WORLDFIRE - Chapter 16, Part II
A Green Fire Rising
Enter the Green New Deal
The most potent expression of the green fire rising is the Green New Deal. When U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) released her vision for a Green New Deal in the fall of 2018, she made history by becoming the first federally elected official to propose a climate emergency response that, if it were to become law, might actually give our children and future generations a fighting chance of calming the climate. Here is how Rep. Ocasio-Cortez described the green energy plan: “The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan. It will require the investment of trillions of dollars and the creation of millions of high-wage jobs.”
For the rocket ship rise of the Green New Deal, we have America’s youth to thank. One week after the 2018 November midterm elections, 200 outraged youth climate activists, headed by the Sunrise Movement, planned a sit-in at Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi’s office to demand that a congressional committee be established to lay the groundwork for a Green New Deal. The spark that lit the fire was climate clueless remarks by party leaders that the Democratic Party was not planning on prioritizing major climate legislation in the new Congress. Mind you, Democratic leaders made this boneheaded announcement mere days after the release of the IPCC Special Report that had people in a panic. Sunrise colorfully called out the incoming House Speaker: "Nancy Pelosi is bringing a squirt gun to a wildfire." Then in a graphic display of just how much the 2018 midterms had changed the culture of Capitol Hill, the 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) responded to Sunrise’s request to publicize their protest by doing them one better and boldly joining the activists at Nancy Pelosi’s office. 51 Sunrise activists were promptly arrested for refusing to leave. The combustible combination of the rising political star of Representative-elect AOC attending the protest and scores of youth activists getting arrested, all at Pelosi’s office, proved irresistible to the national media and generated thousands of news stories.
While all of this was happening, AOC’s office was also working with the progressive groups Justice Democrats, New Consensus, and Climate Justice Alliance to draft a plan for the formation of a House Select Committee for a Green New Deal. Their greenprint called for “meeting 100% of national power demand through renewable sources,” for “eliminating greenhouse gas emissions,” and for a “massive investment in the drawdown of greenhouse gases,” all in ten years. It was a triple moon shot: a green energy moon shot, a zero emissions moon shot, and a negative emissions moon shot. This was the first time a federal lawmaker had ever proposed a climate emergency response equal to the actual emergency. Among those who publicly endorsed the vision was former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who called the ten-year zero emissions goal “a very, very good initiative.”
Three days after the sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s office, hundreds more Sunrise activists assembled at the U.S. Capitol, this time targeting another member of the Democratic old guard–my former boss from decades prior, U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ)–to challenge his disappointing opposition to the Green New Deal House Select Committee. Building the pressure, the group four days later organized 150 in-district congressional office visits, where they found unexpected levels of congressional support for the Green New Deal Committee. A few weeks later, 1,000 more Sunrise activists descended on Capitol Hill calling even more loudly for a Green New Deal, which included more mass sit-ins and resulted in more than 140 arrests. This was followed by a coalition of over 600 green groups releasing a letter to Congress calling for a 100% renewable electricity grid by 2035 or earlier as part of any Green New Deal (their timeline was a bit off, but their rejection of nuclear, biomass, large-scale hydropower, waste-to-energy, and combustion-based power generation as “renewable” was spot-on). AOC and the youth groups failed to get the Green New Deal Committee they sought. Pelosi chose instead to form a strong-sounding but toothless “Select Committee on the Climate Crisis” that lacked the power to introduce legislation (yet nevertheless ended up laying the groundwork for many of the provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act), but they succeeded in planting the concept of a Green New Deal squarely on the U.S. political map.
Building on this success, AOC found a Senate partner for her Green New Deal vision in U.S. Senator Ed Markey (D-MA). Instead of rolling out detailed legislation, the two policymakers introduced a big picture non-binding resolution (one for the Senate and one for the House) from which to build public support for their vision, with details to be fleshed out through subsequent legislation. True to the urgency of the emergency, their resolution called for a U.S. transition to 100% renewable energy and zero emissions in ten years, to be achieved through a national mobilization similar to America’s World War II home front mobilization. Drawing inspiration from FDR’s original New Deal and his 1944 State of the Union message calling for a second Bill of Rights to provide security and prosperity for all, the AOC/Markey resolution included a job guarantee with a family-sustaining wage; health care; affordable housing; family and medical leave; and retirement security, along with strengthening and protecting the rights of workers to unionize. At a Capitol Hill press conference where the resolution was unveiled, the Associated Press reported: “Answering critics who call the plan unrealistic, Ocasio-Cortez says that when President John F. Kennedy wanted to go to the moon by the end of the 1960s, ‘people said it was impossible.’ She also cites Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society and the interstate highway system begun under Dwight D. Eisenhower as examples of American know-how and capability.”
The resolution had 67 original co-sponsors in the U.S. House and 11 co-sponsors in the U.S. Senate (including seven presidential hopefuls). While the bulk of their vision was breathtakingly bold, compromise language also left it lacking in several key respects. I’ll come back to this, but first a little history on the concept of the Green New Deal.
Ideas like a Green New Deal don’t just drop out of the sky. They are often years–in this case, decades–in the making. As climate blogger Joe Romm wrote in 2019: “[W]hile the Green New Deal may appear to be a sweeping and radical new proposal, in fact its main ideas strongly resemble the 2016 Democratic Platform… As the 2016 text reads: ‘We are committed to a national mobilization, and to leading a global effort to mobilize nations to address this threat on a scale not seen since World War II.’ Meanwhile the Green New Deal says we need ‘a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II.’” Romm’s conclusion? “[T]he Green New Deal is a logical outgrowth of the 2016 Democratic Platform.” My conclusion? Romm’s right. But just as important to the birth of the Green New Deal was Standing Rock and the Great Sioux Nation’s heroic stand against the Dakota Access oil pipeline, for that is where AOC first became inspired to run for Congress. No Standing Rock water protectors, no AOC in Congress. No AOC in Congress, no Green New Deal.
But the concept has an even longer history than that. Author Mark Hertsgaard publicly advocated for a Green New Deal as far back as 1998 in his engrossing book, Earth Odyssey. Because Hertsgaard’s vision was global in scale, he called it the “Global Green Deal.” Here was his prescient proposal in a nutshell: “The idea is to renovate human civilization from top to bottom—to redesign and retrofit everything from our farms to our factories, our garages to our garbage dumps, our schools, shops, houses, offices and everything inside them… One model worth emulating… is the New Deal that President Franklin Roosevelt launched in the thirties to propel the US economy out of depression… The basic function of the New Deal was to restore demand to the economy by, among other measures, guaranteeing workers a minimum wage, and putting the unemployed to work in government-funded public works projects.”
In 2006, the U.S. Green Party developed as one of its top policy priorities a Green New Deal similar to what is now being embraced by Democrats. As described by the Green Party: “The Green New Deal 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.” So the U.S. Green Party also deserves credit for the conversation we are now having.
In 2007, Thomas Friedman called for his own version of a “Green New Deal” in a New York Times op-ed. That same year, a group of high-level experts in the UK, called the Green New Deal Group, began advocating for a Green New Deal in the UK “to power a renewables revolution.” In 2008, the Post Carbon Institute issued a report called “The Real New Deal,” urging the Obama administration to embrace a “thorough redesign of our economic and societal infrastructure” to "address not only our transportation system and electricity grid, but also our food system and building stock.” In reaction to the global economic meltdown, the United Nations in 2009 called for a “Global Green New Deal” to revive the global economy and create jobs “while simultaneously accelerating the fight against climate change, environmental degradation and poverty.” At a 2009 meeting of the G20 in Pittsburgh, the UN “called on the 20 most advanced economies to engage in a Global Green New Deal by investing at least 1 per cent of their total GDP in promoting green economic sectors.” As you may recall, a Green New Deal was also at the heart of the Zero Emissions America group my friend Paul and I contemplated launching in 2011–as part of a national strategy to put people to work transforming our energy systems and rebuilding America’s infrastructure.
So the Green New Deal concept is hardly new. Many thought leaders and organizations have been advocating for it for a long time, but it took some uniquely creative in-your-face confrontation and perfect political timing by fed up youth activists, combined with the courageous political leadership of the youngest member of the 116th Congress, to give the idea traction within the Democratic Party and thrust it into the national limelight. That we are at long last having a national conversation about this commonsense policy prescription is thanks to America’s youth.
Not that the political establishment welcomes that conversation. It doesn’t. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissively mocked the Green New Deal back in 2019, saying, “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?" Come again? America is all about dreaming big dreams and actualizing those dreams. America herself is the manifestation of such a daring dream. In that sense at least, the Green New Deal is a “green dream.” But it’s the kind of dream that must come true if we are to have any hope of continuing to live on this planet. That is the truth, whether politicians want to hear it or not. My respect for former Speaker Pelosi’s record of leadership aside, the other truth I would remind the political establishment of is this: the young voters are coming.
But for all the Green New Deal resolution offered, it is notable for what it did not. Most notably, it failed to address the elephant in the room: the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground. It also leaned way too heavily on the findings of the IPCC, which we have already established consistently understate the true risks to humanity from climate breakdown. Most green groups nevertheless endorsed the visionary resolution, but these and other gaps prompted some of us to temper deserved praise with constructive critiques. It is easy to critique the work of others. What is hard is what these climate youth did: they forced the issue by boldly seizing the moment.
Friends of the Earth’s president, Erich Pica, wrote: “We enthusiastically endorse the many pieces of the resolution that call for systemic change. But by failing to expressly call for an end of the fossil fuel era, the resolution misses an opportunity to define the scope of the challenge.” Food & Water Watch’s Executive Director, Wenonah Hauter, echoed this point by reminding us that “any legislation that does not explicitly address the urgent need to keep fossil fuels in the ground is insufficient. A Green New Deal must ban fracking and stop the buildout of dangerous fossil fuel infrastructure.” Greenpeace USA’s Climate Director, Janet Redman, similarly said: “The fossil fuel industry will not transition willingly and on its own… a Green New Deal must include a just and managed phase out of oil, gas and coal, starting in the most overburdened communities.” The Climate Mobilization endorsed the resolution while also pointing out these shortcomings: “It relies on the deeply flawed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, and calls for global zero emissions by 2050. This is way too late.” The Indigenous Environmental Network critiqued the resolution by reminding us that “the most impactful and direct way to address the problem is to keep fossil fuels in the ground.” They rightly declared: “We can no longer leave any options for the fossil fuel industry to determine the economic and energy future of this country.”
In 2019, Pope Francis added his voice to the “keep it in the ground” movement by bluntly telling a group of international finance ministers visiting the Vatican: “Investments in fossil fuels continue to rise, even though scientists tell us that fossil fuels should remain underground.... we are trapped by our faulty accounting and by the corruption of vested interests. We still reckon as profit what threatens our very survival.” We have to have the hard conversation about keeping fossil fuels in the ground and we have to have it now. It defies logic to think we can zero out emissions while allowing business-as-usual mining and drilling and new fossil fuel plants to be built. In recognition of this reality, a growing number of nations, among them France, Denmark, New Zealand, Costa Rica, and Belize, have declared their intentions to ban new oil exploration. Two of these nations, Denmark and Costa Rica, created the “Beyond Oil & Gas Alliance” to recruit other nations to join them in phasing out fossil fuels. Around this same time, California became the first U.S. state to commit to ending oil and gas drilling, but we can’t wait until 2045 to do it. The only way for America to get to zero emissions and beyond is with a ban on new fossil fuel infrastructure, joined by a rapid, thoughtfully managed phase-out of existing carbon sources and a crash program to naturally draw down carbon. Getting to zero isn’t complicated math. It’s common sense.
I will say again that we cannot leave a single fossil fuel worker–the miners, the drillers, the roughnecks, the engineers, and others who have worked so hard for so long to keep civilization humming along–hung out to dry by this economic transition. All must be made whole as part of a just transition. Climate blogger David Roberts spoke to this point in a 2019 op-ed he wrote about the Green New Deal (GND): “Part of good industrial policy is shielding ordinary people from the sometimes harsh consequences of economic transformation. The New Deal did that fairly well with land grants, bonds, and job programs, but all its programs were biased strongly in favor of white men. The GND does not want to repeat those mistakes. So alongside the decarbonization targets for electricity, transportation, industry, and buildings are a series of provisions ensuring that everyone can get a job, that everyone can access health care regardless of their job situation, and that the benefits of public investment will be channeled toward the most vulnerable communities. It says to Americans: we are going to do something really big, fast, disruptive, and ambitious, but during the transition, you will not be left behind… We are going to do this big thing together, all of us, and through it we will lift each other up.” The Green New Deal is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to remake society in a way that enriches all of our lives in more ways than we can imagine.
The Green New Deal concept got a rocket propulsion boost when in 2019 the C40 group of mayors (representing nearly 100 of the world’s largest cities) announced their support for a Global Green New Deal. Another who has embraced the Green New Deal with gusto is U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), whose 2020 presidential campaign pledged a historically bold climate initiative to “launch the decade of the Green New Deal, a ten-year, nationwide mobilization centered around justice and equity during which climate change will be factored into virtually every area of policy, from immigration to trade to foreign policy and beyond.” His plan pledged a $16 trillion public investment “in line with the mobilization of resources made during the New Deal and WWII” that includes “black, indigenous and other minority communities who were systematically excluded in the past.” In 2021, the Movement for Black Lives introduced the Red, Black, and Green New Deal, a greenprint “for a sustainable, renewable future in defense of Black lives.” Expanding on that vision is the Black Climate Mandate, which “calls for dismantling the status quo, providing climate reparations, and investing NGO and government resources in transformative climate-change strategies and alternatives that protect and defend all Black lives.” As lucidly explained by the climate and environmental justice collective, The Black Hive: “It’s actually because of anti-Black racism that the climate crisis has taken the shape it has. If policy makers had not treated our communities as expendable for more than 400 years, polluting industries would not have free reign to pursue the over-consumption, extraction of our planet, and rampant capitalism that have destroyed our planet and our people.”
Because it so threatens the fossil fuel barons and those who prop them up, conservative lawmakers and corporate media outlets were quick to pounce on the Green New Deal concept by misrepresenting what it is and how much it would cost. This is to be expected from climate-denying Republicans and the likes of Fox News, but what opponents of the Green New Deal do not want to talk about is the economic cost of not taking bold action. In 2018 alone, extreme weather and climate disasters bled the U.S. economy of $91 billion. This is a fact. Even the Trump administration’s 2018 National Climate Assessment projected that climate-related impacts will rob the U.S. economy upwards of $500 billion annually by century’s end. Another study projects losses to the global economy of more than $23 trillion per year if temperatures reach 4°C, a threshold yet another study gives us a 93% chance of breaching under a business as usual scenario. Our failure to address this global crisis is what will crash the U.S. and global economies. That is the simple truth. Pay close attention to those who say we can’t afford to invest in a Green New Deal. They are some of the same people who in 2017 said we could afford a GOP tax cut for the morbidly rich. Many of those same GOP politicians complained in 2021 that we couldn’t afford a $1.9 trillion emergency stimulus to help everyday Americans and small businesses cope with the Covid pandemic. When we decide something is important to us, we always seem to find the money.
Take war. Brown University’s “Costs of War” project estimates the U.S. has spent $8 trillion on post-9/11 wars, money that would have created at least 1.4 million jobs had it been invested in green energy, health care, or education. Now consider the highest cost of all; the cost in human lives. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians have died in the violence of post-9/11 wars. The war in Afghanistan claimed the lives of more than 2,300 U.S. soldiers, with tens of thousands more wounded. The Iraq War, a war many of us vehemently opposed seeing it was based on a lie, cost the lives of more than 4,500 U.S. servicemembers and wounded tens of thousands more. Yet not one depraved architect of that unprovoked war was ever held accountable for those deaths, just as no one in the Bush/Cheney administration was ever prosecuted for the illegal torture done in our name. I am not a pacifist. I support common sense military preparedness, but think about how much money the U.S. bleeds on military conflicts around the world perpetuating the vicious cycle of man’s inhumanity to man. Then think about the fact that the U.S. Department of Defense is one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in the world by virtue of it being the world’s largest consumer of oil. If we have trillions to spend on perpetual warfare that makes Americans less safe, we have the resources to secure the homeland from climate breakdown to make us more safe.
As a nation, we are way overinvested in weapons of war and way underinvested in instruments of peace. Isn’t it time we had a U.S. Department of Peace? Prioritizing dispute resolution and ecological restoration through nonviolent means is actually a rational choice. Imagine that if instead of launching resource wars for oil and droning innocent noncombatants in faraway lands the U.S. were to launch a green industrial revolution to get us off of oil and build international goodwill by delivering solar panels to those in need around the world. We need to get back to making friends, not enemies. Just as Americans deep down are much more united than divided, so are the people of the world–no matter their national, political, religious, or ethnic identities–much more alike than not. I don’t deny that destructive forces exist in the world, but we need to stop letting politicians and corporations with their self-serving agendas drive fearful wedges between us. Enough with the demonizing. People are people, no matter where they were born. Deep down, we all want the same thing. We want to be loved. And we want to be treated with dignity and respect. Picture a human family cooperatively co-existing on a healthy planet. If enough of us want it badly enough, and work for it hard enough, we can have it. Why settle for a habitable planet when we can have a more peaceful one, too?
Given that the U.S. is historically responsible for most of the world’s heat-trapping greenhouse gases, are we and other developed nations not ethically bound to share our green technologies with the less industrialized world as part of some sort of Green Marshall Plan? The original Marshall Plan, formally known as the “Foreign Assistance Act of 1948,” was a humanitarian American aid initiative designed to help Europe rebuild after World War II “to promote world peace and the general welfare, national interest, and foreign policy of the United States through economic, financial, and other measures necessary to the maintenance of conditions abroad in which free institutions may survive.” What could be more apropos than for us to help the world’s poorest nations rebuild from the climate disasters they face today?
As climate chaos intensifies, so will the need for climate disaster relief missions. The U.S. military is not just a formidable fighting force. It is also a potent humanitarian force. Nowhere was this humanitarianism on more dramatic display than in the skies above Berlin in the aftermath of World War II. In response to the Berlin Blockade–a Soviet Union rail, road, and canal blockade of Allied access to Berlin’s western sector–the U.S. Air Force organized the Berlin Airlift to save West Berliners from starving and freezing to death. Over the course of 15 months, U.S. and British cargo planes flew a staggering 278,000 flights over the German capital, dropping food, fuel, and medicine to more than 2 million desperate Berliners. What if instead of making generations of new enemies around the world in the name of keeping America safe we got back to making some friends and actually made ourselves safer by reasserting ourselves as a powerful force for good in the world? There are many nations we can forge friendships with. Have we not learned by now that economic desperation is a breeding ground for violence and hatred? Poverty and lack of hope rob people of their dignity. A U.S.-led Green Marshall Plan would serve as a bulwark against the radicalization of those who might do us harm. Think of it as an investment in our national security. In his seminal book, Boiling Point, the late, great climate truth-teller, Ross Gelbspan, drives this point home by asserting: “Were the United States to spearhead a wholesale transfer of clean energy to developing countries, that would do more than anything else in the long term to address the economic desperation that underlies anti-U.S. sentiment.”
We could build on the work of groups like Power for All, which has the stated mission of “delivering access to energy for the 85 percent of the 1.1 billion people without reliable power that live in rural areas within 10 years” using decentralized, distributed, and democratized renewables. As you ponder that, consider this: the poorest 50% of the world’s people are responsible for only about 10% of carbon dioxide emissions. Alternatively, 50% of global emissions come from just 10% of the world’s population. I love how climate equity specialist Tom Athanasiou distinguishes between “survival emissions” and “luxury emissions.” In a briefing paper called “FAIR SHARES,” he thoughtfully writes: “A ton of CO2 emitted from the burning of a kerosene lamp to light a small home is not the same as a ton emitted from, say, a private spacecraft. Or from long-distance holiday travel. Survival emissions are, morally speaking, as distinct from luxury emissions as incomes required to meet basic needs are distinct from incomes utilized to fulfill discretionary desires.” This frames it accurately as a moral issue of equity and justice. Think of such a Green Marshall Plan as not just an investment in America’s future, but as an investment in the wellbeing of the entire human family.
Do we not owe this to others who are suffering through no fault of their own from the legacy of destructive carbon emissions our nation has emitted (and continues to emit)? Do we not owe this to ourselves? Mature nations, and mature people, take responsibility for their actions. The U.S. has racked up a huge historic carbon debt since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Debt forgiveness in exchange for protecting Amazon rainforests, for example, would go a long way toward balancing the global carbon debt ledger. It would also release some of the international debt pressure currently driving many poor nations to exploit–instead of protect–their lands to pay off even the interest on those debts. What I am proposing is not some utopian dream. America has a long history of performing humanitarian acts. What I am proposing is a rational choice in favor of our mutually assured survival.
NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.