in the oratory of Martin Luther King Jr. or in the vision of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—that created the space for, and inspired, the grassroots organizing that in turn led to tangible wins. A similar utopian fervor in the late sixties and early seventies—emerging out of the countercultural upheaval, when young people were questioning just about everything—laid the groundwork for feminist, lesbian and gay, and environmental breakthroughs.
By the time the 2008 financial fiasco was unfolding, that utopian imagination had largely atrophied. Moral outrage poured out against the banks and the bailouts and the austerity that was sure to follow. Yet even as rage filled the streets and the squares, generations who had grown up under neoliberalism’s vice grip struggled to picture something, anything, other than what they had always known. Science fiction hasn’t been much help, either. Almost every vision of the future that we get from best-selling novels and big-budget Hollywood films takes some kind of ecological and social apocalypse for granted. It’s almost as if a great many of us have collectively stopped believing that there is a future, let alone that it could be better, in many ways, than the present.
The climate movement has suffered from this imaginative asphyxiation for many decades. The mainstream green movement has been very good at describing the threat we face in harrowing detail. But when it came to telling the truth about the depth of systemic change required to avert the worst outcomes, there has long been a profound a mismatch. Change your lightbulbs, we were told for a decade. Plant a tree when you fly. Turn your lights off for an hour a year. The name of the game was always the same: show people how they can change without changing much of anything at all.
As this urgent and exciting book makes abundantly clear, that era of pseudo change is definitively over. The Green New Deal has a long way to go before it constitutes an actual plan to get to zero emissions while battling rampant economic inequality and systemic racial and gender exclusions. But it starts with those goals and puts a whole lot of big and bold ideas on the table to get us planning, organizing, and dreaming in our communities and workplaces. Many commentators have of course declared that none of this is possible. It’s too ambitious. Too much. Too late. But that overlooks the crucial fact that none of this began in 2018. The ground for this moment had been prepared for decades outside the headlines, with models for community-owned and community-controlled renewable energy; with justice-based transitions that make sure no worker is left behind; with a deepening analysis of the intersections between systemic racism, armed conflict, and climate disruption; with improved green technology and breakthroughs in clean public transit; with the thriving fossil fuel divestment movement; with model legislation driven by the climate justice movement that shows how carbon taxes can fight racial and gender exclusion; and much more. What had been missing is only the top-level political power to roll out the best of these models all at once, with the focus and velocity that both science and justice demand. That is the great promise of a comprehensive Green New Deal in the largest economy on earth. As is detailed in the pages to come, the original New Deal was rife with failings and exclusions. But it remains a useful touchstone for showing how every sector of life, from forestry to education to the arts to housing to electrification, can be transformed under the umbrella of a single, society-wide mission. And unlike previous attempts to introduce climate legislation, the Green New Deal has the capacity to mobilize a truly intersectional mass movement behind it—not despite its sweeping ambition, but precisely because of it. As the fossil fuel industry ramps up its attacks, the “serious” center will craft whittled-down countermeasures that preserve only the most narrowly defined of climate policies. The promise of the kind of radical Green New Deal described in this book is in rejecting both, pushing not just for the “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has urged, but for us to treat the climate crisis as an opportunity to build an altogether fairer, more leisurely, and more democratic world on the other end. We have a hell of a lot of work to do. What will sustain us in the difficult years to come is a dream of the future that is not just better than ecological collapse, but a whole lot better than the barbaric ways our system treats human and nonhuman life right now.
INTRODUCTION: BAD WEATHER, GOOD POLITICS
Seizing the Future
The streets of New Orleans are running with saltwater and grime. Mardi Gras beads thrown up by overflowing sewers speckle the muck like shiny soap suds. A Category 4 hurricane—officially named Maggie, informally known as Katrina 2—has smashed through the city’s defenses.
On CNN, the president looks grim but satisfied. “We saw this coming and we prepared. But we can do better.” A Coastal Protection Plan softened the blow: restored wetlands and porous concrete diverted and absorbed a lot of the floodwaters in New Orleans. But the storm’s violence was overwhelming. A well-planned evacuation has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Electric buses conveyed well-fed, hydrated city residents to temporary retreat camps. The death toll is sixty-five: some residents simply refused to evacuate.
Two days after the flooding subsides, hardy residents and unionized relief workers—many hired through a job guarantee program—are repairing roads, buildings, and power lines. Relief vans deliver reused bus batteries to emergency shelters to bolster damaged emergency microgrids while the larger power system is repaired. The Chinese government has sent a small relief crew with an innovative system for grid repair. They’re joined by conservation workers from around the country, trained in disaster relief and accustomed to bussing from one extreme weather hotspot to another.
The disaster has caused a national revolt. In Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, activists have chained themselves to bulldozers in the country’s last coal pit. Climate justice organizers are decrying slow resiliency investments in Black and Indigenous communities. In cities and towns across the country, militant teachers have joined their students on a new round of climate strikes, angry that the US power sector isn’t on track to hit net zero carbon until 2036. It’s 2027, and solar panels and wind turbines aren’t going up fast enough. The protestors want to try harder to hit the 2030 net zero carbon target set in the heady first 100 days of the Green New Deal, in spring 2021. Polls say the majority of Americans agree.
Looking ahead, coastal, drought-ravaged, and wildfire-scorched communities around the country are having hard conversations. Is it time to retreat? What would it take to stay? Americans are realizing that large-scale climate migration is both international and domestic. Everyone now recognizes what the climate movement has been saying for years. In the twenty-first century, all politics are climate politics.
If the scenario above is disorienting, it’s because we rarely see climate narratives that combine scientific realism with positive political and technological change. Instead, most stories focus on just one trend: the grim projections of climate science, bright reports of promising technologies, or celebrations of gritty activism. But the real world will be a mess of all three. Climate disasters are coming—but we can withstand the coming storms and prevent far worse ones from happening. Whether we arrive at the relatively bright scenario described above will come down to politics—material struggle and bold ideas. If we get it right, we’ll withstand the disasters that are too late to prevent and keep worse ones from happening, while improving living conditions for most people at the same time. We call our vision a radical Green New Deal to signal the depth and breadth of the change we need.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us that we need to roughly halve global carbon emissions by 2030 to have a decent chance at keeping warming below 1.5° Celsius—the limit that scientists and activists agree we should aim for to prevent catastrophe. Getting there just might be doable. We can absolutely keep global heating to 2° Celsius—the maximum level that the world agreed on in the Paris Agreement in 2016—although we’re currently not on track to meet it. Halving global emissions, given that billions of people live in countries far poorer than the United States and some economies will decarbonize more slowly, means that the United States needs
