[[link removed]]
LET’S LAUNCH A GREEN NEW DEAL FROM BELOW
[[link removed]]
Jeremy Brecher
November 21, 2024
Guardian
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]
_ Local and state initiatives can act as ‘proof of concept’ for
transformative climate and jobs legislation _
March for Science | April 22, 2017, NYC,
As Trump and Trumpism devastate the American political landscape, how
can people counter this destructive juggernaut? For the past five
years, I have been studying how people are actually implementing the
elements of the Green New Deal through what has become a Green New
Deal from Below. This framework, which ordinary people are already
putting into practice, is an approach to organizing that can form a
significant means for resisting and even overcoming the Trump agenda.
The Green New Deal is a visionary program designed to protect the
Earth’s climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice and
eliminating poverty. The Green New Deal erupted into public attention
as a proposal for national legislation, and the struggle to embody it
in national legislation is ongoing.
But there has also emerged a little-noticed wave of initiatives from
community groups, unions, city and state governments, Indigenous
American tribes and other non-federal actors designed to contribute to
the core principle of the Green New Deal: to use the necessity for
climate protection as a basis for creating good jobs and social
justice. The US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who helped
start the campaign for a Green New Deal, has called it “a Green New
Deal from Below”.
My new book, The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are
Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy, details more than a 100 such
initiatives in over 40 states. Some of these initiatives use names
like “The DeKalb Green New Deal” and “The Green New Deal for
Education”; others don’t use the moniker but apply the same
principles. Here are some examples.
Trump has pledged to wage war on planet Earth – and it will take a
progressive revolution to stop him / George Monbiot
[[link removed]]
In DeKalb county, Georgia, on 17 September, the DeKalb Green New Deal
presented a 100% clean energy and transportation transition plan.
Since it started in 2020, the DeKalb Green New Deal has passed 20
climate action policies, resolutions and initiatives. A local
official, Ted Terry, told
[[link removed]] a
news outlet: “Our Green New Deal is specifically a DeKalb Green New
Deal – it’s what we think we can do with our own resources, our
own land, our own people.”
On New York’s Long Island, a co-op led by women of the Indigenous
American Shinnecock Nation have fought for and are now exercising
their traditional right to cultivate and harvest kelp in Long Island
Sound. Their ocean farming extracts carbon and nitrogen from the
polluted waters of Long Island Sound and produces an environmentally
friendly alternative to fertilizer derived from fossil fuel. It is
also producing jobs for impoverished tribal members. This and similar
programs are often referred to as a “Blue New Deal”.
In Minneapolis, unionized workers who clean downtown commercial office
high-rises struck to demand that their employers take action on
climate change. The janitors, members of Service Employees
International Union (SEIU) local 26 who are mostly immigrants and
women, won a green education initiative that includes training in
climate-friendly cleaning and building management, funded by their
employers.
In Illinois, the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, promoted by a broad
coalition of labor and community groups, sets the state on a path to a
carbon-free power sector by 2045 with the nation’s strongest labor
and equity standards. The bill will slash emissions, create thousands
of new clean energy union jobs, expand union apprenticeships for Black
and Latino communities and increase energy efficiency for public
schools. It also contains a transition program for families and
communities currently reliant on jobs in the fossil fuel industry.
Journalist Liza Featherstone has called
[[link removed]] the
legislation a “miniature Green New Deal” for Illinois.
In southern states like Texas and Virginia, the Green Workers Alliance
has organized poorly paid solar panel installers to establish “a
strong, worker-led movement that supports the Green New Deal and a
just transition to a renewable economy”. They have connected with
hundreds of workers in Facebook groups and listening tours. They have
won back lost wages, organized struggles against temp agency abuses
and campaigned to pressure large utility companies to transition to
renewable energy.
With Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of Congress
we can still create local programs like the DeKalb Green New Deal with
its comprehensive municipal plan for clean energy and its score of
concrete climate initiatives. We can still create co-ops like the
Shinnecock Kelp Farmers that protect the environment, eliminate carbon
pollution, create jobs for deprived communities and increase the power
of those marginalized in our political system. Workers like the union
janitors in Minneapolis can organize, strike and win both better
working conditions on the job and demands that their employers protect
the climate.
States can follow the lead of Illinois and pass legislation to
transition to carbon-free power while creating union jobs for those
who need them most and providing a just transition for workers
transitioning out of the fossil fuel economy. Workers in the
still-burgeoning green industries can organize both to challenge
employer abuses and to fight to expand renewable energy to create good
jobs and protect the climate.
One of the leading proponents of a Green New Deal from Below is
Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston. Her programs have included
solarization and resilience in poor neighborhoods, a massive
construction program called the Green New Deal for Boston Public
Schools, a Youth Clean Jobs Corp, and provision of free, nutritious
breakfasts and lunches to all of Boston’s 50,000 public school
students, prepared by an employee- and Black-owned food service
company.
Wu has already shown how action by a Green New Deal from Below can
resist the coming Trump onslaught. On 12 November she told the Boston
Globe that the city’s authorities will not assist federal law
enforcement in any mass deportation efforts and pledged to fight the
fear that might take hold among some Bostonians when President-elect
Donald Trump takes office.
The role of the Green New Deal from Below in the Trump era can go
beyond such defensive measures. To paraphrase Wu, the impact of the
Green New Deal has been to “expand the sense of what is possible”.
A core goal of Trump and Trumpism is to obliterate that sense of
possibility – the knowledge that through collective action people
can improve their lives and their world. The Green New Deal from Below
resists that obliteration, with people organizing to build the blocks
of possibility right in their own backyards.
_Jeremy Brecher is the author of the new book The Green New Deal from
Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe
Economy [[link removed]]. He is the
author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements and
the co-founder and senior advisor of the Labor Network for
Sustainability_
_The Guardian [[link removed]] is globally renowned
for its coverage of politics, the environment, science, social
justice, sport and culture. Scroll less and understand more about the
subjects you care about with the Guardian's brilliant email
newsletters
[[link removed]],
free to your inbox._
* Green New Deal
[[link removed]]
* local organizing
[[link removed]]
* Climate Change
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]
INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT
Submit via web
[[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]
Twitter [[link removed]]
Facebook [[link removed]]
[link removed]
To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]
