More than a handful of times in the last few weeks, I’ve woken up to hazy skies and a peach red sun as a result of smoke from the West Coast wildfires. The wildfires, or “climate fires,” are a devastating reminder of how climate change continues to grow in severity year by year. Today, I want to look at something that might help us course correct.
Since Nov. 2018, the Green New Deal has taken center stage in just about every public discussion of environmental policy. Each time it comes up on the news, I feel a little more optimistic that we might finally see a comprehensive climate action plan come to fruition.
What is the Green New Deal?
How did talk of the Green New Deal come to be so prevalent — and what exactly is it? It can get pretty confusing. Broadly, the Green New Deal refers to an umbrella of policies that aim to pull the US economy off of fossil fuels, minimize national greenhouse gas emissions, and create millions of jobs in sustainable energy.
To understand more precisely what the term means today, it’s helpful to follow the Green New Deal’s recent evolution chronologically. Charting this evolution is also useful for another reason: it provides insight into the remarkable effectiveness of youth activism in shaping national policy discourse.
Roots of something revolutionary
While the Green New Deal is not a new idea, the various forms it has taken on recently have garnered much more attention than previous iterations — and that isn’t just happenstance. The unprecedented media coverage has come about in no small part thanks to the concerted effort of the youth climate activists behind the Sunrise Movement.
Founded just three years ago, the Sunrise Movement helped catapult the Green New Deal into the headlines seemingly overnight by leading a sit-in of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in Nov. 2018, urging her to create a House committee on the Green New Deal. They were able to recruit to their cause Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had just won election to the House with climate policy as a top priority. She and Senator Ed Markey agreed to be ambassadors for the Green New Deal in Congress.
In Feb. 2019, Ocasio-Cortez and Markey introduced a Green New Deal resolution to Congress. This congressional resolution wasn’t a path to policy implementation yet, but instead served as an affirmation of the weight of the climate crisis and an outline of how it should be addressed. Despite being only 14 pages long, the resolution served as a precursor for the more fleshed out proposals we see today.
The document begins by acknowledging the many adverse repercussions of climate change, including the extreme weather events that are so pressing around the country right now. It goes on to establish goals such as minimizing the carbon emissions of the transportation sector, renovating buildings nationwide to be more durable and energy efficient, upgrading our heterogenous electrical grid, and “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.” Dictated by the dire warnings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, all of this is meant to be achieved within a 10 year window.
The plan underscores the creation and protection of jobs as part of the process of achieving these goals and simultaneously stresses equitable treatment for all citizens, especially Native Americans and other people of color. These elements are taken as non-negotiables — the Green New Deal would be untenable without a just transition for the workers who stand to have their livelihoods transformed the most by the decarbonization of the economy.
Rounding out an already expansive to-do list, the resolution further touches on universalizing access to secure housing, healthcare, and higher education, as well as strengthening unions and environmentally-conscious trade deals.
The analogy drawn between the Green New Deal and FDR’s New Deal is deliberate — the Green New Deal would result in fundamental shifts in the economy and the American workforce amidst a sprawling nationwide mobilization against climate change.
The Green New Deal two years later
Fast forward to the present: the world has been turned upside down by the coronavirus pandemic, but youth activists have not been deterred. Global climate strikes drew millions of participants, and the Sunrise Movement continues to expand its grassroots national network and apply unceasing pressure on elected officials to commit to aggressive climate action.
Much energy has also been poured into substantiating the skeleton Green New Deal framework from last February, turning those 14 pages of objectives into workable policy.
In June, the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis unveiled a 500 page report with extensively detailed policy recommendations. This report doesn’t map one-to-one to the original Green New Deal resolution, but it does retain its main objectives and match its urgency.
On the presidential field, the climate platform of Joe Biden’s campaign, which members of the Sunrise Movement helped craft, aligns closely with the House report and is seen as the most ambitious environmental plan of a major party nominee ever.
These are the fruits of activists’ labor. In just two years, young people have completely altered the policy landscape on climate change.
Taking stock and looking forward
The family of Green New Deal proposals are of course not without controversy. If you go looking for their flaws, you will absolutely find them, whether that comes down to logistics or political feasibility. But the Green New Deal can’t be faulted for its ambition.
There are wildfires tearing through the West Coast, severe storms battering the Gulf, and historic floods submerging the Midwest. The human costs of these disasters are gutting. And economically, extreme weather events could cause as much as 2 billion dollars in lost global GDP per day by 2030.
It’s hard to continue arguing for incremental climate regulations because the policies we enact today are no longer just about forestalling future troubles, but mitigating the turmoil we’re already facing in the present. The patchwork approach to environmental policy that we have relied on thus far amounts to applying Band-Aids to burn wounds. As we circle the drain of climate disaster, what we need first of all is a plug.
This is why the Green New Deal makes me optimistic. Hope should be accompanied by action. The energy around the Green New Deal, driven by young activists, has resulted in a cascade of research and mobilization. Whether we have a new presidential administration or a continuation of the current one after this year’s elections, we are closer than we have been in years to meaningful and lasting solutions.
Further reading
green new deal 2020; green new deal 2020; green new deal 2020; green new deal 2020
- Charting the Course of the Green New Deal - October 20, 2020
- What We Can Learn from the Search Engine that Plants Trees - August 25, 2020
- Meet Luke - August 6, 2020