Best News in a Long Time: The Green New Deal

Photo credit: Rachael Warriner / Shutterstock.com

By Randa Solick
Santa Cruz Branch

This is going to be GOOD NEWS!!! Take a deep cleansing breath – and imagine we are successful. We pull the planet out of its death spiral, we create a just society for everyone, and the despair is lifted from all shoulders. Wow – gratitude and hope just in time!!!!

We’ve all been hearing about the Green New Deal. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and more than 15 members of Congress are calling for a select committee with a mandate to draft comprehensive legislation: a Green New Deal. Based on FDR’s concept of the New Deal that helped rescue the country from the Great Depression of the 30s, this Green New Deal could be a game-changer.  

At this winter’s San Francisco Global Climate Action Summit, progressive activists declared: Action on climate change will not be effective until it expands beyond the goal of bringing about an end to the unsustainable use of fossil fuels. It has to include plans that create jobs, that lead to economic justice for poor communities, that transfer power from corporations to us, the people. It has to include the earth, our food, our health, our values.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report tells us we have about 12 years – 12 years!!!! – to get carbon emissions under control before catastrophic climate change impacts become unavoidable.
 
One solution: It’s called the Green New Deal (GND), harkening back to FDR’s original New Deal in the 1930s. It proposes a massive program of investments in clean-energy jobs and infrastructure, meant to transform not just the energy sector, but the entire economy. It is meant both to decarbonize the economy and to make the economy fairer and more just.

On November 13, 2018, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) proposed to form a Select Committee on Climate Change and a GND, and presented to Speaker Pelosi this Full Resolution. Current co-sponsors include Democratic Reps. Brendan Boyle (Penn.), Joaquin Castro (Texas), Yvette Clarke (N.Y.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Ro Khanna (Calif.), Ted Lieu (Calif.), Joe Neguse (Colo.), and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.).

That’s why Naomi Klein wrote of hope: “Decades from now, if we are exquisitely lucky enough to tell a thrilling story about how humanity came together in the nick of time to intercept the metaphorical meteor, … the moment will be when a group of fed-up young people from the Sunrise Movement occupied the offices of Pelosi after the midterm elections, calling on her to get behind the plan for a Green New Deal — with Ocasio-Cortez dropping by the sit-in to cheer them on…. “[we have] been waiting a very long time for there to finally be a critical mass of politicians in power who understand not only the existential urgency of the climate crisis, but also the once-in-a-century opportunity it represents.” (Read "We Can Pay for a New Green Deal" on huffingtonpost.com).

The Green Party summarizes the GND’s main tenets here. “The Green New Deal (full language version) is a four-part program for moving America quickly out of crisis into a secure, sustainable future. Inspired by the New Deal programs that helped us out of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Green New Deal will provide similar relief and create an economy that makes our communities sustainable, healthy and just.

The Four Pillars of the Green New Deal

I - THE ECONOMIC BILL OF RIGHTS ensures all citizens: the right to employment; workers’ rights; single payer healthcare; free tuition for education pre-K-college; publicly owned utilities; fair taxation.

II - A GREEN TRANSITION will convert the old, gray economy into a new, sustainable economy that is environmentally sound, economically viable and socially responsible: invest in green businesses; promote green research for alternative energy; green jobs.

III - REAL FINANCIAL REFORM will:  finance the GND through public banking, progressive taxation, and reduced military spending; relieve debt burden; give the public control of money supply; break up oversized banks; restore Glass-Steagall; promote public banks.

IV - A FUNCTIONING DEMOCRACY will:  revoke corporate personhood; protect the right to vote; ensure public financing of all elections; strengthen media democracy; end the war on immigrants; rein in the military-industrial complex.

This is urgent, AND hopeful!  Please discuss in your branches what we in WILPF can do to support this.  

For a start, we can participate in the early February national week of action.

A February 4, 2019, article on Common Dreams says the early February national week of action will call us to:

• Halt all new fossil fuel extraction, infrastructure, and subsidies, and transition power generation to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035 or sooner;
• Rapidly decarbonize the agriculture and transportation sectors, and expand access to public transportation;
• Ensure a fair and just transition, led by impacted workers and communities, including low-income and communities of color, without relying on corporate schemes or market-based mechanisms;
• Uphold indigenous rights; and
• Pass a national jobs guarantee, creating good jobs with collective bargaining and family-sustaining wages.    

In the next eNews, I’ll explain some of the background of the GND, provide details of the pillars, and share more ideas for what we can do.

Many thanks, and I hope to hear from some of you with your ideas and plans for action. Contact me at rsolick@gmail.com.

(This article contains edited and paraphrased excerpts from many websites and papers about the GND; write to me for details, URLs, and references: rsolick@gmail.com.)