What's next for the Green New Deal
Last night in Washington D.C., the youth-led Sunrise Movement sponsored its final stop on a national Green New Deal tour across the U.S. It was the biggest event of their one month journey— with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sens. Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey turning out to give remarks.
Like probably many readers of this newsletter, and like many Americans across the country, I’ve grown more alarmed by and more focused on climate change in recent months. One survey released in January, sponsored by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University, showed that nearly 75 percent of Americans said they grasped global warming was happening, a jump of more than 10 percentage points from three years ago. A CNN poll released at the end of April showed climate change is a top issue for 82 percent of Democratic respondents.
There’s are many reasons for this shift, but certainly a top reason is the United Nation’s IPCC report issued in October which said the next twelve years are the most important if we want to limit the devastating impacts of climate change. Last week another UN report was released which said a million species are at risk of extinction due to human activity, and this past weekend the highest levels of carbon dioxide in human history were recorded in the atmosphere. If you’re someone who believes in science and scientific research, this truly is the time to start living out those commitments IRL. It’s not too late.
So what’s next for the Green New Deal? Activists plan to mobilize in Detroit on July 30 — the date of the second scheduled presidential debate. There they will make three demands on all the Democratic presidential contenders. They will ask all candidates to sign a pledge to refuse political donations from the fossil fuel industry, they will ask all candidates to commit to making a Green New Deal a day one priority if elected president, and they will ask candidates to pledge support for a presidential debate on climate change so voters can hear where they stand on the issues.
I covered the event last night for The Intercept and you can read more about it here.
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I also did a story last week for In These Times looking at the politics around a Green New Deal in Kentucky. Kentucky is a state where coal mining has served as an anchor industry for decades, and even though experts expect coal mining to continue to decline in Central Appalachia, figuring out a way to transition to a cleaner economy with the support of communities that will be most affected by that transition is widely recognized as a crucial political and moral factor.
I spoke with a man who worked as an underground coal miner for 22 years. He has black lung and two ruptured vertebrae. He made the decision last April to get out of the coal industry, went through a job retraining program, and now works as a renewable energy consultant. We talked about if others can make that move, and I also looked at the work that Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, a statewide grassroots organization, has been doing to build support for a green and just transition.
You can read the story here.
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