U.S. President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan is the politically ambitious, morally imaginative piece of legislation we need to tackle the ever-worsening climate crisis by rebuilding our country and rebooting our economy through grand-scale public-works projects. Whether we actually get it, however, comes down to how hard we—all American citizens—are willing to fight for its full passage and implementation.
In 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic cast a floodlight on the pervasive environmental injustice, wealth disparity, infrastructural neglect, and systemic racism here in the United States, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) introduced a fourteen-page nonbinding resolution that prescribed a holistic approach to addressing those interconnected crises known as the Green New Deal.
Often misunderstood by the public (it was about defining the problems and establishing aggressive targets for solving them, not proposing specific policy solutions, which were meant to come later), mocked by establishment Dems (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissively referred to it as the “green dream”), and knavishly mischaracterized by the right (The libs are banning hamburgers!), the Green New Deal is a straightforward-enough concept undermined by inadequate messaging from its own advocates as well as reflexive outrage from conservative media. So… let’s try this again:
The idea is a simple one: in the process of transforming the infrastructure of our societies at the speed and scale that scientists have called for, humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts. Because the factors that are destroying our planet are also destroying people’s quality of life in many other ways, from wage stagnation to gaping inequalities to crumbling services to the breakdown of any semblance of social cohesion. Challenging these underlying forces is an opportunity to solve several interlocking crises at once.
In tackling the climate crisis, we can create hundreds of millions of good jobs around the world, invest in the most systematically excluded communities and nations, guarantee health care and child care, and much more. The result of these transformations would be economies built both to protect and to regenerate the planet’s life support systems and to respect and sustain the people who depend on them. It would also strive for something more amorphous but equally important: at a time when we find ourselves increasingly divided into hermetically sealed information bubbles, with almost no shared assumptions about what we can trust or even what is real, a Green New Deal could instill a sense of collective, higher purpose—a set of concrete goals that we are all working toward together.
Naomi Klein, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019), 26
Klein makes a compelling argument in On Fire, but, alas, the strongest case for a Green New Deal was presented by the pandemic itself. And after decades of incremental steps in which, time and again, Democrats invariably ceded more legislative ground than they gained—lest they be accused of supporting the kind of Big Government programs Saint Reagan had long since poisonously reframed as unpatriotic and un-American (socialism!)—the candidates seeking the nomination for president last year found themselves jockeying for the green ribbon of Most Environmentally Visionary. Despite its bumpy rollout, the Green New Deal changed the entire political conversation. As Klein noted in 2019:
The emergence of the Green New Deal means there is now not only a political framework for meeting the [recommended carbon-drawdown] targets in the United States but also a clear (if long-shot) path to turning that framework into law. The plan is pretty straightforward: elect a strong supporter of the Green New Deal in the Democratic primaries; take the White House, the House, and the Senate in 2020; and start rolling it out on day one of the new administration (the way FDR did with the original New Deal in the famous “first 100 days,” when the newly elected president pushed fifteen major bills through Congress).
ibid., 31
And here’s the thing: We actually met the first two goals of that “long-shot” plan!
Continue reading
Recent Comments