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In a video for the Intercept, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lays out an exciting vision of the future
by following a young girl Illeana: “Her first job out of college was with AmeriCorps
Climate, restoring wetlands and bayous in coastal Louisiana. Most of her friends were
in her union, including some oil workers in transition. They took apart old pipelines
and got to work planting mangroves with the same salary and benefits. Of course when it
came to healing the land, we had huge gaps in our knowledge. Luckily Indigenous communities
offered generational expertise to help guide the way.”
This snapshot of AOC’s future is bright, but it’s going to require work. And one
of the centerpieces of that bright future is a Green New Deal. An idea that has many
iterations and at least as many critics. Just looking at cable news it’s hard to even
understand what the Green New Deal is. According to cable news, it seems like an impassable
piece of legislation that will destroy the world. Well, the Green New Deal will certainly
not destroy the world, and it definitely has large public support. So, today we’re going
to go through what a Green New Deal proposes and why it’s so important at this moment.
At its core the Green New Deal is an idea, a vision of a future. It’s not one single
piece of policy that has to be passed through the United States congress, it’s a framework
through which to understand how to transition our world from a climate crisis into a just,
equitable, and post-climate change future. In the U.S. the Green New Deal has coalesced
around a proposal championed by Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey, but
there are hundreds of Green New Deal proposals around the globe tailored to specific countries
or municipalities as well as even more visionary frameworks like the Red Deal, which expands
upon the Green New Deal by centering indigenous liberation and environmental anti-colonialism.
The key idea between all of these Green New Deals is this: climate change is a massive
crisis that is both caused by and exacerbates economic inequality, racism, militarism, and
conflict. This means that addressing climate change necessitates addressing racism, militarism,
and inequality. Essentially, climate action must include intersectional analysis in order
to succeed.
This is a crucial shift in thinking within mainstream environmental and climate action
circles, which have historically been dominated by white folks and white supremacist thinking,
which often separates climate action from racial oppression, ableism, and economic injustice.
Indeed the sentiment that addressing systems of oppression in conjunction with climate
change will stymie climate action still runs rampant throughout the climate movement. Michael
Mann, a leading climate scientist expressed this opinion a year ago in Nature. He writes,
“My worry is this. Saddling a climate movement with a laundry list of other worthy social
programmes risks alienating needed supporters (say, independents and moderate conservatives)
who are apprehensive about a broader agenda of progressive social change.” But he’s
wrong. We’ve tried slow incremental technological and policy change for the last 40 years, and
there hasn’t been much progress. We also know that this siloed neoliberal approach
to climate change doesn’t work. French President Emmanuel Macron’s gas tax is a perfect example.
Macron placed a tax on gas that disproportionately burdened poor and working class people, and
then turned around and lowered France’s wealth tax by 70% as well as proposed capping
welfare benefits and pensions. The backlash that ensued was inevitable. Workers rose up
in anger, and the gas tax was a failure because it did what so many neoliberal policies have
done before it: it characterized climate action as a necessary evil that will increase the
cost of living for working people. These kinds of market-based, single-issue solutions then,
are not the answer. System change needs to happen to truly address the scale of the climate
crisis. The Green New Deal recognizes this reality and understands that the root causes
of climate change are the same as the root causes of many other struggles: capitalism,
imperialism, colonialism, and racism.
So then what would a Green New Deal look like? In the U.S. specifically, it needs to focus
on two concepts, abolition and abundance. Abolition in the sense that it needs to dismantle
networks of harm that have led to the myriad of crises we are now facing. Abolition of
fossil fuels yes, but also abolition of a carceral state that has enslaved Black Americans
for over 400 years. Abolition of a military that has destabilized whole countries and
fostered one of the most polluting industries in the world. And Abolition of a neoliberal
capitalist economy that allows for 3 people to own the same amount of wealth as 150 million
people. But, as prison abolitionist and geography professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes, “abolition
means not just the closing of prisons but the presence, instead of vital systems of
support that many communities lack.” Abolition, then, is much more about abundance than absence.
This is why the Green New Deal is important. Yes, it seeks to dismantle unjust and unsustainable
systems, but, unlike the multitude of other climate proposals, it seeks to replace those
violent systems with systems of what Naomi Klein calls “care and repair.” These programs
look like guaranteed jobs for all that want them, guaranteed sustainable housing, investing
in art, electrified transportation, and caretaking economies, as well as continuously transforming
what the Green New Deal means by listening to those that have been at the frontlines
of environmental and systemic harm.
But Charlie! The Green New Deal will never happen! It’s politically impossible! It
costs too much! Yes, creating a society based on a Green New Deal framework will take work,
but isn’t that work worth doing? Political impossibilities become possible when there
are mass movements of people working against injustice. Look at the uprisings we’re seeing
all over the world, asserting Black Lives Matter and that white supremacy must end.
There are concrete changes already happening because of these uprisings, and more still
to come. As for cost, yes it will cost money, but the alternative is much worse. One 2019
study says that climate change could cause the GDP per capita to drop by 7 percent worldwide
and 10.5 in the United States if the global economy continues on its current course. The
policy lead for the Green New Deal, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, lays out this idea plainly: “Do
we want to invest up front and use this moment and not just tackle climate change but to
make our economy more robust and better for people or do we just want to bleed money because
of inaction and never get that money back.” And our response to the Coronavirus shows
that we can spend the money necessary if we deem our situation a crisis. And climate change
is the biggest crisis humanity has faced. There are also relatively straightforward
ways to get that money: cutting the military budget, ending fossil fuel subsidies, and
taxing wealthy individuals and corporations. It is not only possible to do these things,
it is our duty to make our government spend money to protect and care for life instead
of violating it. So, as we look towards an uncertain future, and live in a present where
the hundreds of scientists from the IPCC are calling for vast structural changes within
the next 10 years, what other choice do we have than to fight hard for a Green New Deal
and much much more?
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