Green New Deal

A Global Green New Deal Is The Only Way To Avert Disaster

January 9, 2021 C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout. Create! climate crisis, Green New Deal, international cooperation

Global warming is the biggest challenge facing humanity today. Yet, climate change has yet to become our number one priority even though, as the World Meteorological Organization warned back in March 2020, “time is fast running out” on averting an acute environmental catastrophe. In this context, a comprehensive Green New Deal is urgently needed to be put into action. A Global Green New Deal. And, hopefully, the incoming Biden administration will not squander the opportunity to have the U.S. take the lead on climate emergency now that the Senate is under Democratic control. In the interview that follows, Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin explain the urgency of undertaking ambitious efforts to respond globally to the existential crisis of climate change within the context of a just transition to a green economy.

Part 2: The Unannounced Death Of The Green New Deal

November 6, 2020 Michael Swifte, Wrong Kind Of Green. Educate! climate crisis, Democrats, Green New Deal, Joe Biden

In Part 2, I will explore how the elements of the Green New Deal came together with the transfer of momentum from the People’s Climate Movement to the Sunrise Movement, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and the Green New Deal brigade of progressive vehicles and Democrat aligned NGOs in the wake of the 2018 midterms. I will show how the momentum, built on the endorsement of the Green New Deal by grass roots advocates, was exploited to give Democratic presidential hopefuls a set of talking points and commitments.

How Progressives Could Still Win The 21st Century

October 1, 2020 Yanis Varoufakis, The Correspondent. Strategize! climate crisis, Green New Deal, International Solidarity, New Economy

Our era will be remembered for the triumphant march of authoritarianism in whose wake the vast majority of humanity have experienced unnecessary hardship and the planet’s ecosystem has suffered avoidable climate destruction. For a brief period – a period the British historian Eric Hobsbawm described as “the short 20th century” – establishment forces were united in dealing with challenges to their authority. It was a rare period in which the establishment had to face a variety of progressives, all seeking to change the world: social democrats, communists, self-management experiments, national liberation movements in Africa and Asia, the early, radical, ecologists etc.

Part I: The Unannounced Death Of The Green New Deal

September 12, 2020 Michael Swifte, Wrong Kind of Green. Educate! climate crisis, Democrats, Green New Deal, Renewable Energy

You could say that the Green New Deal died when the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force recommendations came through, or perhaps that was the moment we knew that the Jemez Principles and the principles of a Just Transition had been abandoned more than a year before? Perhaps they were abandoned shortly after John Washington’s straight forward, perfectly articulated warning to New Consensus? Or perhaps they were abandoned as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey prepared the Green New Deal resolution with it’s “clean” and “net zero” language replacing the language of fossil fuel phase outs and 100% Renewables?

Nuclear Power In The Green New Deal?

August 27, 2020 By M.V. Ramana and Schyler Edmunston, Beyond Nuclear International. Create! Green New Deal, Nuclear Energy, pollution, Uranium mining

Over the last few years, there has been a growing interest in a Green New Deal and there are many versions proposed in different countries. At the same time, there has also been criticism of these proposals on many counts, including the fact that they typically don’t include nuclear energy. This criticism misses a basic point: a Green New Deal is, by its very definition, much more than an emissions reduction plan. As we argue below, the other attributes that characterize Green New Deals, rule out nuclear energy as an option. Like the original New Deal of U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, all Green New Deal proposals emphasize the creation of new jobs.

COVID19 Lockdown Has Little Impact On Climate, Green Recovery Needed

August 9, 2020 Piers Forster, The Conversation. Educate! climate crisis, COVID-19, Fossil Fuels, Green New Deal

Here in the UK, with traffic noise back to drowning out birdsong, and foreign holidays back on the cards, it is easy to forget the weeks of cleaner air. If we do not seize the opportunity to pause, reflect and plan transformative change, the COVID-19 years could end up being just a small and temporary blip in our overall climate trajectory. Earlier this year, during the lockdown, my daughter and I found ourselves with time on our hands. Her A-level (senior high school) exams had been cancelled and my colleagues had not yet discovered Zoom.

Here’s How We Remake The Economy

July 31, 2020 Alexander Reed Kelly, Scheerpost. Create! COVID-19, Green New Deal, Jobs Guarantee, Recession, Universal Basic Income

To defend the $600 unemployment payments as both morally and economically necessary is not to suggest that the CARES Act is a sufficient solution to our economic problems. Nor, says Pavlina Tcherneva, Associate Professor of Economics at Bard College and a Research Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute and advisor to Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, is the Democratic-led HEROES Act, which would extend the payments through January 2021 if Senate Republicans and the Trump administration would support it. Dr. Tcherneva studies the impact of unemployment on growth, income inequality and public health, and saving people from the hardship that awaits Valerie is the focus of her work. In The Case for a Job Guarantee, which she published this summer, Tcherneva explains how the federal government could provide a living-wage job to anyone who wants one. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation about what the pandemic unemployment payments meant for the economy and how the United States could enact a Job Guarantee.

In the Face of Mass Unemployment, We Need a 21st Century WPA

July 13, 2020 Max Page, Labor Notes. Create! Greater Depression, Green New Deal, New Deal, Work Products Administration

In the Great Depression of the 1930s the Works Progress Administration was one of the main New Deal agencies that put millions of unemployed back to work on public infrastructure projects. The WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps together employed over 10 million total over the course of their existence. The WPA also put some of America’s greatest artists, writers, and musicians to the task of telling a more democratic history of the country, painting murals in public spaces, teaching art and music to young people, and documenting and uncovering untold histories, including those of slavery. The WPA, the largest of the New Deal work initiatives, has come to be shorthand for a variety of agencies including the Public Works Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the WPA’s own Federal Art Project. Together they created jobs where the capitalist market had utterly failed and used the catastrophe to pursue projects of economic and cultural importance.

Supreme Court Rejects Effort To Greenlight Keystone XL Construction

July 9, 2020 Jake Johnson, Commondreams. Resist! Green New Deal, Keystone XL, Pipelines, Supreme Court

The Supreme Court late Monday upheld a federal judge's rejection of a crucial permit for Keystone XL and blocked the Trump administration's attempt to greenlight construction of the 1,200-mile crude oil project, the third such blow to the fossil fuel industry in a day—coming just hours after the cancellation of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the court-ordered shutdown of the Dakota Access Pipeline. While the ruling was not a total victory for the climate—the high court said other pipeline projects can proceed as environmental reviews are conducted—green groups applauded the delay of Keystone XL construction as further confirmation of their view that the Canada-owned pipeline will never be built thanks to legal obstacles and fierce grassroots opposition.

Shell: Latest Oil Company To Do A Belly Flop

July 3, 2020 Brian Kahn, Gizmodo. Educate! climate crisis, Fossil Fuels, Green New Deal, Recession, shell

We’re halfway through 2020, and I think we can all safely say it’s been a pretty terrible year. There’s been so much terrible stuff in the past two months alone, I can’t even remember the bad stuff that happened in January. But I’m sure it sucked. So I’ll take minor bits of good news where I can get it. And the latest is Shell writing down $22 billion on its balance sheets, making it the latest oil company to acknowledge that things are probably not going back to the way they were. The company announced it expected the dip in value to be driven by both its oil and gas sides of the business on Tuesday. The problem, for Shell and other fossil fuel companies big and small, is that the pandemic has cratered demand. The price of oil dipped into negative territory for a hot second in April, and the fallout has continued.

New Democratic Climate Action Plan Is Woefully Inadequate

July 2, 2020 Jessica Corbett, Commondreams. Educate! climate crisis, Congress, Democrats, Green New Deal

"This is not an emergency response." That is how Laura Berry, director of research and policy at the Climate Mobilization (TCM), responded to reporting on a congressional "action plan" for the planetary emergency from the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, which the panel and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) unveiled Tuesday. The climate roadmap features hundreds of policy proposals under 12 key pillars. Specifically, the 538-page plan calls for selling only zero-emissions vehicles by 2035, net-zero greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector by 2040, and net-zero U.S. emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050.

The Pandemic As Part Of A Much Broader Crisis Of Civilisation

June 27, 2020 Roland Kulke, Transform! Europe. Strategize! Green New Deal, Neoliberalism, Planetary capacity

Covid-19 was first identified in November 2019 in the city of Wuhan. It is an infectious disease caused by a virus which is highly likely to have ‘jumped’ from a horseshoe bat to a human. This is widely known and yet it is striking how little is said about the actual implications. What are the impacts for us when humans can contract deadly diseases from animals? Is this normal? Or is it an isolated incident? Sadly, such cases of viruses being transmitted to humans from vertebrates are certainly no exception. 60% of infectious diseases that affect humans originate from vertebrates. These are known as ‘zoonotic’ viruses, and their numbers rise even further when we look at the origins of emerging infectious diseases: 75% of new pathogens that make humans sick originate in wildlife.

Democratizing Energy To Counter The Climate Catastrophe

June 25, 2020 Lavinia Steinfort, ROAR Magazine. Create! Democracy, Energy, Green New Deal, New Economy

Youth climate activists have been striking to demand immediate climate action from political powers. They conjoined the issues of climate and labor by calling for a global climate strike in September, 2019, in which a historic 7.6 million schoolkids, (grand)parents and workers from 185 countries participated. Over 70 trade unions around the world supported the strike and the number of climate groups that are demanding a just transition for fossil fuel workers are also steadily increasing. The European landscape of climate activism is becoming densely populated. Numerous communities are defending nature together with their livelihoods. Initiatives like Ende Gelände practice civil disobedience to mobilize large numbers of European activists for climate justice. In most recent manifestations, such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion, many pupils and students are active, who also brought their families and teachers onto the streets.

40 Million Health Workers Endorse Green Recovery

May 29, 2020 Olivia Rosane, Ecowatch. Create! Global Recession, Green New Deal, Healthcare workers, Pandemic

More than 40 million doctors and nurses are in, and they are prescribing a green recovery from the economic devastation caused by the new coronavirus. More than 350 health organizations representing some 40 million medical professionals, as well as more than 4,500 individual health workers from 90 countries, signed a letter to the G20 leaders Tuesday urging them to craft what they are promoting as a #HealthyRecovery by taking measures such as reforming fossil fuel subsidies and fighting pollution and deforestation. "A truly healthy recovery will not allow pollution to continue to cloud the air we breathe and the water we drink," the health professionals wrote. "It will not permit unabated climate change and deforestation, potentially unleashing new health threats upon vulnerable populations."

Covid-19 Is A Reason To Start The Green New Deal Now

May 11, 2020 Sarah Lazare, In These Times. Create! Green New Deal, New Economy, Recession, Unemployment

Our political leaders, Republican and Democrat, are leaving tens of millions of people in free fall. Instead of a guaranteed income and universal, single-payer healthcare, we are offered paltry, one-time checks and unemployment payments (for those who qualify—and many don’t, including all undocumented people). Epidemiologists tell us that people must stay home to curb the spread of the virus—yet, to do so, people need a consistent income, which most cannot achieve from home. We have been offered no road map for keeping bread lines—like the 10,000 families who showed up at a food bank in San Antonio—from growing ever longer. Even as there are no jobs, work is piling up. For example, any plan to safely emerge from shutdown also requires contact tracing, which involves mass testing to find people who have been infected with the virus, then tracking down and monitoring anyone they have come in contact with.

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