As a teacher and a father, I worry every day about the quality of our air, water, and soil. I worry about the effects of lead and polluted soil on the learning and health outcomes of my students. In this pandemic, we have seen evidence that communities which are exposed to more fine particulate matter – communities that tend to be poorer and inhabited by People of Color- see higher mortality rates from Covid-19. Dating back before the pandemic, air pollution alone causes 250,000 early deaths in our country. A transition to clean energy would save $37 billion a year in reduced hospitalizations and emergency room visits, and you cannot put a price on the numbers of lives saved.

Yet we are going in the wrong direction. On March 27th, Bill Cassidy stood by as the federal EPA announced it would stop enforcing air pollution regulations in the midst of a pandemic. That doesn’t make sense to me; we need cleaner and healthier lungs. On August 2nd, a transport ship spilled plastic pellets into the very waters that support our fishing industry. Politicians, if they bothered to care, argued over the blame instead of finding solutions. Most recently, Hurricane Laura led to up to 31 oil and chemical spills from creaking infrastructure. Apparently, it is cheaper to lobby folks like Bill Cassidy than to maintain 21^st century resilient infrastructure.

When we face immense, seemingly intractable challenges, we must remember that hope lies in the tremendous strength of our people. In the classroom, great teachers find solutions by drawing upon the strengths of their students. In the political space, we must find solutions that empower the people.

In order to fight to protect our air and water, we must provide information directly to the people. Just as you can type “weather” in the search bar and have access to localized data, you should be able to do the same with fine particulate matter, benzene, and other air pollutants. This starts by providing grants to local governments to collect hyper-local air pollution data. We can replicate approaches that are already proven to work, like placing monitoring devices on city vehicles or at every school. Next, we can work with the National Weather Service to enhance our access to air quality information and create easily searchable data.

When communities can see air pollution levels at their schools and homes and compare those to other neighborhoods across their cities, states, and country, then we can have a people-powered fight for clean air and clean water for our children. I would require the EPA and state agencies to use this data to examine disparate impacts of air pollution on poor communities and communities of color.

While we’re tracking air pollution around schools, let’s remove one of the largest, most immediate sources of air pollution for young people: school busses. We must initiate a program, based on cash-for-clunkers, to transition our fleet of school busses to electric power. With the promise of public support, we could spur tremendous private investment and private jobs right now.

 Another way to empower the people to drive environmental change is to establish a private right of action for environmental harm. Over and over again we see that our environmental “defense” is too often paid for and influenced by our worst polluters. Politicians may tell you they’ll change that, but as a non-politician I’m looking for answers that don’t rely on a fairy-tale. By giving people the right to bring suits over environmental harm, we make companies accountable to the people directly. No politicians involved.

We can empower our children with better health and better school performance by cleaning the lead from our pipes, paint, and soil. Now, at a time when unemployment is over ten percent – thank you, Senator Cassidy – is the perfect time to put people back to work doing the expensive but necessary work to clean lead pipes from schools in Tensas Parish and clean lead paint from homes in Alexandria. Eliminating lead is the clearest way to make sure our children live healthier and better lives than we do.

In the long term, reducing pollution means reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. Over the next 50 years, a transition to clean power will prevent 4.5 million premature deaths due to pollution. That starts with a requirement that utilities be carbon neutral by 2035 and that all cars on the road be carbon neutral by 2040. We must give our children a healthy environment and a sustainable energy plan on which to build their own dreams. In the meantime, those requirements will spur billions of dollars of private investment in the next two decades. We are accustomed to workers being left out when change occurs. Not this time. I pledge that this transition will empower workers, not large corporations and politicians.

• Bill Cassidy thinks that we need to bail out oil companies during a bust. I say that if you don’t pay extra taxes during a boom, don’t ask for a handout during the bust. I say that we need to empower workers with good-paying jobs and scholarships when oil and gas prices go down. We need a program so that any time the seven-day moving average of the price of oil is below $60 a gallon for sixty days, grants are made available to pay for job-training, retro-fitting of federal buildings, plugging orphan wells, and upgrading our electrical transmission system.
• Bill Cassidy thinks that clean energy is anti-business, but clean energy is one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy. The largest energy companies and car companies in the country have big sustainable energy departments that are ready to hire new people. But with the subsidies we have, we basically have politicians sitting on the boards of private companies directing money towards fossil fuels. That’s corporate socialism.
• Bill Cassidy has been in Washington for six years, and we still don’t have a national green bank to help finance private or local projects to improve resilience, building efficiency, and industrial heat investments.

With the environment, it comes down to yesterday versus tomorrow. Bill Cassidy is paid by yesterday’s profits from yesterday’s corporations. I will champion tomorrow’s industries by investing in tomorrow’s workers and unleashing innovation in tomorrow’s industries.