Author: Kevin Dickinson / Source: Big Think
- Recent protests by the Sunrise Movement have taken the Green New Deal from forgotten policy to trending hashtag.
- The Green New Deal aims to move the U.S. to 100% renewable energy within a decade.
- Proponents also hope to catalyze a top-down restructuring of the U. S. economy and advance social justice issues.
In October of last year, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a special report, titled ‘Global Warming of 1.5°C‘. The report’s authors believed that humanity could still limit global warming to 1.5° above pre-industrial levels, if we could curb carbon emissions by 49 percent of 2017 levels by 2030 and then achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
Is such a goal achievable? Theoretically, yes, but it would require a massive undertaking by governments and the private sector the world over.
A month later, the Sunrise Movement, an advocacy group of young people tackling the issue of climate change, staged a sit-in protest at Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi’s office. Freshman Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also made an appearance to show her support for the protestors.
Both Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement advocate for what is called the Green New Deal, a phrase that has since caught the public’s attention. What is this Green New Deal, and can it provide the United States an answer to the impending dangers of climate change?
A short history of the Green New Deal
(Photo: Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty Images)
A man holds a placard reading ‘Go Solar’ during a rally calling for action on climate change on November 29, 2015, in Rome a day before the launch of the COP21 conference in Paris.
Like its namesake, President Fredrick D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, there’s nothing truly new about the Green New Deal. The concept has been floating around at least 2007, when Thomas L. Friedman used it in an op-ed for The New York Times. He later expanded the idea into a book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, which was read by President Barack Obama.
Obama would include aspects of a Friedman’s thesis in the 2009 stimulus package. Of the $800 billion spent as part of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, $90 billion was set aside for green initiatives such clean electricity, renewable fuels, smart grids—a move Politico called “a prototype Green New Deal.”
Around the same time, commentator Van Jones used the phrase to describe a push for a green economy that could simultaneously increase jobs and teach labor skills, and British economist Richard Murphy founded the Green New Deal Group. The United Nations called for a global green deal in 2009.
The idea lost immediacy as other political battles pushed to the forefront of the cultural wars, but it would reemerge as part of Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein’s 2016 campaigns.
After the Sunrise Movement’s sit-in protest, Ocasio-Cortez created a draft for a proposal for a Select Committee for a Green New Deal, which
The new(ish) green deal
The Green New Deal has never been a unified movement. As its history shows, it’s a set of general goals promoted by a loose-knit association of progressives and advocacy groups. What follows is an overview of the Green New Deal as synthesized from Ocasio-Cortez’s select committee proposal, the Green Party’s proposal, and the Sunrise Movement’s list of goals.
The Green New Deal’s primary goal is to transition the United States’ economy to 100 percent renewable energy within 10-12 years.
To meet this goal, greenhouse gases would need to be eliminated from industry, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation; current electric grids would also need to be replaced with smart grids; and residential and commercial buildings would need to be retrofitted for sustainable energy efficiency. Among other changes.
This target alone is a staggering enterprise, as renewable energy accounts for only 18 percent of the total power generated in the U.S. (Though, this figure represents double the contribution from 2008 and costs for such technologies continue to go down.)
“It’s going to require a lot of rapid change that we don’t even conceive as possible right now,” Ocasio-Cortez told 60 Minutes. “What is the problem with trying…
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