 My name is Sarah Layton. I am the chapter director for Sierra Club Maine. I just want to thank you for joining us. Just some logistical things before we get started. First, the presentation is being recorded, and it's also live on Facebook. We ask that you put yourself on mute for the presentation, and if you have any questions to enter them in the chat, you should see the chat button at the bottom of your screen, and we will read them then. Now I'd like to introduce David Gibson. He is an executive community member for Sierra Club Maine, and is going to be facilitating the conversation this evening. Hi. Welcome, everybody. I'd like to introduce Representative Chloe Maxman. She is serving her first term in the Maine House of Representatives. Maxman grew up on her family's farm in Nobleboro and has been a community organizer for more than 13 years. She has worked on numerous political campaigns and initiatives focusing on combating climate change and protecting Maine's environment. She is a graduate of Lincoln Academy, where she started the Climate Action Club. She attended Harvard College and co-founded Divest Harvard, a campaign calling on Harvard University to divest from fossil fuels that ultimately drew 70,000 supporters. Her work has been recognized by the Maine Women's Fund, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Real Time with Bill Mayer, CNN, MPBN, and more. Notably, as representative, she introduced a Green New Deal for Maine, LD1282, which passed in 2019. So without further ado, here is Chloe Maxman. Thank you so much, David, Sarah, Joan, Becky, and Sue, and everybody else on the call for having me. Chloe, we can't hear you. Oh, no. I can hear just me. I can hear him. It's just you. So you can hear me. OK. I see more shaking heads than nodding heads. I'm really grateful to be on here with you tonight and to talk about climate work in Maine. I was just going to share some slides with you, since I think looking at photos is probably more entertaining than looking at my face. So I'm going to hopefully this will work. OK. I assume you can all see my screen now. You can. OK. I'm going to press Play. And if you can't see it, just say something because it takes Zoom away. Everyone can see that too? OK. Yay. So OK. I always start with this photo when I talk because this is a photo of the Maine House of Representatives on the day that we were being sworn in in 2018. I genuinely never thought that I would find myself in office. I'm actually quite the introvert. And so there's a lot of challenges in me for being in politics. But the theme of everything that I'm about to talk about is that all that we love and care about circles back to politics. And so much of our political work happens at the state level. And therefore, so much of the work of elections happens at the local level. This is a realization that took me many years to come to. But I finally got there. And the more I'm in this space, the more I feel like it's really where everything is at these days. So I grew up on my family's farm in Nobleboro. And when I was young, I heard about the big proposal to develop the Moose Headwoods. And that was the first time I really got activated as a young person because I have always loved Maine. And I just began to see how there are these big forces that really want to come in and change what makes Maine Maine. And the Plum Creek development was really the first example of that. And it was through that experience that I began to understand the larger threats around climate change that were really bearing down on Maine and threatening to take away our culture, our economy, our way of life, everything that raised me and everything that I want to raise my children. So I went to Lincoln Academy for high school. And I started the Climate Action Club, which is actually still in existence, surprisingly enough. Actually, our faculty advisor, Mr. Simone, just retired this year, which is pretty crazy. So I did a little video for him. And it was fun to think back to the CAC days. But I was pretty mild back then. And we did a bunch of different things at Lincoln that from stopping idling to getting reusable bags all over. Damra Scott at Newcastle to getting more involved with the Plum Creek efforts. And it really was the first time that I saw the power of young people when they come together to really build something that goes beyond just a conversation. It can become a movement. And so with that experience, I went to Harvard for college. And during my first summer, I learned about the Tarsans Pipeline, the Trail Baker Pipeline that was running across Canada to Montreal, and then down through England to Casco Bay. And I remember sitting in my dorm at Harvard being like, oh my god, this is awful. What is happening here? The real kicker for me was that ExxonMobil owned 76% of this pipeline. And I came back to Maine this summer. And I actually worked with the Maine Sierra Club to document the pipeline and organize people against this proposal, because for so many reasons, pumping Tarsans through a very old pipeline that runs by the drinking water source for 20% of Maine's population is a really bad idea. So that's what I spent the summer doing. But then when I went back to Harvard in the fall, I was just really shocked about what I learned about the fossil fuel industry, how they're just trying to take advantage of small rural communities just to get their profit in. And so I went back to Harvard and started Divest Harvard. Our goal is to get Harvard to stop investing in fossil fuels. Harvard has the largest endowment of any entity on planet Earth. It's $40 billion. And it was really coming out of that summer being like, oh my gosh, Maine is so threatened by these massive corporations. And then going to Harvard and being like, hey, you're kind of like a massive corporation. Why don't you lead the way a little bit? So we started organizing. And another implicit goal of the divestment movement was that if we can get these really large actors to stop investing in fossil fuels, we can create a social stigma around the fossil fuel industry and build a movement that can reduce the fossil fuel industry's influence over our political system. And then the people can claim the space. So it was really when I was like getting into the political stuff. Anyways, with Divest Harvard, we started with a student vote on divestment, the first student vote on divestment in the world. 72% of Harvard students said it was a good idea. And we kept organizing. You're going to see this person's name throughout my slides because he's an integral part of my work and everything that I do. And I want to make his presence known. His name is Canyon. And he's my campaign manager. And we met at Harvard. So we started organizing, just trying to build a movement. People weren't really talking about climate justice at Harvard. And so it really felt like we were starting from ground zero. But no matter how much momentum we built on campus, the administration didn't listen. We tried a whole variety of tactics from sit-ins to social events and forums and everything else. Our campaign ultimately hit 70,000 supporters. Harvard still wouldn't listen. We fasted. We had students sue the university for failing to divest. The movement just kept building and building. We ultimately ended up sleeping outside Massachusetts Hall for six days and six nights, with just masses amounts of people coming back to campus to call on Harvard to stand on the right side of history. These are just some pictures of what we mobilized. This was year three of divest Harvard. So we had hundreds and hundreds of people showing up. And it was pretty amazing. It was a testament to the power of real climate justice organizing in this day and age. Harvard then went and hired a former oil executive as our CFO. So we did a little action around that. But anyways, my experience with divest Harvard ended up leaving me more confused and empowered at the end, because I saw through the divestment movement that we were really good at building on the ground movements around issues. But those movements still weren't talking about policy. We weren't really calling out politicians. We weren't organizing around campaigns. We weren't getting students out to vote. And I began to see that the climate movement had all this power, but it wasn't really political power, even though our goals are political. And so I wrote my thesis on that, and that's what this chunk of paper is that you see. And I was really interested in figuring out why we're building movements that don't have the political power that we need and how we can change that. So I moved back to Maine. I worked for The Nation. I worked on Bernie Sanders' campaign. I worked for Benchants' campaign in Lewiston. I was in Paris for COP 21, just going into all of these experiences with this lens of, how do we build a new kind of political power that's really effective? And I wanted to do that work in Maine because this is the place that I love. All of that thinking eventually led me to think, well, OK, what if I run for office? What if we actually experiment with a new type of politics in real life instead of doing it through other people's campaigns? One of the other, like some other facts that we're swirling around in my mind, as I was thinking about this, is that Democrats have lost a ton of power at the state level since the Obama era. We've lost 968 legislative seats. That's a lot. And if you look at the 2016 election results, the majority of the people that voted for Trump come from rural communities. And Democrats have just completely lost any base in rural America. And they also aren't really trying to get it back. So like Tom Perez says, you can't knock doors in rural America. So I'm back in Maine, and I'm trying to build political power. And I'm seeing how state politics and rural politics has just been completely left behind. So we launched our campaign for District 88, which is in the district that I grew up in. It's half of Nobleboro, and then all of Chelsea Whitefield and Jefferson for anybody who wants to know. District 88 has a 16% Republican advantage, which mirrors the advantage that Republicans have on the national level and never been held by a Democrat before. And there are just some really interesting dynamics in District 88 that I think make it symbolic of other possible rural organizing. Chelsea is one of my towns. It's right next to Augusta and has super high property tax rates. And Lincoln County, which is most of my district, is the oldest county by age in the country and tied as the most rural county in Maine. And Maine is the most rural county in America. Sorry, the most rural state in America. So lots of stuff at play here. But we came into our campaign thinking about how we could do it differently, how we could really build a community movement around politics that was really connecting everything that we're experiencing in our lives to the possibility of shifting that at the state house. We had house parties. I spent my entire existence knocking on doors. We ended up knocking 10,000 doors in our house race. These are just some other pictures of door knocking, because door knocking is where it's at when you're not in a pandemic. We, like one of the things we're most known for is we had hand-painted signs by local artists and we put them up all over the district. There's Canyon again, and I forgot to mention he ended up moving to Maine to manage my campaign. And so we had these big canvas days with all of our friends and family and community members. Almost everybody who volunteered on our campaign had never volunteered before. And I just met them door knocking or they were my friends from high school or from college and they were just like, oh, that's cool. So we were engaging all these new people just because a different type of person was running for office. We did everything ourselves. We did our own trainings, our own canvases. We created our own literature. We really came at it from a perspective of we need to do this differently and we need to figure out what that looks like. We had almost 100 letters to the editor and local papers. These are just some other signs in front of pictures that I put in here. I like the one that says we are glowy for Chloe. That's one of my favorite ones that came out of everything. And so I had a primary and we ended up winning our primary with 80% of the vote. The local town offices actually ran out of ballots because we turned out so many folks. We broke record turnout by 40%. But then we ended up, but then I went to talk. So for the primary, I was just talking to Democrats, but then after the primary, I was talking to all independents and Republicans. And I began to see this really interesting pattern of, so these are some, this is my mini van results, which is a thing that I use for canvassing. It pulls up a person's name and it tells me if they've been canvassed before by a Democrat candidate or volunteer. So these are all Republicans that I canvassed. And you can see the two on the left, they have never been talked to by a Democratic candidate in their entire voting history. The third one to the right hasn't been talked to since 2008. And the one on the far right was talked to but was marked as lean GOP by the Senate campaign. And we came in and talked to them and they ended up supporting us. So all of this is to say that when we come at politics and campaigning from a movement building perspective, which is really about inclusivity and listening and respect, we were reaching so many new people who have really been left out of the political process. The other thing that we did during our campaign is that we just talked to people many times to build real relationships. So in the primary, I talked to people, or I tried to talk to people eight times. And in the general, I talked to, I tried to talk to people four times. And I made, so these results are just showing you that I talked to people twice before they went to go to the poll so that I wasn't just like, hello, I'm Chloe, will you vote for me? But it was, oh yes, we have a relationship. And I ended up winning with 52.4% of the vote. So that was very exciting. A lot of people were kind of putting us in the blue wave bucket, but when we were looking at our results, we didn't really think that was true because in Jefferson, for example, which is the biggest town in my district, we were the only Democrat on the ticket to win in Jefferson. Janet Mills and Shelly Pingree did not win. So to us, it was more of a sign of what you can do when you're building a political movement that is based in values and not party. Since then, it's been my honor to represent District 88 in Augusta. I sponsored four pieces of legislation. They all came directly from conversations that I had from constituents. My biggest priority in Augusta has been staying rooted in my community so I actually can represent my community. I spend most of my time talking with constituents. I have coffee with Chloe's every month. I'm just constantly in contact with my constituents so I know what's going on. Of particular interest to this group is one of my bills was the main Green New Deal. Obviously, we've all heard of the Federal Green New Deal. The main Green New Deal was different. I called it Green New Deal to draw attention to a different way of talking about climate change that was really rooted in impacted communities in Maine and focused on a just transition. So to me, that means ensuring that we're moving towards a new energy in economy in a way that is just inequitable. I get most discouraged with climate work when I see us creating a world that feels just as unjust as the world that we're living in right now. And I think the way that we avoid that is through very intentional organizing. So the main Green New Deal was really rooted in rural working Maine. The bill itself was developed mostly with the AFL-CIO. Since the national AFL-CIO did not endorse the national Green New Deal, we were the first state Green New Deal to be endorsed by a state AFL affiliate, which was really amazing. The bill had five different parts at the beginning. And I was most excited about the task force for a Green New Deal that would have brought impacted communities to the table to chart out what a just transition looks like for Maine because that path does not exist yet. One day it will, but we don't know what it looks like yet for Maine. And so yeah, so you can see the pieces of the bill. We did a lot of organizing around the bill. We have the public hearing on the day of the youth climate day in Augusta so that the public hearing was really accessible to young people. We did a lot of work with the Maine AFL-CIO. These are just some pictures of the public testimony after sitting in committees for two years. I rarely saw young people come in and I was really excited that we had the opportunity for young folks to have their voices heard in Augusta. It was really almost all young folks and all people from the labor movement who were testifying on a climate justice bill. And that's pretty rare, unfortunately, in state politics. The bill ultimately got whittled down to just two pieces for a variety of reasons that I won't get into, but the first one really supports schools as they're transitioning to renewable energy. As I've mentioned before, property taxes are a huge thing in my district and I really wanted to make sure that there was an undue burden on property taxpayers because the transition was forcing schools to switch their energy sources. So there's lots of support for schools now because of the bill. The other part of the bill requires a certain number, a certain percentage of workers on electrical generation projects, two megawatts or more in Maine to come from apprenticeship programs at the state or federal level unless there aren't enough apprentices available. So it's not binding or burdensome on businesses, but what it's doing is creating that job pipeline that we always talk about. I always hear that businesses don't wanna develop in Maine because there aren't enough trained workers and trained workers don't wanna, or workers don't wanna get trained because there aren't enough businesses offering jobs here. So this fixes that problem. And it was language that came from the AFL-CIO and I was really proud to assure it through. The bill was passed out of committee and it was signed into law by Governor Mills last year. So that was all very exciting. I am now running for states on it. I won't go into that too much because I know that we're staying within the C3 bounds here, but to me, so much of the political work that I do is all about community. It's all about making sure that our politics is representative and accountable and transparent to the people that it's supposed to represent. And to me, the way that we engage folks in that conversation, how we bring new people into the fold, how we really have the conversations about how important politics is today, all of that happens on the campaign trail. So the opportunity to do that for me on a little bit of a bigger scale throughout the Senate district was really exciting. The Senate district is all of Lincoln County except for Justin, plus Washington and Windsor. So it's quite a big territory and it's all my home. So we launched in January. This is a picture of our launch. And once COVID hit, we immediately stopped campaigning and we started doing masses amounts of COVID relief. We have phone banks twice a week for 11 or 12 weeks. We ended up calling over 13,500 people and coordinating this incredible relief network. We were providing rides, food, literally anything that people needed during COVID, we provided it for them. And this is just a screenshot of one of our, of one of our phone banks because we did it all virtual. And it was just really amazing. We had almost 200 volunteers sign up and coordinate this effort with us. So it was quite amazing. And to me, it was just another example of how we can look at campaigns and politics really differently as a service for our community. It's not about getting somebody elected. It's not about one day in November. It's about building a movement of support to make a community stronger and more resilient as we move forward. So that's what I'm all about. I'm all about doing that in rural Maine and the other thing that I wanted to talk about is since I don't make enough money in the legislature to live off of, that's a topic for another time. I do a lot of other work and one of my other jobs is working for this amazing new group that I'll just touch on briefly because we're just getting started. It's called Just Me for Just Us and we are focused on building out a new kind of youth climate justice organizing in Maine that really focuses on funding and resourcing young folks in parts of Maine that don't usually receive resources from the climate movement. And so I'm really excited about that. A huge part of our work is really focusing on diversity, equity, inclusion. It's the core of everything that we do and there's just an amazing group of people. And I put our website on there if you wanna take a look at it. It's in its nascent stages but I'm super excited about it and I think it's gonna be a really exciting project. So I've talked for a long time. I have my email up there. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or if you're interested in getting involved with anything that we're doing at all. I'm gonna stop talking now and I'm gonna stop showing my screen. So thank you all so much. Great, thank you for that. And we do have a couple of questions so let me just pull them up. The first one is, have you been following the climate council's work? And if so, are there any particular proposals that you're excited about? Good question. I haven't been following the climate council that closely. Yeah, for a few reasons but I really stand by the main youth climate justice. They're a youth-led organization and they had a list of demands for the climate council in terms of how it's integrating a just transition framework. And to me, that's what I'm really looking for from the climate council. I've seen bills being proposed in the state house that are pro-climate but I think don't reflect the just transition lens. And so it ends up disproportionately burdening rural communities or poor communities. And so I just make, I just like, that's what I look for when I look at what the climate council is doing. Okay, great, thank you. And we have two questions that are similar in nature so I'll read them together. But what are the next steps for the Green New Deal for the next legislative session? And is there a follow-up bill to the Green New Deal that you're looking for? Yes, I want to respect the C3 confines of this conversation and I would say, so I would say yes. There are lots of things that I'm excited about and I'm looking at that are going through this year if we go back to session, which hopefully we do or that I would be sponsoring next year if I get re-elected and I'm happy to talk more about that in the appropriate space. The next question is, do you think the Green New Deal could play a role in helping our economy after COVID-19? And if so, how? Oh, that's such a good question. Yes, definitely. So I mean, that's such a big question because COVID-19 is a systemic crisis that has really laid bare the inequities of our society today. And we have to rebuild from that. And I think that's one of the reasons why this election in November is gonna be so important as a side note. But COVID has laid bare injustices just as the climate crisis has, is and will lay bare injustices in our society. So I think when we're rebuilding from COVID to me, the way that I've been thinking about it, the way that I talk about it with my constituents is through the framework of resilience and that making sure that we are building out, building out and building up communities in our state that are able to withstand these massive crises that we're in right now and that we know are coming our way. To me, that means supporting local agriculture, local businesses, access to broadband, access to healthcare. I mean, having a resilient local economy has everything that we need in a way that is accessible to all of us. I also think that one of the things about COVID is just seeing like who has access to what, when these crises come down on us. And I think it's obvious, but also we can, it's a moment for us to learn for when the brunt of the climate crisis comes down on us that we cannot repeat those same patterns in the future that in Maine people of color are getting COVID at a far greater rate than white folks and that's just not okay. So I think we have an opportunity to rebuild in an intentional way that I think is also building us up in a way that can protect what we love and our homes and families from climate change. Great. So it's a similar question, but what are some of your ideas to better ensure equity, inclusion, and justice as we move forward from COVID and towards our 100% RPS goals? And also just to add one of our C3, C4 experts has added that you can speak to the concept of a bill if you'd like to. Okay, cool. Thank you. Yeah, so there are definitely people in Maine who are far more qualified to talk about equity and inclusion than I am and I feel very privileged to work with them and I'll try and do them justice, but so I mean, first off is that I think that the conversation around diversity, equity, inclusion, it cannot be a siloed conversation. So it can't be like a conversation that only happens in this space if these people decide to go there. These are systemic issues, which means they have to be addressed in all of our spaces. So that means that, I guess this is one example. I've been following a lot of Rachel Talbot Ross's work. She is the only black woman in the Maine legislature and one of the things that she's calling for right now is a racial impact analysis on every single bill that we pass so that we know if it's gonna disproportionately affect people of color. So it's not just going to be applied to bills in the criminal justice committee, but all the bills that are going through the state house and I think it's that kind of approach that we need. So it's systemic and holistic. The other thing is really thinking about who's at the table. I mean, like as an obvious example, I think we've been electing the same kinds of people with the same identities and the same backgrounds and the same kind of, yeah, two politics for decades and decades and that hasn't gotten us anywhere. And I really think that one of the reasons why that doesn't move us forward is because your identity shapes the kind of policy that you sponsor or will work on or feel passionate about. We need all identities in the state house. And if we don't, then we're not creating policy that is really for all people. I think that's true of any official policy bodies that are coming out of legislative work as well that we need to think about who's at the table. Are we bringing people to the table who have always been there or are we bringing people to the table who couldn't be there because they're working, couldn't be there because they're taking care of their families, couldn't be there because they didn't have a car and couldn't afford to be there. And that was one of the reasons why I was so excited about the entities that I had in my original Green New Deal bill because they were intentionally bringing voices to the table that are not usually there but that are most impacted by the conversation. In one of the original parts of my bill, we were gonna create the commission on a just transition that would oversee the just transition to a new energy economy and make sure that it was just inequitable. And we had in there that a member of that commission would be somebody who was working in the fossil fuel industry. So, I think it's just thinking about things in a different way. And I think at least for me, it's like the only way to move forward. I think if we move forward in any way that is less than just, then we're just perpetuating the same cycles that we're trying to get away from. Great. And I see one more question, which is how is the Green New Deal going to be played out in Maine? Good question. Yes, so I think if we're talking about the Maine Green New Deal, that such a big part of that work was really trying to build a bridge between the climate community and the labor community. And that work is deep work that's gonna take a long time, longer than just one bill can do. But to me, that's the heart of so much of the work that needs to happen. And one of the things that this bill can lay the foundation for. From all my conversations talking with my constituents, I mean, most people know and acknowledge that climate change is a real crisis. But very few are thinking about it or like talking to me about it because there are other immediate things on their minds that they're dealing with. And so I think coming at the climate crisis from like rooted in a place of rural working America is providing a platform to really talk about it all in a different way that is more inclusive. It's not to say that's the only way to talk about it at all, like we need to be making all those connections, but at least for my community, that's how I see the Green New Deal playing out. And just, and also really being able to talk about why legislation is so important in this day and age. I think I often heard this argument when I was working on the bill that like the free market will get us there. And okay, maybe it will, but like part of the way that the market works, if we're gonna even talk about the market is that it's also influenced by policy and that policy guides us and policy is so important. And the policy is made by the people that we elect. So to me, so much of the another like path forward that the Green New Deal is laying out is just really saying pay attention to who you're voting for when you go to the ballot box. Yeah. Well, it seems like that's all the questions that we have. And I wanna offer a sincere thank you. It's fantastic having you spend some time talking with us this evening, Chloe. I wanna remind everyone that the Climate Council is hearing recommendations from the various working groups tomorrow and Thursday. So if you're interested in that, it's worth signing up for the Zoom conversation on the Climate Council's website. And Chloe, you may or may not have heard, we've been organizing a summit next week on creating a statewide green bank. And so we're gonna have a Zoom summit on Thursday next week. And you are obviously invited and we can send you an invitation with the info in that. But it's on Thursday afternoon from two to five and we have lined up the president of the Connecticut Green Bank to share some of the successes that they have seen in Connecticut. And one of their programs that I absolutely love is focused on low income neighborhoods and providing financing for low income. And they specifically targeted neighborhoods of color. And so trying to do that outreach and make sure that they were inclusive of low income communities of color. And so those are certainly the types of things that hopefully we can replicate. So thank you so much for your vision and for sharing with us tonight. And I hope everyone has a great evening. Thank you.