies that need our attention now to lessen the dangers and possibility of a nuclear war

  3. Speak out about the deployment of “low-yield” nuclear warheads which increase the likelihood of a conventional war escalating to a nuclear war. Tell your Member of Congress to reverse their deployment to submarines in Puget Sound at the Trident Submarine Base in Kitsap County.

  4. Grow the movement.Talk to your neighbors, community institutions, schools, and organizations about the threats of nuclear weapons and the history of resistance here in Washington State and urge your organizations to join the 50 member organizations of the Washington Against Nuclear Weapons Coalition to build our fighting capacity in 2020 to abolish nuclear weapons.



As New Nuclear Arms Race accelerates, WA Legislatures can reduce risk of nuclear war

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OLYMPIA, WA. - On Friday February 7th at 12:30PM Sen. Hasegawa and the Committee on State Government, Tribal Relations and Elections passed Senate Joint Memorial 8006, “Requesting that Congress establish more checks and balances to reduce the possibility of nuclear war”, out of committee. Now in the coming weeks, the Senate needs to pull the bill from Rules Committee onto the Senate floor for a vote!

With this memorial -- and it’s partner HJM 4008 led by Rep. Tarleton in the House -- Washington State Legislators are stepping up to say no more to nuclear proliferation and are standing up to nuclear war and the new arms race. 

SJM 8006 urges that Washington “has a local responsibility to lead a national conversation about reducing and eliminating the threat of nuclear war and revamping our federal strategy.” The memorial goes on to urge the U.S. to lead a global effort to prevent nuclear war by laying out several policies aimed at reducing the extreme risks from these weapons as well as reducing our arsenals. 

If passed by the Washington Senate (and House), these Memorials would be sent to President Trump and the leaders of both houses of Congress, urging action on nuclear dangers from the highest levels of Washington state government. Similar resolutions were passed in California and Oregon in 2019.

“We are fortunate to have this quality of leadership in our Washington Legislature that is willing to challenge the very dangerous status quo and address these policy issues that ultimately reside at the national level,” said Dr. Bruce Amundson, Vice President of Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility.

“People in Washington State find ourselves in a crossfire of the New Nuclear Arms Race, since the presence of nuclear-armed submarines at the Kitsap-Bangor Naval base makes us a prime target in the case of a nuclear exchange,” said Carly Brook, Nuclear Weapons Abolition Organizer for Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility.

The Washington Against Nuclear Weapons coalition, comprised of over 50 organizations across Washington, and Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility, an organization of 900 health professionals, strongly support passage of these Memorial statements, and commend our elected officials for their foresight and leadership in putting them forward in the 2019 Legislature.