The Roosevelt Rundown is an email series featuring the Roosevelt
Institute’s top 5 stories of the week.
1. How
Progressives Are Shaping the Climate Conversation
This week’s CNN
town hall event
proved two things: Climate change is—rightfully—a
defining issue of the 2020 presidential race, and the contenders have
proposed the boldest and most progressive platforms in American
history. “If you are a
Democratic candidate for president, you believe climate change is an
existential threat not only to the United States but to human
civilization. You believe the country needs to reach net-zero carbon
emissions by 2050 at the very latest,” Lisa Friedman and Maggie Astor
wrote in their New
York Times coverage. As Roosevelt Fellows JW Mason and Mark Paul explain in
Decarbonizing
the US Economy: Pathways Toward a Green New
Deal, public
investment to solve the climate crisis can boost wages, living
standards, and equity—and save our planet.
2. We Can Afford Big Climate
Ideas
While many of the candidates’
proposals capture the urgency of the climate crisis, some of the town
hall questions treaded familiar, small-ball territory. “A lot of the
CNN questions are framed in such a way that they assume the solutions
to climate change are a bigger threat to existing systems than climate
change. Where is the evidence of that?” New York Times
climate reporter Kendra
Pierre-Louis tweeted during the event. We
can’t afford short-sighted thinking; we can
afford to invest in our planet and our economy.
As Roosevelt Vice President of Policy and Strategy Nell
Abernathy writes for the blog, “the question should no longer be ‘How
will you pay for it?’ but ‘How
will you ensure that our economy is reaching its full
potential?’”
3. Centering Racial Justice in
Our Climate
Response
As presidential candidate Julián
Castro has emphasized, climate
change and environmental degradation are civil rights
issues. “Communities of color and low income
communities are more likely to live next to polluters and breathe
polluted air. More than half of the 9 million people living near
hazardous waste sites are people of color,” Castro’s
climate plan explains. As Roosevelt Fellow and
Insight Center President Anne Price and Insight Center Vice President
of Programs and Strategy Jhumpa Bhattacharya write for Medium, “we
can no longer shy away from talking about
race when talking about justice of any
kind—whether it be environmental, economic, reproductive, or criminal
justice.”
4. How Corporate Power Drives the
Crisis
Beyond public investment, tackling
the climate crisis will require curbing the corporate power and
political influence of mass polluters. As Roosevelt Fellow
Susan
R. Holmberg tweeted this week, “The climate crisis is driven by
corporate power. Yes, we all
need to do our part, but don't let a concern about plastic straws
change the conversation from the market/political power of fossil fuel
companies, utilities, and Big Ag.”
5. The Next Step: A
Global Green New
Deal
“While the United States is the
world’s largest historic polluter of greenhouse gases, it today
produces about 15 percent of total global emissions, and experts have
said it is impossible to solve climate change without international
curbs on emissions,” New
York Times reporters Coral
Davenport and Trip Gabriel wrote this week. As Roosevelt Fellow Todd
Tucker has argued, this existential challenge requires
transformative structural reform at the domestic and international
levels: progressive
industrial policy,
a reimagined trade infrastructure, and a global
Green New Deal.
What We’re
Listening To
The prevailing story about rural
America is that it’s politically regressive, homogenous in identity,
and in economic decline. The outcomes of this false narrative are all
around us: misleading headlines, flawed policy choices, and dangerous
fissures in our social fabric. To help correct this narrative,
Roosevelt Communications Director Kendra Bozarth has been working on
an independent podcast project called The
Homecomers with Sarah Smarsh, which launched this week. From health care
and immigration to worker power and racial (in)justice,
The
Homecomers addresses
universal issues and reveals the diversity—and progressivism—of rural
America.
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