A Green New Deal would touch our lives at every level, including at home Climate change isn?t coming?it?s already here: increasingly severe weather, climbing temperatures, and fires raging across not only California, but the Arctic, too. The U.N. says we have about a decade to avert climate change, otherwise we?ll push Mother Earth to the brink. If this sounds scary to you, you?re not alone. A variety of politicians and political organizations, most notably Sunrise Movement and Bernie Sanders, have rallied around a plan to avert this crisis: or, rather, a variety of plans all given the moniker the Green New Deal.
The ?official? Green New Deal is the House of Representatives Bill 109, ?Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal,? which was introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey in January. The Sanders campaign has given its climate plan the same name, and individual cities have their own green building initiatives as well. Rather than being one specific bill or initiative, the Green New Deal is better understood as a framework for a massive public works and jobs program aiming to decarbonize the economy and transition workers in the fossil fuel industry to new, greener work. Named after the New Deal, implemented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as an economic recovery plan from the Great Depression, a Green New Deal is an economic?and environmental?recovery plan for the anthropocene. Though the plan has earned ...