Though it seems like a lifetime ago, I opened the blog this year with a post I’d titled—with entirely unintentional and unforeseen irony—“A 2020 Vision of Hope.”  In it, I discussed a number of auspicious signs that America was on the cusp of finally making a meaningful commitment to addressing the climate crisis—from regional sustainability initiatives, to Gen Z activism, to carbon pricing, to the November election.  So determined was our movement, it couldn’t be derailed by even a global pandemic.  Over the summer, in “What Comes Next:  Lessons on Democracy and Narrative from Hamilton,” I shared my enthusiasm for the promising ambition of the Biden climate plan, a document that appeared by all evidence to be a real-time reaction to the interconnected crises of global warming, economic inequality, and systemic racism—all of which reached a boiling point this year.

On December 8, I delivered a presentation on the Biden climate plan to the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the Climate Reality Project; I have reproduced the text of that talk below.

There is no doubt about it:  The tireless work of environmental activists over the past two years moved President-elect Biden appreciably to the left on the matter of the climate crisis.  Everyone here—all of you who selflessly and compassionately allocated time and energy from your busy lives to prioritize this issue, whether by training with Vice President Gore, attending a climate-strike rally, merely dialing in to this very meeting—made a difference.  President-elect Biden hears our collective voice; he shares our sense of urgency.

And though the incoming president will only go so far as to say the Green New Deal provides a “crucial framework” for meeting the challenges we face, much of the language from his campaign speeches, as well as his extensively detailed climate plan, echoes phrasing from the Green New Deal verbatim—a testament to and direct consequence of the pressure and the power of our movement.  In the two years since I trained under Mr. Gore, the climate breakdown has gone from a political lightning rod to a political litmus test.  All of us take a share of credit for that.

Like the Green New Deal, Biden’s comprehensive climate plan, which he intends to fund by rolling back the Trump tax cuts, takes a holistic approach to solving our interconnected crises by calling for a $2 trillion accelerated investment in infrastructure, transit, the power sector, housing, agriculture, and—most crucially—environmental justice, with the bulk of those resources to be deployed during his first term.  The overarching goal is to set the United States on an irreversible path to achieve net-zero emissions by no later than 2050, and, in the process, facilitate a just transition by creating millions of good-paying union jobs—yet more language adopted directly from the Green New Deal.

Does the proposal pass every environmentalist purity test?  No.  But the Biden Plan to Build a Modern, Sustainable Infrastructure and an Equitable Clean Energy Future—oof, that’s a mouthful—is an exhaustive plan with a commensurably exhaustive name that I encourage everyone to read, but let’s talk for a minute about a few of its key goals with hard timelines attached.

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