I've always been interested in working on systems.
When I'm talking about systems,
what I mean is that often we talk about issues
as sort of siloed things,
climate's over here,
poverty's over here,
access to higher education is over here.
But the fact is that all of those problems,
they all exist sort of like within the same system.
And a lot of times those systems intersect.
Every time you change a policy,
you are changing a system.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright wants to tell you
that the world is more connected than you might think.
She's the director of climate policy
at the Roosevelt Institute
and one of the architects of the Green New Deal,
this sweeping comprehensive climate legislation
championed by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez,
and met by political opponents with,
let's say, some criticism.
After reading the Green New Deal,
I'm mostly afraid of not being able
to get through this speech with a straight face.
The Green New Deal is expansive, it's comprehensive.
So how does a woman
with fewer than three years of experience
in the world of climate justice,
end up writing one of the most controversial
and impactful climate bills in American history?
Because she saw
that everything in American power is connected
and she wants everyone else to see it with her.
Born and raised in Chicago,
Rhiana Gunn-Wright grew up with asthma.
And I had asthma to the point
that by the time I think I was in
like third or fourth grade,
I was out for like a week every spring.
I would get sick and I would be out of school.
She didn't make the connection at the time,
but we now know today that her asthma,
like many others,
was most likely linked to the air pollution
in her neighborhood where she grew up.
The situation for a lot of other kids
was that their parents worked hourly jobs, right?
So every time your child is out of school,
not only are you hurting their educational outcomes,
you have mothers trying to figure out
what to do about childcare.
These things are all connected.
That connection
has not only shaped Gunn-Wright's world view,
but the fundamental tenets of the Green New Deal.
A lot of what the Green New Deal did
was just connect a lot of conversations
that were happening already.
Climate justice and environmental justice activists
have been talking about how environment
is larger than polar bears and ice caps and the Arctic.
So it was just essentially
trying to create a policy proposal
that not just met the scale of the problem,
but actually tried to address the problem
as it exists in the real world,
which is a mass of overlapping and interconnected issues.
The Green New Deal is a 14 page document
and it covers a lot of ground.
It not only promises
to get carbon emissions to net zero by 2050,
but to add millions of green jobs
and makes the link
that climate issues like fossil fuel emissions
are justice issues,
since people of color
are more likely to live near power plants
and other polluting factories,
and they suffer higher levels of asthma
and greater risk of early death from air pollution.
While Rhiana's writing of the Green New Deal
may be one of the most influential documents
in the green space,
she's a relative newcomer when it comes to climate justice.
For her, she sees that as an asset instead of a hindrance.
When we talk about climate change,
most times people are talking about super scientific stuff,
carbon footprints, parts per million,
how much carbon is in the atmosphere.
And there's this feeling I feel like often in climate policy
that if you don't have a background in those things,
you can't talk about it.
But the fact is that most people experience climate change
as economic effects and health effects.
They experience it as Hurricane Katrina.
They experience it as the wildfires in paradise.
They experienced it as this heat wave
where they don't have money to afford air conditioning.
Climate change is not a partisan thing.
So Rhiana took this pragmatic approach
all throughout her career.
Originally, she was a policy analyst
for the Detroit Health Department.
And Detroit is a hotbed for environmental injustice.
When I was working there,
there was an incinerator in the middle of the city.
And around that area,
asthma rates were like three times the state average.
Residents were complaining that they couldn't go outside
'cause it smelled so bad.
So trying to figure out what to do about it,
it just became clear that these things had health effects,
but the reasons that it was happening
were beyond what we could do for people.
So after working on Abdul Sayed's
2018 Michigan gubernatorial campaign and losing,
Rhiana was looking for a job.
So she emailed
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's campaign manager,
looking for something short term.
And when she was offered a job at New Consensus,
a progressive think tank
They were like,
"Hey, so we are developing a Green New Deal,
which is a mobilization on climate
to restructure the US economy and reduce emissions."
In addition,
the idea was to create the lofty goal
of zero waste, zero poverty and zero racial wealth gap.
So they were like,
"Oh, so you can write this whole thing
in like four months, right?
And I was like, "No, but maybe
if you give me two research assistants we can try."
And so that's what we did.
No one does economic mobilizations anymore in the US.
Last time we did that was in World War II.
So the first thing we had to figure out was like,
how do you actually run an industrial mobilization?
What does that look like?
That's when Rhiana
brought in other organizations
to not only pitch ideas
for what the Green New Deal should look like,
but how to shift power structures
and figure out how money should be dispersed.
So I work with the Green New Deal Network,
which is essentially a coalition of movements.
But what became clear was
the folks who had been put together
were not climate justice organizers or advocates.
That's John Washington.
He's part of the Green New Deal Network.
And he's worked with Rhiana during his time
at People United for Sustainable Housing or PUSH.
Initially, he had doubts about Rhiana's new deal coalition.
They were folks who had had success,
like Rhiana, in electoral work,
but who had never done climate justice work.
And so Rhiana recognized that there was a gap in that
and really took it all in
and built a relationship with myself
and many others across the climate justice movement.
The only way we're gonna figure out
how to do such big intersectional policy
is to have people from various,
not only viewpoints and expertise,
but people that are gonna be affected by this,
in the room talking to each other,
building relationships and working together.
One of those people she listened to
is Lucy Velez.
She lives in Buffalo and she's a climate justice activist.
While her story is only tangentially related
to an environmental issue,
it's actually addressing the knock-on effects
that spill over into different, but connected areas of life.
I thought, you know, my cough was just a cough,
all these congestion issues and colds
were just things that normally most people experience.
Like Rhiana,
Lucy suffered from persistent medical issues from pollution,
most likely caused by the Peace Bridge
connecting Buffalo to Canada,
which emitted emissions into the surrounding neighborhoods.
In the year '98,
I got a house and I thought that that house
was in good condition.
But in 2016, I was hospitalized
with like a lung and bronchial infection.
And when Lucy returned from the hospital.
I went into a room which happened to be my office,
and there was this black fuzzy mold.
That's when members of PUSH
knocked on Lucy's door one day
and they were able to help her fix her house.
It took a while to find different funding sources
to add up to the amount of money
that was required to fix Lucy's home
because it was in pretty bad shape.
The costs to my house was $40,000
to cover the things that I needed.
So Lucy got her home fixed.
And then a few months later, she gets a thing from KeyBank
saying that they're redoing her mortgage
because the value of her home has gone up.
Her mortgage payment was doubled.
I didn't have the money.
I couldn't find the money to pay for
that kind of a jump.
And so she used part of her burial fund
to pay her taxes so she could keep her house.
That's the problem with Lucy's situation.
It started as a pollution-related issue,
and that issue ended up affecting her mortgage.
That domino effect
is what the Green New Deal is trying to address.
That's what Einstein said, right?
"The consciousness that created a problem,
it's not the consciousness that's gonna solve it."
So the consciousness of the nonprofit and private world
is not what's gonna solve the problem.
It's the consciousness of the community.
And so I think the Green New Deal Network
and the team have started really to address that.
They've started to build a national network
of organizations that do this work
and that understand
what people in communities are experiencing.
Today's biggest issue
with interconnected consequences?
For four straight days,
the coronavirus claimed more than 1,000 lives
in this country.
Infections are also still surging.
But with COVID
spreading throughout the United States,
it seems that climate issues,
including the Green New Deal
are taking a back seat to the pandemic.
But that hasn't stopped opponents
making their feelings known.
What does placing emission standards on airlines
have to do with getting Iowa families and workers
the relief they need right now?
We're here trying to fight
for the man and woman on the street in our home towns
and yet they're fighting for the Green New Deal.
But Rhiana says that COVID and climate justice
have one major thing in common.
They both ravage poor communities of color.
And it's not a coincidence.
If you look at the hotspots of COVID deaths,
they basically mapped on
almost directly onto frontline communities.
One of the reasons why
COVID ravaged communities of color
was because we put toxic pollution there
and now COVID is taking them out at double the rate.
With Joe Biden's
$1.7 trillion green initiative plan,
some are calling it his own spin on the Green New Deal.
So it's catching on in the mainstream.
But Rhiana still knows
she has a long, hard fight ahead of her
because ultimately changing an entire system
means getting citizens to realize their own power
over that system.
We ran into a lot of people who would talk about
how they felt powerless.
What do we want? Climate justice.
When do we want it? Now.
But they always have power in some measure.
And it's just really important to remember
that you have the right to gather with other people.
We all have the ability
to emotionally affect another person,
to make another person feel connected.
And that is powerful.