Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) speaks at a primary election night event at Malden Public Library on September 1, 2020 in Malden, Massachusetts. Allison Dinner / Getty Images
By Jake Johnson
Bolstered by an energized climate movement, small-dollar donors, and support from prominent progressive lawmakers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Green New Deal champion Sen. Ed Markey on Tuesday fended off a Democratic primary challenge from Rep. Joe Kennedy III, whose name recognition and late endorsement from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were ultimately insufficient to topple the popular Massachusetts incumbent.
<p>Declaring victory Tuesday night with a 10-point lead over Kennedy, Markey, 74, shouted out the young voters and activists who fueled his campaign with on-the-ground organizing and social media efforts, including the production of <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/14/exact-right-message-ed-markeys-must-watch-2020-campaign-ad-praised-highlighting" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">viral ads</a> that built enthusiasm for the incumbent senator and laid the groundwork for his <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ed-markey-wins-2020-massachusetts-senate-primary_n_5f4eb790c5b69eb5c035a517" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">comeback win</a>.</p><p>"This campaign has always been about the young people of this country," Markey said in a speech to supporters in his hometown of Malden. "You are our future. And thank you for believing in me, because I believe in you."</p><p>Touting his support for the Green New Deal, the signature issue of the senator's reelection bid, Markey declared that "there will be no peace, no justice, and no prosperity unless we stop the march to climate destruction."</p><p>"This is a matter of life and death. The very future of our civilization depends upon it," Markey continued. "There is no time for simply 'doing what we can.' There is no time for compromise on the existential threat to our time. We must pass a Green New Deal... The time to be timid is past. The age of incrementalism is over. Now is our moment to think big, to build big, to be big. This is what this election is all about."</p>
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<p>The Sunrise Movement—the first national organization to endorse the senator's reelection campaign—celebrated Markey's victory as a testament to the growing power of youth-led climate activism in Massachusetts and across the United States. The group said its volunteers made 250,000 calls on Markey's behalf, on top of directing and producing a <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/14/exact-right-message-ed-markeys-must-watch-2020-campaign-ad-praised-highlighting" target="_blank">striking Green New Deal ad</a> that racked up four million views.</p><p>"From the outset, we worked with the campaign to put climate change at the center of this race," Evan Weber, political director for the Sunrise Movement, said in a statement. "As we gained momentum, the establishment clearly felt threatened and sent Nancy Pelosi to throw in a last-minute endorsement to boost funds for Kennedy's big money campaign."</p><p>"Despite this establishment opposition," added Weber, "we won a clear victory tonight—and with that, no one should underestimate the power of the climate movement to elect and defend our champions in Congress."</p>
<div id="0f55a" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="d0bd98efe5ee810a7bb55355313bd889"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1300979425991888896" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">Before tonight, a Kennedy had never lost an election in Massachusetts. But even a 100 year dynasty can not overcome… https://t.co/eKdoYm55sx</div> — Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@Sunrise Movement 🌅)<a href="https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt/statuses/1300979425991888896">1599012640.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>In a <a href="https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1300983895631048704" target="_blank">tweet</a> late Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez—who <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/02/07/major-party-backing-ocasio-cortez-and-markey-unveil-green-new-deal-outlining-wwii" target="_blank">joined</a> Markey in co-authoring the Green New Deal resolution introduced in Congress last year—hailed the senator's win as a "victory for the progressive movement, for 21st century policy, and for the Green New Deal."</p><p>"Thank you to every single voter, supporter, organizer, grassroots donor, and everyday person who helped make this happen," said the New York Democrat, who <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/20/nancy-pelosi-endorsing-joe-kennedy-over-ed-markey-critics-charge-reveals-ridiculous" target="_blank">slammed</a> Pelosi's decision to back Kennedy against Markey as hypocritical, given her <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/democratic-leaders-stand-firm-on-incumbent-favor-rule-rebuff-liberal-cries-of-blacklist/2019/04/02/117a7714-54bd-11e9-8ef3-fbd41a2ce4d5_story.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">approval</a> of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's (DCCC) policy of <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/03/22/progressives-refuse-back-down-dccc-moves-kneecap-primary-challengers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">kneecapping</a> progressives who challenge incumbents.</p><p>"On a personal note, when I first got to Congress the reception I got in many spaces was very chilly," Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a separate <a href="https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1300986944680329217" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">tweet</a>. "Ed Markey wasn't afraid. He offered his expertise and partnership. He wasn't scared of big policy and didn't use kid gloves. It's great to watch him overcome the odds and win tonight."</p>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/02/age-incrementalism-over-declares-green-new-deal-champion-ed-markey-after-defeating?cd-origin=rss" target="_blank">Common Dreams</a>.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
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Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his wife Dr. Jill Biden at the Democratic National Convention at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware on Aug. 19, 2020. OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP via Getty Images
The Democratic party made the curious move of removing a ban on fossil fuel subsidies from its platform earlier this week as its convention kicked off. The move, which also backtracked from a clean energy commitment, raised the ire of environmental activists. However, presidential nominee Joe Biden, who will steer the party's agenda if elected, has recommitted to a ban on fossil fuel subsidies, as The Verge reported.
<p>What happened was this: earlier this week <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/democratic-national-committee-climate_n_5f3c2907c5b6d8a9173f0268" target="_blank">HUFFPOST</a> revealed that the amendment to the party's platform that was approved, "Democrats support eliminating tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuels, and will fight to defend and extend tax incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy," was not included the <a href="https://www.demconvention.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2020-07-31-Democratic-Party-Platform-For-Distribution.pdf" target="_blank">platform document</a> that Democrats released on Monday.</p><p>That stoked the ire of activists who had been buoyed by the aggressive climate plan that Biden agreed to. Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA, called the removal of the amendment, "immoral, criminal, inexcusable," as <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/19/immoral-criminal-inexcusable-climate-groups-furious-dnc-drops-support-ending-fossil" target="_blank">Common Dreams</a> reported.</p><p>"We are nearing global tipping points on climate, fires and extreme weather are killing people and devastating the economy, and the DNC can't even accept an end to public subsidies for making it worse?" Leonard <a href="https://twitter.com/AnnieMLeonard/status/1295898217662386177" target="_blank">tweeted</a>.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">We are nearing global tipping points on climate,<br>fires & extreme weather are killing people and devastating the economy and <a href="https://twitter.com/DNC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@DNC</a> can’t even accept an end to public subsidies for making it worse? This is immoral, criminal, inexcusable. <a href="https://t.co/7UXxS6JneG">https://t.co/7UXxS6JneG</a></p>— Annie Leonard (@AnnieMLeonard) <a href="https://twitter.com/AnnieMLeonard/status/1295898217662386177?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 19, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>"This platform is a step backwards, and we deserve better," Charlie Jiang, a campaigner at Greenpeace, said in a statement, as HUFFPOST reported.</p><p>And yet, the <a href="https://joebiden.com/climate-plan/" target="_blank">public document</a> of Biden-Harris campaign's climate agenda says it will end subsidies for fossil fuels. The Verge reached out to the campaign to get some clarity on the discrepancy between the campaign and the party's platform.</p><p>"Vice President Biden's commitment to ending fossil fuel subsidies remains as steadfast as it was when he outlined this position in the bold climate plan he laid out last year," Stef Feldman, policy director for the Biden campaign said in a statement to The Verge. "He will demand a worldwide ban on fossil fuel subsidies and lead the world by example, eliminating fossil fuel subsidies in the United States during the first year of his presidency."</p>
<p>The amount of money that the fossil fuel industry receives from the U.S. government is staggering, though the estimates vary widely, as Vox reported. The <a href="https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subsidies-a-closer-look-at-tax-breaks-and-societal-costs" target="_blank">Environmental and Energy Study Institute</a> estimates the number is around $20 billion a year, but the <a href="https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/WP/2019/WPIEA2019089.ashx" target="_blank">International Monetary Fund</a> puts the number around $649 billion.</p><p>The decision to remove the language about subsidies from the party platform is still confounding as the party tries to bring more activists into its fold. Greta Thunberg tweeted her dismay at the decision, simply saying, "So, not even the very minimum…"</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">”The Democratic National Committee this week quietly dropped language calling for an end to fossil fuel subsidies and tax breaks from its party platform”<br><br>So, not even the very very minimum...<a href="https://t.co/2h7A1bDmj9">https://t.co/2h7A1bDmj9</a></p>— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) <a href="https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1296083687130320896?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 19, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>Despite frustrating activists, the party's platform does call for an aggressive transition to renewable energy and to eliminating carbon emissions from power plants in 15 years. It also seeks net-zero greenhouse gas emissions for all new buildings in 10 years with the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, according to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/us/politics/democratic-party-platform.html?searchResultPosition=2" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.</p><p>However, it makes no mention of the Green New Deal, which is a strong rallying cry for the party's progressive wing.</p>
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The Environmental Legacy of Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s Newly-Announced Running Mate
12 August
Politics
California Senator Kamala Harris endorses Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden at a campaign rally at Renaissance High School in Detroit, Michigan on March 9, 2020. JEFF KOWALSKY / AFP via Getty Images
Former Vice President Joe Biden made a historic announcement Tuesday when he named California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate in the 2020 presidential election.
<p>Harris is now the first Black woman and the first person of Indian descent to run for national office for a major political party in the U.S., the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) pointed out. She also has a strong legacy of championing environmental justice throughout her career.</p><p>"Congratulations to Senator Kamala Harris, a true environmental champion!" LCV Action Fund Senior Vice President of Government Affairs Tiernan Sittenfeld said in a <a href="https://www.lcv.org/article/lcv-action-fund-statement-joes-bidens-vp-pick-senator-kamala-harris/" target="_blank">statement</a>.</p>
<div id="dd1a3" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="68af3c0112c4b985dfd2678d05cb02d9"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1293294015278985217" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">@JoeBiden @KamalaHarris Her stellar 91% lifetime score on LCV's Environmental Scorecard speaks for itself:… https://t.co/ZClO9w8soC</div> — LCV – League of Conservation Voters (@LCV – League of Conservation Voters)<a href="https://twitter.com/LCVoters/statuses/1293294015278985217">1597180296.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>Harris has a lifetime LCV environmental voting score of 91 percent, better than Biden's 83 percent, <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11082020/kamala-harris-joe-biden-election-2020-climate-change" target="_blank">InsideClimate News noted</a>. Her selection won praise from several mainstream environmental groups, including the <a href="https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2020/08/sierra-club-statement-biden-harris-2020" target="_blank">Sierra Club</a>, <a href="https://foeaction.org/news/friends-of-the-earth-action-applauds-the-historic-selection-of-kamala-harris-as-the-democratic-nominee-for-vice-president/" target="_blank">Friends of the Earth Action</a> and <a href="https://www.nrdcactionfund.org/kamala-harris-for-vice-president/?utm_source=tw&utm_medium=tweet&utm_campaign=AFciven" target="_blank">Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund</a>.</p><p>Harris is a co-sponsor of the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/green-new-deal" target="_self">Green New Deal</a> resolution, according to <a href="https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/what-the-kamala-harris-vp-pick-means-for-bidens-energy-and-climate-platform" target="_blank">Greentech Media</a>, and promised to end the filibuster during her own presidential campaign so that the major climate legislation would have a chance at passing. Her unique contribution to the green movement, however, is her lifetime focus on environmental justice in particular. This is a key issue for the Biden campaign as a <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/2020-election-climate-change-abortion-2638025748.html" target="_self">growing awareness</a> of the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change/" target="_self">climate crisis</a> corresponds with <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-activist-racial-justice-2646152490.html" target="_self">nationwide protests over racial injustice</a> and <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/black--hispanic-americans-coronavirus-2645677258.html" target="_self">health disparities</a> made starker by the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/coronavirus" target="_self">coronavirus</a> pandemic.</p>
<h3>Environmental Justice</h3><p>When Harris served as San Francisco district attorney, she created the office's first environmental justice unit in 2005, InsideClimate News reported.</p><p>"Crimes against the environment are crimes against communities, people who are often poor and disenfranchised," Harris said at the time, as <a href="https://grist.org/politics/kamala-harris-is-bidens-vp-pick-what-does-that-mean-for-the-climate/" target="_blank">Grist reported</a>.</p><p>She has continued championing the issue as a Senator. This summer, she introduced the Environmental Justice for All Act with Senators Tammy Duckworth and Cory Booker to ensure the federal government considers low income communities and communities of color when issuing permits, Greentech Media reported.</p><p>She also teamed up with New York Representative and Green New Deal champion <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/alexandria-ocasio-cortez" target="_self">Alexandria Ocasio Cortez</a> to introduce the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/harris-aoc-climate-legislation-2639501313.html" target="_self">Climate Equity Act</a>, which would create a new Office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability within the Office of Management and Budget to make sure that all environmental legislation and regulations are assessed based on their impact on frontline communities.</p><p>The duo first proposed the act last summer and formally introduced it last week.</p>
<div id="c4f11" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="67da6c1aa88b185f74fa063adbac316a"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1292181834571354115" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">This week, @RepAOC and I introduced the Climate Equity Act, legislation to ensure that we center the fight against… https://t.co/bpQi8aELxk</div> — Kamala Harris (@Kamala Harris)<a href="https://twitter.com/SenKamalaHarris/statuses/1292181834571354115">1596915131.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>"COVID-19 has laid bare the realities of systemic racial, health, economic, and environmental injustices that persist in our country," Harris said in a statement about the new legislation reported by <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/510920-harris-aoc-push-climate-equity-bill-with-green-new-deal-roots" target="_blank">The Hill</a>. "The environment we live in cannot be disentangled from the rest of our lives, and it is more important than ever that we work toward a more just and equitable future."</p>
<h3>Climate Liability</h3><p>During her presidential campaign and her time as California attorney general, Harris also emphasized holding <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/fossil-fuel" target="_self">fossil fuel</a> companies accountable for their pollution, InsideClimate News pointed out.</p><p>As attorney general, she opposed a Chevron refinery expansion in Richmond, a majority Black and Hispanic community. She also sued Southern California Gas Co. over a methane blowout near Los Angeles.</p><p>Finally, she joined AGs United for Clean Power, a group of 17 attorneys general who said they would hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate change. However, Harris never actually sued ExxonMobil, despite mistakenly claiming she had during a debate last year. She did repeatedly emphasize the need to hold fossil fuel companies responsible on the campaign trail and promised to have the Department of Justice launch an investigation.</p><p>"They are causing harm and death in communities. And there has been no accountability," she said at a CNN Town Hall on climate change.</p>
<h3>Weaknesses</h3><p>But Harris' prosecutorial record has another side. She has faced criticism from Black and progressive voters for her role as top prosecutor in a state that incarcerates African Americans at a rate five times higher than their share of the population. This has dampened her image somewhat with younger climate activists.</p><p>"I think Kamala Harris is a big win for women of color and environmental justice, however she definitely has some work to do in order to show our generation that she's become more progressive since her prosecutor days," 15-year-old climate activist and <a href="https://earthuprising.org/" target="_blank">Earth Uprising</a> founder Alexandria Villaseñor told InsideClimate News.</p><p>On the environmental front, Harris' weaknesses include the fact that she was one of the last Democratic candidates to unveil a climate plan, and, when she did, it did not include a ban on <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/fracking/" target="_self">fracking</a>, Grist pointed out. She has also accepted donations from fossil fuel companies in the past, though she pledged not to do so this election.</p><p>Weighing Harris' legacy, <a href="https://www.sunrisemovement.org/" target="_blank">Sunrise Movement</a> co-founder Varshini Prakash said the Senator was willing to grow in response to criticism.</p><p>"Throughout the course of her campaign for President, Senator Kamala Harris showed her responsiveness to activist and movement pressure to make climate a top priority, and demonstrated her willingness to be held accountable," Prakash said in a statement reported by Greentech Media. "I'm also deeply aware of Senator Harris' record as a prosecutor and the ways in which a number of her decisions harmed communities of color, which our movement has spoken about in the past and will continue to."</p>
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New Analysis Shows How Electrifying the U.S. Economy Could Create 25 Million Green Jobs by 2035
30 July
Business
A new report from Mobilizing for a Zero Carbon America demonstrates how 25 million green jobs could be created over the next 15 years. U.S. Department of Energy / Flickr
By Jessica Corbett
A report released Wednesday by a new nonprofit—in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the resulting economic disaster, and calls for a green recovery from those intertwined crises that prioritizes aggressive climate policies—lays out how rapidly decarbonizing and electrifying the U.S. economy could create up to 25 million good-paying jobs throughout the country over the next 15 years.
<p><a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e540e7fb9d1816038da0314/t/5f209173294b6f5ee41ea278/1595969952405/Jobs_White_Paper_Compressed_Release.pdf" target="_blank"><em>Mobilizing for a Zero Carbon America</em> </a>envisions a dramatic transformation of the nation's power, transportation, building, and industrial sectors by 2035 to meet the global heating goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The first project of the newly launched <a href="https://www.rewiringamerica.org/" target="_blank">Rewiring America</a> is "based on an extensive industrial and engineering analysis of what such a decarbonization would entail."</p><p>The report details a two-stage "maximum feasible transition" (MFT) that would involve a World War II-style production ramp-up for three to five years, followed by "an intensive deployment of decarbonized infrastructure and technology up to 2035," which would include both supply-side generation technologies and demand-side technologies like electric vehicles.</p><p>In addition to creating millions of green jobs in the wake of a public health crisis that has left tens of millions of Americans <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/29/yale-study-600-unemployment-lifeline-championed-democrats-destroys-favorite-gop" target="_blank">unemployed</a> and helping the country contribute to the goals of the Paris accord—which President Donald Trump <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/04/delivering-catastrophic-message-moment-great-urgency-trump-formally-begins-ditching" target="_blank">started</a> withdrawing from last November—the report says that the MFT approach would save households nationwide up to thousands of dollars in annual energy costs.</p><p>"While government investment will be critical to the transition, private capital also has a large role to play," a summary <a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e540e7fb9d1816038da0314/t/5f205587b6d39a471674c41d/1595954567576/RewiringAmerica_Jobs+Report+Summary_Rag.pdf" target="_blank">document</a> from the group says. "The study estimates the government's share of overall costs to be about $300 billion per year for 10 years for an approximate total of $3 trillion, mostly in the form of loans and/or loan guarantees to spur lending, akin to similar loan systems that the government has created in the past."</p>
<div id="f81ce" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="a2fad6ba1ecf38ccb6549191cdb16426"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1288520002916823041" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">A MacArthur Genius, business leader, and MIT physicist have a plan: get 25 million Americans back to work in good-p… https://t.co/tCvc2rmvd3</div> — Otherlab (@Otherlab)<a href="https://twitter.com/otherlab/statuses/1288520002916823041">1596042082.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>"We can power our homes by the sun, charge our cars from clean energy while we sleep, and rethink city streets as we know them. In the process, we can create 25 million jobs in America. The only thing standing in the way is a leadership vacuum," lead author Saul Griffith, an engineer and inventor who was awarded the MacArthur "Genius Grant" in 2007, said in a statement.</p><p>Griffith, founder and chief scientist of the independent research and development lab Otherlab, joined with Alex Laskey, president and founder of the software company Opower, to launch Rewiring America, which focuses on decarbonization in the U.S. The report, co-authored by Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Sam Calisch, is part of a forthcoming book by Griffith.</p><p>"I think the best way to describe what needs to happen politically is we need a president and some level of bipartisanship that will enable FDR levels of urgency in action," Griffith <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90533448/how-to-create-25-million-jobs-by-decarbonizing-the-economy?partner=rss&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss" target="_blank">told</a><em> Fast Company</em>. "And you could use either FDR's response to the Great Depression or to World War II as your measure of that, but I think it's actually more analogous to the World War II effort in terms of the speed of industrialization to win that war."</p>
<p>A<em>s Fast Company</em> reported:</p><blockquote>The report attempts to make the idea of a Green New Deal more concrete. "I think all of the various Green New Deals and aspirational climate plans are narratively in the right direction, but we need to give them some ground truths and build some reality to them about what needs to happen from the ground up," he says. "Those aspirations are great, but this is actually what you now need to do to get there. I think this is one of the first analyses that really builds out that model from the ground up of what has to happen in order to keep this on target for two degrees."<br></blockquote><blockquote>The changes would also mean lower energy costs for consumers, and the report calculates that the average American household would save between $1,000 and $2,000 a year. Everyday life wouldn't necessarily change significantly. "We now have technologies that are transformative, meaning you can now roughly have the same size and shape car, but electric," Griffith says. "You can have the same size and shape house, but it will be run with electric heat pumps instead of the natural gas furnace. And if we have the sort of that spirit of can-do that America had mid-20th century, there's every reason to believe that our lives improve when we do this, and we can have and live something like the American dream. It'll just be electrified, not fossil-fueled."<br></blockquote><p>Leaders of the Sunrise Movement—a youth climate organization that advocates for the Green New Deal—endorsed the findings of Rewiring America's report, as did Sen. Brian Shatz (D-Hawaii), former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner, Niskanen Center director of climate policy Joseph Majku, and Mike Fishman, past secretary-treasurer of Service Employees International Union and current president of Clean Jobs New York.</p>
<p>"The Rewiring America team asked the question: 'What would happen if we actually tried to transition all of the infrastructure in American society over the next 15 years to stay within the 1.5ºC safe upper limit of global warming?'" said Evan Weber, co-founder and political director of the Sunrise Movement. "The answer they found is that would save consumers and society money, and it would create lots and lots and lots of jobs—around 25 million of them."</p><p>The report comes a couple weeks after presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/14/more-work-do-major-step-forward-progressives-welcome-bidens-2-trillion-green-energy" target="_blank">unveiled</a> a $2 trillion green energy plan that progressive climate advocates, including Sunrise, welcomed as a "a major step forward." Biden's job-creating plan calls for a power sector free of carbon pollution by 2035.</p><p>Sunrise executive director Varshini Prakash <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/07/09/lets-keep-organizing-inside-look-biden-sanders-task-force-climate" target="_blank">served on</a> a unity task force launched by Biden and his former primary rival Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who won Sunrise's <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/01/09/grasping-scope-climate-crisis-and-fully-embracing-green-new-deal-youth-led-sunrise" target="_blank">endorsement</a>. She welcomed Biden's recent proposal while also promising that her group will work to ensure he actually delivers on it if he wins.</p>
<p>Prakash also welcomed the analysis Wednesday, noting that "for so long we've been sold the lie that we have to choose between good jobs and a safe environment, that our generation has to choose between a livable planet and a thriving, equitable economy."</p><p>"The Rewiring America Plan puts that lie to rest once and for all," she said. "This report is a critical contribution that shows that urgently achieving an all-society clean energy future by 2035 is not only necessary and achievable, but will make the world that young people inherit more prosperous."</p><p>"We can achieve a just transition to a better world out of the wreckage of this economic crisis, with good union jobs for all, including low-income communities and communities of color," she added. "The only thing standing in the way is political will."</p>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from<a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/29/new-analysis-details-how-electrifying-us-economy-2035-could-create-25-million-green?cd-origin=rss" target="_blank"> Common Dreams</a>.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
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Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks at a "Build Back Better" Clean Energy event on July 14, 2020 at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware. Joe Biden / Facebook
Presidential hopeful Joe Biden announced a $2 trillion plan Tuesday to boost American investment in clean energy and infrastructure.
<p>His plan would spend the money over the next four years to boost the transportation, electricity and building sectors' clean energy profiles. It is also part of a plan to create new economic opportunities, improve the nation's aging infrastructure, and to combat the climate crisis, as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/us/politics/biden-climate-plan.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a> reported.</p><p>Biden's sweeping proposals would put an end to all greenhouse gas emissions spewed by U.S. power plants by 2035, arguing that large-scale dramatic moves are necessary to tackle the impending threat of the climate crisis and to revive the economy after the coronavirus pandemic, as <a href="https://apnews.com/7cdf40d9bd40c75861fc0053212d034a" target="_blank">The Associated Press</a> reported. It would also ban fracking on public lands.</p>
<p>Speaking near his home in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden also sought to reframe the discussion around the climate crisis, moving it away from a moral imperative and toward an economic one, dismissing <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/trump-watch/" target="_self">Trump</a>'s and the Republicans' arguments that investments in green energy would cost jobs. Biden looked to play up how many jobs clean energy creates.</p><p>"When Donald Trump thinks about climate change, the only word he can muster is 'hoax,'" Biden told reporters, <a href="https://apnews.com/7cdf40d9bd40c75861fc0053212d034a" target="_blank">The Associated Press</a> reported. "When I think about climate change, what I think of is jobs."</p><p>Biden's <a href="https://joebiden.com/clean-energy/" target="_blank">climate initiative</a> calls to chart the U.S. on "an irreversible path" to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. In addition to achieving a carbon-free power grid by 2035, Biden's plan calls for upgrades to 4 million buildings and to weatherize 2 million homes over four years to increase energy efficiency, as <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/07/14/890814007/biden-outlines-2-trillion-climate-plan" target="_blank">NPR</a> reported. Homeowners would be given cash rebates to upgrade home appliances and install more efficient windows. Car owners would receive rebates to swap their old, less efficient cars for newer ones that release fewer pollutants, according to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-set-to-offer-newly-ambitious-climate-goals/2020/07/14/39ced8b8-c578-11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html" target="_blank">The Washington Post</a>.</p>
<p>The proposal, Biden's campaign said, would aim to shift major cities towards increased use of public transportation and "create millions of good, union jobs rebuilding America's crumbling infrastructure," according to NPR.</p><p>"We're not just going to tinker around the edges," Biden said his speech. "We're going to make historic investments and seize the opportunity and meet this moment in history."</p><p>Environmentalists and liberals quickly praised the climate initiative as a step forward in the climate effort. Predictably, Republicans quickly denounced it as an unwieldy plan that would raise energy costs, as The Washington Post reported.</p>
<p>The new goals align Biden more closely with three primary opponents: Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Washington Governor Jay Inslee. They follow the recommendations of a unity task force of Sanders and Biden supporters that was co-chaired by New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who co-sponsored the Green New Deal, according to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/14/joe-biden-climate-jobs-plan" target="_blank">The Guardian</a>.</p><p>"This is not a status quo plan," said Inslee, as The New York Times reported. "It is comprehensive. This is not some sort of, 'Let me just throw a bone to those who care about climate change.'"</p><p>Inslee called the proposal "visionary."</p><p>Gina McCarthy, the former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator who is now president of the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, told The Guardian that the plan was "by a long shot – the most ambitious we have ever seen from any president in our nation's history."</p>
<p>In the proposal, Biden also linked environmental advocacy with racial justice, noting that pollution and other toxins disproportionately affect communities of color. His plan calls for establishing an office of environmental and climate justice within the Justice Department and developing a broad set of tools to address how "environmental policy decisions of the past have failed communities of color," according to The New York Times.</p><p>Varshini Prakash, co-founder of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, said, as The Guardian reported, that Biden's plan responds to many of the group's previous criticisms by "dramatically increasing the scale and urgency of investments, filling in details on how he'd achieve environmental justice and create good union jobs, and promising immediate action — on day 1, in his first 100 days, in his first term, in the next decade — not just some far off goals."</p>
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U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveils the Green New Deal resolution in front of the U.S. Capitol on February 7, 2019 in Washington, DC. Alex Wong / Getty Images
For all its posturing on climate change, the Democratic Party has long been weak on the actual policies we need to save us from extinction. President Barack Obama promised his presidency would mark "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow," and then embraced natural gas, a major driver of global temperature rise, as a "bridge fuel." Climate legislation passed in the House in 2009 would have allowed industries to buy credits to pollute, a practice known to concentrate toxic air in black and brown neighborhoods while doing little to cut emissions.
<p>Even this year, with interest in the issue at an all-time high, the candidates the <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Democratic_Senatorial_Campaign_Committee" title="Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee" target="_blank">Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee</a> endorsed — like Amy McGrath, who eked out a victory in Kentucky's Senate primary, and former-Governor John Hickenlooper, who handily won Colorado's — have evinced skepticism about the Green New Deal, a resolution pending in Congress to put trillions of dollars into a transition to renewable energy plus job-training for a new clean economy.</p><p>On June 4, however, when the Democratic National Committee's Environment and Climate Crisis Council released a rigorous set of proposals for the party's 2020 platform, it offered climate voters some hope. The 14-page document's solutions for the warming planet included investment in communities that suffer every day with the consequences of industrial waste, shoring up public health services and making sure everyone has enough to eat. It also advises changing the structure of the society that allows police to kill unarmed black people with relative impunity.</p><p>"There's just no way to address the climate crisis without taking on systemic racism," says Michelle Deatrick, chair of the council. "They're intertwined and integrally related."</p><p>But proposals are not a platform; they don't represent any official statement of purpose from the DNC on climate or anything else. The climate council, founded in August 2019 after party members failed to persuade Chairman Tom Perez to hold a climate debate, is but one of three groups involved in crafting the party's final climate policies. Another, the eight-member Biden-Sanders Climate Task Force, will offer recommendations from the likes of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and environmental justice leader Catherine Coleman Flowers. Then it's yet another committee that will draw up the actual climate platform with former Vice President Joe Biden, the party's presumptive nominee.</p>
<p>On its face, that process looks reasonable: A task force and a council inclined to progressive ideals will push the ultimate deciders to take bigger steps toward a zero-carbon future. The problem, Deatrick says, is that once the platform has been agreed upon by that final, 15-member committee, it rarely changes when it goes before the full committee for approval.</p><p>"It's mostly a formal vote," she says. The state and local officials in the DNC, despite the crucial knowledge they bring from their jurisdictions, "historically have had no impact on the final product." But this year, with its great convergence of catastrophes that have defined the spring and summer of 2020, <em>has</em> to be different. "We need to have an inclusive and transparent process around the creation of the platform," Deatrick says. "This is a great opportunity for Democrats to show that we are the party of listening and deep considerations of ideas."</p><p>Among those ideas is that none of the problems we're facing can be disentangled from the others. "The nature of environmental problems is bound up in the history of race in America," says Adrien Salazar, senior campaign strategist for climate equity with the social-justice think tank Dēmos. "The only way that [polluting] industries have been viable at all is because there are communities where they can pollute, places that have ended up being the sacrifice zones for the rest of America."</p><p>Racial inequality, he says, "undergirds the very fabric of American society."</p>
<p>"You can't have climate change without sacrifice zones,"<a href="https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/racism-killing-planet" title=" wrote" target="_blank"> wrote</a> Hop Hopkins, director of strategic partnerships for the Sierra Club, in a recent essay. "And you can't have sacrifice zones without disposable people, and you can't have disposable people without racism."</p><p>Robert Bullard, the author and researcher often called "the father of the environmental justice movement," has found that toxic hot spots across the U.S., from Louisiana's "Cancer Alley" to the refinery rows of Texas, <a href="https://drrobertbullard.com/african-americans-on-the-frontline-fighting-for-environmental-justice/" title="align closely" target="_blank">align closely</a> with Jim Crow housing segregation and other discriminatory zoning practices. "America is segregated," he says, "and so is pollution."</p><p>The injustice bleeds into public health and disease transmission: The COVID-19 virus<a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.11.20061713v1" title=" travels" target="_blank"> travels</a>, scientists hypothesize, on the sooty particles that blight communities on the front lines of industrial pollution. Those same places emit the greenhouse gases warming the atmosphere. In other words, it's not just pre-existing conditions causing the disease to hit harder in black communities. It's literally the air people breathe.</p><p>There are people tasked with air-quality regulation who argue that the common air contaminants that make people sick – the ground-level ozone that irritates lung tissue, the particulate matter that triggers cancer – belong to a different category than the greenhouse gases that trap the earth's heat. Mustafa Santiago Ali, vice president of environmental justice, climate and community revitalization for the National Wildlife Federation, remembers hearing as much during the 24 years he spent at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "I've had these conversations with some of the best scientists in the world," he says. "And what I know is that it is impossible, <em>impossible, </em>to hit the numbers that we need to hit to win on climate change if you're not focused on environmental justice."</p>
<p>Fossil-fuel infrastructure, for instance, blights "lower-wealth communities," Santiago Ali says. "So if you focus on that, you're going to begin to minimize the impacts of oil and gas." Pipelines cut through indigenous land in the Midwest and end up on Louisiana's Gulf Coast. "If you stop those pipelines, you stop the climate-killing export of oil."</p><p>Cars and trucks drive global warming, too, and their proliferation is made possible by "policies of running highways through certain communities, moving wealth into certain communities and dropping off pollution in lower-wealth communities along the way." Writer Peter Simek has <a href="https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2016/03/the-racist-legacy-of-americas-innercity-highways/" title="noted" target="_blank">noted</a> that you can find the locations of Dallas' Freedmen's Towns — communities established by emancipated slaves during and after the Civil War — by following the highways engineers built on top of them. "Some of the most powerful planners in America were forthright about their intention to use their power as transportation engineers to rewire a society built on racial and economic segregation," he wrote.</p><p>If you stop dehumanizing people in order to pollute, you stop degrading the environment, Santiago Ali says. If you don't, we literally won't survive. "There's no way of pulling climate out and saying, 'We're going to win on this but not focus on any of these other issues," he says. "That's just bad arithmetic."</p>
<p>Whether the platform committee does better math depends on how well it responds to outside pressure: The group is diverse, but not necessarily progressive. (Journalist Emily Atkin in her newsletter<a href="https://heated.world/p/dnc-snubs-progressive-climate-activists" title=" Heated" target="_blank"> Heated</a> has broken the group down in a useful<a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PloB-PNkeg8j2s0UFFnFFPfcoxTMalI8S6pm8PhrVJ0/edit?usp=sharing" title=" spreadsheet" target="_blank"> spreadsheet</a>.) Fear surrounds this election — fear that pushing too hard on climate and racial injustice both will alienate white voters of the Rust Belt; fear that people will equate an expensive clean energy transition with the loss of jobs in oil and gas. Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mineworkers Union, told<a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-climate-exclusive/exclusive-u-s-democratic-party-irked-by-councils-insurgent-climate-plan-sources-idUSKBN23M1DO" title=" Reuters" target="_blank"> Reuters</a> that the circulation of the climate council's policy recommendations "has already cost Democrats potential votes in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan."<span></span></p><p>Deatrick, who in addition to her environmental work is a longtime union supporter from Michigan, isn't worried. "We have to walk the talk," she says. "We have to make sure that we commit to policies that support those workers, replace pensions, provide health care." What she's learned on three months of listening tours around the country is that people are less afraid of economic transitions than they are of the chaos a changing climate will bring.</p><p>"We have a real opportunity to reinvigorate the part of the electorate – which is the vast majority of Democrats and Independents as well – who rate the climate crisis among their top priorities," Deatrick says, along with health care and racial inequality. She wants to make sure that when the draft of the climate platform is drawn up, those people are heard. The DNC "has not laid out what that listening process will be," she says. "And we don't have much time left."</p>
<p class=""><em>This story originally appeared in</em> <em><a href="https://capitalandmain.com/" target="_blank">Capital & Main</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. and Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., along with affordable housing advocates and climate change activists announce the introduction of public housing legislation as part of the Green New Deal outside the Capitol on Nov. 14, 2019. Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
When former Vice President Joe Biden effectively clinched the Democratic nomination in April, one major concern for the climate movement was the fact that his plan for tackling the issue was less ambitious than that of some of his primary rivals.
<p>But Biden signaled a willingness to boost his climate platform. And now, <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/green-new-deal" target="_self">Green-New-Deal</a> champion Representative <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/alexandria-ocasio-cortez" target="_self">Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez</a> (D-NY) has agreed to serve on a panel helping him shape his plan to address the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change/" target="_self">climate crisis</a>.</p><p>"She made the decision with members of the Climate Justice community — and she will be fully accountable to them and the larger advocacy community during this process," a representative of the Congresswoman told <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-biden-climate/democrat-ocasio-cortez-will-serve-on-bidens-climate-change-panel-idUSKBN22P0F8?fbclid=IwAR1sVcrqWBpfV6rxppA6z8u8IA4104nCx1JmVhLogxJduRJsJjDk_R_PdU4&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook" target="_blank">Reuters</a> by email Tuesday. "She believes the movement will only be successful if we continue to apply pressure both inside and outside the system."</p>
<p>Ocasio-Cortez has made a name for herself in Congress as an <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/green-new-deal-ocasio-cortez-2628265318.html" target="_self">advocate</a> for a Green New Deal to transition the U.S. away from fossil fuels while providing jobs and supporting greater equality. In the primaries, she endorsed Independent Vermont Senator <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/bernie-sanders" target="_self">Bernie Sanders</a>, whose climate plan promised $16.3 trillion for a Green New Deal-type mobilization and earned a 94 out of 100 on <a href="https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/" target="_blank">Greenpeace</a>'s <a href="https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/climate2020/" target="_blank">climate scorecard</a>. Biden's initial plan, meanwhile, promised only $1.7 trillion and earned a 72 from Greenpeace.</p><p>But when Sanders, the last major primary contender to drop out, endorsed Biden, the campaign announced a series of task forces that would work to bring together supporters of the two candidates on issues from health care to criminal justice to the economy, <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/12/politics/ocasio-cortez-biden-campaign-task-force-climate-change/index.html" target="_blank">CNN explained</a>. It is the climate-centered of these task forces that Ocasio-Cortez will be serving on, as Biden himself confirmed in an interview with News8 in Las Vegas Tuesday.</p>
<p>"I'm working with Bernie and with his people. And so, and we've made some changes. We've listened to Bernie supporters and, you know, for example, we have Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, she is on one of the panels," Biden said.</p><p>A source with direct knowledge of the matter told CNN that Ocasio-Cortez would actually be co-chairing the panel.</p><p>Ocasio-Cortez spokeswoman Lauren Hitt told <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/aoc-joins-biden-s-climate-policy-panel-n1205886" target="_blank">NBC News</a> the Congresswoman would be representing Sanders on the panel.</p>
<p>When the panels were first announced, Sanders explained them as a way to unify the Democratic party's progressive and moderate wings.</p><p>"It's no great secret out there, Joe, that you and I have our differences, and we're not going to paper them over. That's real," Sanders said, as CNN reported. "But I hope that these task forces will come together utilizing the best minds and people in your campaign and in my campaign to work out real solutions to these very, very important problems."</p><p>Biden told News8 he was reaching out to Sanders supporters, but said their positions were not as far as voters may have believed.</p>
<p>"My message to all — and what they're finding out now that the nomination process is de facto over, they're finding out the positions I had on an awful lot of things were not accurately characterized and they're feeling more comfortable with it," Biden said, as NBC News reported. "But I'm listening. I'm here, I need them, and I hope they all will join us."</p><p>President <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/donald-trump" target="_self">Donald Trump</a>, who Biden will be running against in November, has not taken any steps to address the climate crisis and has a Greenpeace score of zero.</p><p>"Trump denies the reality of the climate crisis and is actively promoting fossil fuels while weakening existing climate protections. His Cabinet is filled with former coal and oil lobbyists. Trump gets an 'F' for putting our most vulnerable communities — and our very futures — at risk," Greenpeace wrote.</p>
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Bernie Sanders, Candidate With Most Ambitious Climate Plan, Drops out of 2020 Race
09 April
Politics
Bernie Sanders announces he is suspending his campaign via a livestream Wednesday. berniesanders.com via Getty Images
Bernie Sanders, the Independent Vermont Senator who campaigned for aggressive action on the climate crisis and environmental justice, has dropped out of the 2020 Democratic primary race.
<p>His announcement, made Wednesday morning during a conference call with his entire staff, means the more moderate former Vice President <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/joe-biden" target="_self">Joe Biden</a> will face off against President <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/donald-trump" target="_self">Donald Trump</a> in November, <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/08/bernie-sanders-suspends-his-presidential-campaign-175137" target="_blank">POLITICO reported</a>. In a speech livestreamed to supporters, Sanders said his campaign had won the "ideological battle" on issues ranging from universal health care to climate action, but that he could see no clear way to secure the nomination.</p><p>"Together we have transformed American consciousness as to what kind of nation we can become, and have taken this country a major step forward in the never-ending struggle for economic justice, social justice, racial justice and environmental justice," he told his supporters, according to a transcript provided by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/us/politics/bernie-sanders-concession-speech.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.</p>
<div id="3a082" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="131662b2ba22cb4092191ade98d0ac98"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1247913426166280192" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">Today I am suspending my campaign. But while the campaign ends, the struggle for justice continues on. https://t.co/MYc7kt2b16</div> — Bernie Sanders (@Bernie Sanders)<a href="https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/statuses/1247913426166280192">1586360720.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>When Sanders first entered the race in February of 2019, he <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/bernie-sanders-2020-2629410846.html" target="_self">promised</a> to release his own version of the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/bernie-sanders-2020-2629410846.html" target="_self">Green New Deal</a>, an ambitious plan to transition the U.S. from fossil fuels to renewable energy while providing jobs and addressing inequality.</p><p>When his <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/sanders-green-new-deal-2639955047.html" target="_self">plan dropped in August</a>, many said it was the most progressive of the proposals of the Democratic candidates contending for the nomination. <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/22/20828794/bernie-sanders-green-new-deal-2020-elections-climate-change" target="_blank">Verge summed it up</a> at the time:</p><blockquote>At $16.3 trillion spent over 15 years, Sanders' climate deal is by far the priciest of all the Democratic candidates left in the primary race. It's also arguably the most progressive — pushing for the US to have a carbon-free economy by 2050. The senator from Vermont also set a 2030 benchmark goal of reaching 100 percent renewable energy in the country's two most carbon-intensive industries, transportation and the power sector, by investing in solar, wind, and geothermal power. Sanders' plan would also declare climate change a national emergency, bring the US back on board with the Paris climate agreement, and commit $200 billion in funding to help developing nations cut their emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change.</blockquote>
<p>His plan earned a 94 out of 100 on <a href="https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/" target="_blank">Greenpeace</a>'s <a href="https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/climate2020/" target="_blank">climate scorecard</a> and an <a href="https://medium.com/sunrisemvmt/sunrise-movement-endorses-bernie-sanders-for-president-b6bdb68ba408" target="_blank">endorsement</a> from pro-Green New Deal group the <a href="https://www.sunrisemovement.org/" target="_blank">Sunrise Movement</a>.</p><p>But after early primary victories in New Hampshire and Nevada, Sanders began to falter beside the more moderate Biden, who won in South Carolina, and then in 10 out of 14 Super Tuesday states after other more moderate contenders threw their support behind him, POLITICO explained. Biden continued to do well throughout March, and now has 1,127 delegates compared to Sanders' 914, according to the most recent delegate count from <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/elections/delegate-count-primary-results.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.</p>
<p>Biden's climate policies are more moderate than Sanders' as of now. His plan has a <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/sanders-biden-climate-coronavirus-2645497732.html?rebelltitem=4#rebelltitem4" target="_self">much lower price tag</a> of $1.7 trillion dollars and a score of 72 out of 100 from Greenpeace. The organization applauded his commitment to achieving climate neutrality by 2050, investing in clean energy and restoring international climate leadership, but faulted him for not promising to ban all oil and gas drilling on public lands and to end all federal permits for fossil fuel infrastructure.</p><p>There is a chance Biden will ultimately run on a more ambitious plan, however. Sanders said he would keep his name on the ballot in the remaining primaries to boost his delegate count in order to have more influence over the party platform.</p><p>The Biden campaign is also working to bring in Sanders' supporters by incorporating some of his policies, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/us/politics/biden-sanders-campaign-policy.html?auth=login-google" target="_blank">The New York Times reported</a>. In a virtual fundraiser Wednesday, Biden hinted he would add some more progressive ideas to his climate plan, and POLITICO reports he is in talks with the Sunrise Movement.</p><p>The Sunrise Movement is also one of a coalition of youth-led groups that sent a letter to Biden urging him to endorse certain policies including a Green New Deal.</p>
<div id="5dfc4" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="d3a9b1cd7c33c70dcdf68530984b5c77"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1248011402494631936" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">.@JoeBiden is now the presumptive Democratic nominee.
But he wasn’t able to win over the vast majority of voters u… https://t.co/VXaw3P2lQv</div> — Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@Sunrise Movement 🌅)<a href="https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt/statuses/1248011402494631936">1586384079.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>"If Joe Biden is going to be the nominee on the Democratic side, we are going to champion Joe Biden and put all muscle behind" his election, Sunrise Movement Executive Director Varshini Prakash told The New York Times. But then she addressed Biden directly, suggesting he also had work to do. "You haven't earned our vote yet," she said.</p>
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Essential farm workers continue to work as Florida agriculture industry struggles during coronavirus pandemic. Joe Raedle / Getty Images.
By Liz Carlisle
This opinion piece was originally published by Yes! Magazine on March 30, 2020.
As the coronavirus crisis has laid bare, the U.S. urgently needs a strategic plan for farmland. The very lands we need to ensure community food security and resilience in the face of crises like this pandemic and climate change are currently being paved over, planted to chemically raised feed grains for factory farm animals, and acquired by institutional investors and speculators. For far too long, the fate of farmlands has flown under the radar of public dialogue—but a powerful new proposal from think tank Data for Progress lays out how a national strategic plan for farmland could help boost economic recovery while putting the U.S. on a path to carbon neutrality.
<p>The new Data For Progress <a href="https://www.dataforprogress.org/memos/land-access-for-beginning-disadvantaged-farmers" target="_blank">memo</a> builds on the Green New Deal <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109/text" target="_blank">resolution</a>—a sweeping proposal to build out a carbon neutral economy, inspired by the package of Roosevelt administration social policy that lifted the United States out of the 1930s Depression and created the largest middle class in history. The Green New Deal, advocates say, would mobilize similar infrastructure and jobs programs, but with a focus on climate mitigation and resilience, and a more broadly construed focus on equity. (While the original New Deal met many goals expressed by organized labor, it failed to address racial inequality).</p><p>Yet this latest Data for Progress memo, published today, hearkens back several decades before Roosevelt's presidency. Reopening conversations that were front and center during Abraham Lincoln's time in the White House, the memo proposes one of the most promising strategies yet offered for meeting climate targets while building broad-based economic prosperity: a systematic national policy to facilitate land access for small farmers.</p>
Lincoln’s Unfinished Business
<p>Farmland ownership has not followed the path that President Lincoln envisioned, explains the memo's co-lead author Meleiza Figueroa, a Ph.D. candidate in geography at University of California, Berkeley and faculty-owner of the Birmingham-based Cooperative New School for Urban Studies and Environmental Justice. When Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862, he promised small tracts of land to family farmers. Following emancipation, the Lincoln administration also promised "40 acres and a mule" to formerly enslaved Africans.</p><p>However, land speculators cheated from the beginning of the homestead era, gobbling up multiple claims under different names. And "40 acres and a mule" were never provided to emancipated slaves, as President Andrew Johnson <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/the-truth-behind-40-acres-and-a-mule/" target="_blank">rescinded the promise</a> after Lincoln's assassination. Homestead claims <a href="https://www.nps.gov/home/learn/historyculture/abouthomesteadactlaw.htm" target="_blank">trickled to a close</a> in the early 1900s, and the federal government backed out of land policy, letting the market take its course. "When you look at the history of injustice in this country," Figueroa says, "it's all about land."</p><p>In the century-long absence of a coherent U.S. policy framework for farmland, Figueroa and her coauthors point out, several worrying trends have developed. For one, prime farmland has been paved over. According to the American Farmland Trust, 25.1 million acres of U.S. agricultural land—nearly the size of the state of Ohio—was converted to developed uses between 1982 and 2015.</p><p>Such land use change has significant climate implications. A <a href="https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/2012publications/CEC-500-2012-032/CEC-500-2012-032.pdf" target="_blank">2012 University of California, Davis study</a> that compared an acre of urban land to an acre of irrigated cropland found that the urban land generated 70 times as many greenhouse gas emissions. There's also an opportunity cost: Land-based carbon sequestration strategies like <a href="https://civileats.com/2018/10/11/fire-and-agroforestry-are-reviving-traditional-native-foods-and-communities/" target="_blank">agroforestry</a> and <a href="https://civileats.com/2020/02/11/two-states-are-leading-a-cover-crop-revival/" target="_blank">cover cropping</a> can't be adopted if the land is under concrete.</p><p>Second, the memo points out, what farmland remains has become ever more concentrated in the hands of large farms and institutional investors. A mere <a href="https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.356/" target="_blank">3.2% of U.S. farms account for 51% of the total value</a> of the nation's agricultural production. Forty percent of U.S. farmland is rented, discouraging sustainable agricultural practices that require long-term management and secure land tenure. And farmers make up just <a href="https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy.aspx" target="_blank">1.3%</a> of the U.S. workforce.</p><p>"There's an assumption out there that this is just the forward march of progress," Figueroa says. " 'Who wants to be a farmer anymore?' Actually, a lot of people want to be farmers now—especially young people who are aware of the effects of climate change and also not satisfied by alienating office labor. Why not offer the opportunity for meaningful and gainful work that is beneficial to everybody, to people and planet?"</p>Racial Injustice Plays Out on the Land
<p>The absence of a coherent U.S. land policy can be blamed for some of the current problems with farmland concentration, say the authors of the Data for Progress memo. But co-lead author Leah Penniman, founding co-director of Soul Fire Farm in Upstate New York, argues that the U.S. government has had a very influential de facto land policy over the past century, even if it wasn't articulated as such. "The very basis of U.S. land policy is rooted in the theft of land and the exclusion of people of color from land," Penniman explains. "This, of course, started with the genocidal stealing of almost the entire continent from the stewardship of Indigenous people … [and] throughout much of our history, there have been various state-level property ownership requirements that excluded people of color from being able to own property."</p><p> When people of color did amass property, Penniman says, they were targeted with violence.</p><p>"The Ku Klux Klan, the White Caps, and the White Citizens Council were responsible for lynching almost 4,500 people, many of whom were landowners, who they saw as having the audacity to get off the plantation and to want to stop sharecropping." The federal government also discriminated against black farmers through USDA programs, Penniman explains, resulting in a rapid decline of black farmers from 14% of the nation's farmers in 1910 to approximately 1% today.</p><p>Given that the average age of the American farmer is 57, and a significant share of the nation's farmland will soon change hands, Penniman and her co-authors argue, Americans have a short window of opportunity to rectify this unjust history while ensuring that farmland is conserved and that farmers have opportunities to combat climate change.</p>A Diverse Coalition for Reform
<p>The diverse coalition mobilizing around these shifts to farm policy is notable: Contributors to the Data for Progress memo range from staffers at predominantly white farm state groups like National Family Farm Coalition and Family Farm Defenders to racial justice leaders like Penniman and Figueroa to academics focused on economic policy.</p><p>What these diverse constituencies share, the memo's authors explain, is that they've all gotten the short end of the stick of land consolidation and are struggling to survive. Ironically, many family farmers have accumulated significant land over the past generation or two but are less economically secure, as they've taken on debt to keep up with the treadmill of overproduction stimulated by current agriculture policy.</p><p>"We need to give current family farmers, who are mostly white, a lot of credit," Penniman says. "Nobody wants to be complicit in racism and in that kind of harm and exclusion. I think it's in our best interest as a nation not to pretend that we're all the same or that we all need the same policies, but to really look truthfully at what needs to change. And we've found that having these honest conversations in our communities often leads to common ground."</p><p>As for how to turn this common ground into policy change, the memo's authors outline a couple different pathways. The 'low hanging fruit' option, explains contributor Adam Calo, a researcher at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland, would be to expand three separate kinds of existing policies. For one, Calo believes, the U.S. should ramp up efforts to conserve farmland and protect it from development while limiting land investment by large corporations. Second, programs that incentivize farmers to use regenerative agricultural practices that combat climate change should be dramatically scaled up. The third and critical piece of this policy triad, Calo emphasizes, is equity: the U.S. must strengthen and enforce policies that ensure "Socially Disadvantaged Farmers" (the USDA's term for farmers subjected to racial discrimination) have equal access to all farm programs and particular set-asides to redress historic injustices.</p><p>More ambitious and transformative, the memo's authors suggest, would be to combine these objectives with a fully integrated land policy. Such a policy would include public land banks that could acquire land from retiring farmers and provide affordable access for farmers of color, new farmers, and farm cooperatives who pledged to use sustainable practices. It would also include a land commission, anchored by community-based institutions led by people of color, that would periodically assess that state of farmland access and make policy recommendations.</p>Good Stewardship at Scale
<p>Figueroa is excited about these more far-reaching approaches, which she sees as opportunities to mobilize the underutilized climate response potential in Black and brown communities. "How many Oaxacan farmers are in apartment buildings right now?," Figueroa asks. "If you gave them land, they know what to do with it. It's not like they forgot what to do with it once they crossed the border."</p><p>But getting farmers on land isn't enough, Figueroa and her coauthors emphasize. A successful Green New Deal for farmland must help ecological farmers stay on the land—and thrive. Penniman points to the success of payment for ecosystem services policies like those in Costa Rica, where farmers are compensated for providing environmental benefits on behalf of society—benefits like maintaining pollinator habitat, preventing soil erosion, and sequestering carbon. We already have such programs in the U.S., including the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and the Conservation Stewardship Program, but they are funded at much lower levels than other farm programs that predominantly support industrial agriculture.</p><p>Overhauling farm programs by shifting current subsidies to instead compensate farmers for climate-beneficial practices—and establishing public procurement and supply management—would allow current family farmers to earn more money on fewer acres. At the same time, it would enable farmers to produce more human food (rather than biofuels and feed grain for factory farms) and provide more public benefits (such as drawing down emissions and improving watershed health). Remaining and degraded acres no longer needed by these now much more viable farms could be transitioned into land banks like those envisioned by the Data for Progress team, offering a just transition for both existing family farmers and landless farmers looking to contribute to climate mitigation and community food security by stewarding land.</p><p>"It's a win-win," Figueroa says. "People who want to put their labor into agriculture and struggling farmers who want support can actually join together as a community."</p>From Your Site Articles
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A 'Green Stimulus' Could Battle Three Crises: Coronavirus, Economic Injustice and Climate Emergency
24 March
Insights + Opinion
A solar energy project manager carries a panel to the roof ridge of a home at OceanView at Falmouth in Portland, Maine on Aug. 2, 2017. Ben McCanna / Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images
By Jessica Corbett
"As a nation we face three converging crises: the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic recession; the climate emergency; and extreme inequality."
<p><br/></p>
<p>That's the warning from progressive policy experts, climate leaders, and academics who have joined together to support a new "<a href="https://medium.com/@green_stimulus_now/a-green-stimulus-to-rebuild-our-economy-1e7030a1d9ee" target="_blank">Green Stimulus</a>" plan that calls for "at least $2 trillion that creates millions of family-sustaining green jobs, lifts standards of living, accelerates a just transition off <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/fossil-fuels">fossil fuels</a>, ensures a controlling stake for the public in all private sector bailout plans, and helps make our society and economy stronger and more resilient in the face of pandemic, recession, and climate emergency in the years ahead."</p>
<p>That's the warning from progressive policy experts, climate leaders, and academics who have joined together to support a new "<a href="https://medium.com/@green_stimulus_now/a-green-stimulus-to-rebuild-our-economy-1e7030a1d9ee" target="_blank">Green Stimulus</a>" plan that calls for "at least $2 trillion that creates millions of family-sustaining green jobs, lifts standards of living, accelerates a just transition off fossil fuels, ensures a controlling stake for the public in all private sector bailout plans, and helps make our society and economy stronger and more resilient in the face of pandemic, recession, and climate emergency in the years ahead."</p>
<div id="171d2" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="f3c70d33dfeb3a4d4819a32931a453a0"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1242104774583095301" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">I am proud to have co-authored this call to action for Congress, with @aldatweets @MarkVinPaul @johannabozuwa… https://t.co/wEj5hymAd5</div> — Thea Riofrancos (@Thea Riofrancos)<a href="https://twitter.com/triofrancos/statuses/1242104774583095301">1584975830.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>The 11 co-authors — many of whom have ties to the think tank Data for Progress and various 2020 Democratic presidential campaigns — call for automatically renewing the stimulus at 4% of GDP annually, or about $850 billion, until the economy is fully decarbonized and the unemployment rate is below 3.5%. Their proposal aligns with the previously published "<a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdMaV6F_o_ew3P6p1O50JcbFo_AsMoR2N_z6qfMFxEHfPSbRw/viewform" target="_blank">5 Principles for Just COVID-19 Relief and Stimulus</a>" that's backed by more than 300 environmental, justice, labor and other progressive groups.</p><p>Given that other advocates and groups are working on emergency efforts to stabilize the economy to prevent harm from the ongoing pandemic in an equitable way, the Green Stimulus plan aims to address "the longer-term challenge of jumpstarting economic recovery and transitioning to a more sustainable economy."</p><p>According to the letter, posted to Medium: "This is an inflection point for our nation. This is a pivotal moment to put tens of millions of Americans back to work, building a healthy, clean, and just future."</p><p>The plan, which points to the popularity of the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109/text" target="_blank">Green New Deal</a> based on Data for Progress <a href="https://www.dataforprogress.org/memos%E2%80%A9" target="_blank">polling</a>, sorts proposed policies into eight categories:</p><ol><li>Housing, Buildings, Civic Infrastructure, and Communities</li><li>Transportation Workers, Systems, and Infrastructure</li><li>Labor, Manufacturing, and Just Transition for Workers and Communities</li><li>Energy System Workers and Infrastructure</li><li>Farmers, Food Systems, and Rural Communities</li><li>Green Infrastructure, Public Lands, and the Environment</li><li>Regulations, Innovation, and Public Investment</li><li>Green Foreign Policy</li></ol><p>Housing and infrastructure recommendations include massively expanding the federal Weatherization Assistance Program, increasing funding to and beneficiaries of Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, enacting the <a href="https://www.dataforprogress.org/green-new-deal-public-housing" target="_blank">Green New Deal for Public Housing Act</a> and creating a Climate Justice Resiliency Fund.</p><p>Labor-related policies include giving grants and no-interest loans to transit agencies and local governments "to complete their backlog of shovel-ready ADA-compliance and Complete Streets projects" and providing "<a href="https://berniesanders.com/issues/green-new-deal/" target="_blank">just transition benefits</a> for all workers in fossil fuel industries, including five years of wage replacement for displaced workers, housing assistance, job training opportunities, health insurance coverage, pension support, and priority job placement for displaced workers."</p>
<div id="96857" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="53107e8803980c03f8e1199fce565ef9"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1242121418818625536" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">There's going to be a stimulus and it's up to all of us to fight for it to center workers, communities, and the cli… https://t.co/pL2Enyl9m6</div> — J. Mijin Cha (@J. Mijin Cha)<a href="https://twitter.com/jmijincha/statuses/1242121418818625536">1584979798.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>In terms of the climate emergency, the plan calls for mandating "a rapid phaseout of fracking and offshore and onshore oil and gas drilling, end new extraction, and end fossil fuel exports." It also proposes creating a national clean energy standard through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency "that applies to all power providers including rural electric cooperatives, climbing steeply to 100% carbon-free energy by 2030."</p><p>As part of a nationwide <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/renewable-energy/">renewable energy</a> transition, the letter highlights the importance of protecting the rights of workers to unionize, incentivizing employee ownership, "respecting Indigenous sovereignty, and ensuring no sacrifice of public safety." The proposal also features sweeping agricultural reforms to help battle the climate crisis, improve the lives of farmworkers, and boost access to healthy, affordable food.</p><p>The letter recommends changes to managing public lands and the environment more broadly, from directing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers "to clear their backlog of beneficial dredge, habitat restoration, climate adaptation, and infrastructure maintenance projects" to giving state and local governments grants to create "'<a href="https://landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/2019/07/23/the-green-new-deal-landscape-and-public-imagination/" target="_blank">energy parks</a>' that combine recreation (e.g., walking and biking trails, swimming areas, etc.) with clean energy generation, storage and transmission infrastructure (e.g., wind turbines, PV panels and battery centers)."</p><p>Globally, the plan calls for the U.S. to support the growth of green technology as well as local and sustainable farming worldwide; ensure fair trade agreements centered on worker and environmental protections; end funding for fossil fuel infrastructure; and contribute more to the Green Climate Fund, perhaps through a progressive tax on the highest carbon-emitting polluters.</p><p>The more than 100 signatories include 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben; former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, now a professor at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health; climate economist Gernot Wagner of New York University; author Naomi Klein, co-founder of The Leap; filmmaker Avi Lewis, another co-founder of The Leap; economist Stephanie Kelton, a professor at Stony Brook University; Stephen M. Kretzmann of Oil Change U.S.; Andrew Bunker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research; and Drilled News editor-in-chief Amy Westervelt.</p>
<div id="10c25" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="45862ede761ca08aff4181b76822af75"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1242090858322825217" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">We are facing the #COVID19 pandemic, economic recession, climate emergency, and extreme inequality. We need a massi… https://t.co/Y4wfiNs7b6</div> — Naomi Klein (@Naomi Klein)<a href="https://twitter.com/NaomiAKlein/statuses/1242090858322825217">1584972512.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>The proposal comes as U.S. federal lawmakers are negotiating a third package to address the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. Senate Democrats on Monday — for the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/23/senate-democrats-applauded-again-stopping-gop-corporate-bailout-leaves-americans" target="_blank">second time</a> in 24 hours — blocked a measure that critics <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/23/demands-workers-first-stimulus-grow-senate-gop-fails-ram-through-500-billion" target="_blank">charged</a> was a bailout for corporations which did too little to help workers impacted by the public health crisis. Meanwhile, progressive continue to demand <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/23/counter-corporate-handout-pushed-mcconnell-progressives-intensify-demand" target="_blank">#AJustStimulus</a> as a meaningful alternative that centers labor protections, struggling families, small businesses, and the nation's most vulnerable.</p><p>The Green Stimulus plan proposes requiring that "any bailouts or bridge loans to large corporations, like <a href="https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/release/-whitehouse-senate-democrats-request-requirements-for-airlines-and-cruise-lines-to-address-pollution-in-financial-assistance-package" target="_blank">airlines and cruise lines</a>, be contingent on economic, social, and ecological conditions: 10-year plan to substantially cut majority of carbon pollution with targets every two years; use funds to maintain payroll; government gaining long-term preferred shares or other equity in bailed out firms; provide $15 minimum wage within one year; no share buy-backs or dividends; set asides seats on corporate boards for labor representatives; maintain collective bargaining agreements."</p>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/23/green-stimulus-demanded-battle-convergent-crises-coronavirus-economic-injustice-and" target="_blank">Common Dreams</a>.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) (C) chants with housing and environmental advocates before a news conference to introduce legislation to transform public housing as part of her Green New Deal outside the U.S. Capitol Nov. 14, 2019 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) took to the floor of the House of Representatives yesterday to chide Republicans for not reading the Green New Deal, which she introduced over one year ago, as The Hill reported. She then read the entire 14-page document into the congressional record.
<p>Republicans have frequently mischaracterized what is actually in the bill and argued that the ambitious proposal to stop the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/climate-crisis" rel="noopener noreferrer">climate crisis</a> flies in the face of American values. The <a href="https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres109/BILLS-116hres109ih.pdf" target="_blank">proposal</a>, which was sponsored by Ocasio-Cortez in the House and by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) in the Senate in February 2019, has failed to come up for a vote in either chamber, as <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/26/watch-ocasio-cortez-reads-full-green-new-deal-resolution-house-floor-help-improve" target="_blank">Common Dreams noted</a>. </p>
<p>"But throughout this entire year, as we've discussed the Green New Deal, I've noticed there's been an awful lot of misinformation about what's inside this resolution, a tremendous amount of wild claims: everything from saying we're seeking to ban airplanes to ending ice cream," Ocasio-Cortez said on the House floor, as The Hill reported.</p>
<p>"And, as a consequence I've realized that many of my colleagues have never even read the resolution that they're speaking on," she added. "They haven't opened a single word of it — and it's actually only about… just 14 pages long. So I have decided that since some of my colleagues across the aisle could not for some reason read the resolution, that perhaps this hour would be spent best reading it to them, for the public record."</p>
<p>The Green New Deal looks to move the U.S. toward a net zero greenhouse gas emissions future "through a fair and just transition." The 10-year national mobilization plan looks to create millions of jobs through an investment in infrastructure, to ensure a sustainable future, and to protect vulnerable communities, as Common Dreams reported. </p>
<p>The cornerstone of the plan is the rapid and complete conversion to a 100 percent <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/renewable-energy/" rel="noopener noreferrer">renewable energy</a> system for electricity and <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/transportation" rel="noopener noreferrer">transportation</a> by 2030. The resolution also seeks a full decarbonization of the economy by 2050, at the latest, as <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/bernie-sanders-green-new-deal-former-white-house-economist-1489234" target="_blank">Newsweek reported</a>.</p>
<p>Ocasio-Cortez also <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/democratic-debate-climate-crisis-questions-2645311804.html">shared her dismay</a> that Tuesday night's presidential primary debate was conspicuously absent of questions about the climate crisis.</p>
<p>"As I was preparing for this evening, I would be remiss but to say that last night we had a national Democratic debate and not a single question was asked about our climate crisis," she said, as The Hill reported. </p>
<p>The New York Democrat also prefaced her reading of the resolution by sharing data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that has made dire predictions for how the world will suffer if emissions are not reined in within the next 10 years, according to The Hill. </p>
<p>The Green New Deal has is now endorsed by over one hundred lawmakers across both chambers of the Capitol. Not a single Republican has backed the measure though, as Common Dreams reported. </p>
<p>Several of the Democratic presidential candidates have adopted the Green New Deal into their climate legislation proposals, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). </p>
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Six Democratic primary candidates participated in the ninth debate in Las Vegas Wednesday. Mario Tama / Getty Images
The climate crisis got its moment in the sun during the ninth Democratic primary debate in Las Vegas Wednesday.
<p>The six qualifying candidates discussed the issue for a full 16 minutes, <a href="https://grist.org/politics/climate-was-public-enemy-no-2-after-mike-bloomberg-at-nevadas-democratic-debate/" target="_blank">Grist reported</a>. The debate also marked the first time that a climate journalist was numbered among the moderators: Telemundo climate correspondent Vanessa Huac, who has covered environmental issues for more than 20 years.</p><p>"People in the United States and all over our planet are realizing that climate change is one of the most important issues of our times," <a href="https://news.wbfo.org/post/first-time-climate-journalist-will-moderate-presidential-debate" target="_blank">Huac told NPR Tuesday ahead of the debate</a>. "So, this is a great opportunity to really raise this issue and raise important questions to the candidates to see what are the plans, what are the proposals, how are they planning to face this existential crisis that we're facing."</p><p>This sense of public urgency around the issue is reflected in the pool of Nevadans who are likely to participate in the Democratic caucus Saturday. Eighty-six percent of them rated climate and the environment as very important or the most important issue of 2020, according to a <a href="https://www.lcv.org/" target="_blank">League of Conservation Voters</a> and <a href="https://nevadaconservationleague.org/" target="_blank">Nevada Conservation League</a> <a href="https://www.lcv.org/article/new-nevada-poll-climate-change-defining-issue-caucusgoers-especially-latinos/" target="_blank">poll released last week</a>. The poll also found that the issue came second to health care for most voters when deciding who to vote for. But for Latinx voters, who make up 20 percent of the Nevada voting block, climate was even more important than health care and immigration, <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18022020/nevada-caucus-climate-change-among-latino-voters-vanessa-hauc" target="_blank">InsideClimate News reported</a>.</p>
<div id="b1051" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="81EU2R1582207511"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1230327285603012608" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">As we kick off climate talk in the #DemDebate, remember 86% of likely caucus-goers in Nevada think climate & the en… https://t.co/1RMNH0DvHK</div> — LCV – League of Conservation Voters (@LCV – League of Conservation Voters)<a href="https://twitter.com/LCVoters/statuses/1230327285603012608">1582167857.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>So how did the candidates address voters' concerns?</p><h3>Climate Solutions</h3><p>Wednesday's climate discussion was kicked off by Jon Ralston of the Nevada Independent, who pointed out that Reno and Las Vegas were among the fastest-warming cities in the country. He then directed his first question at former Vice President Joe Biden.</p><p>"What specific policies would you implement that would keep Las Vegas and Reno livable, but also not hurt those economies?" he asked, according to an <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/full-transcript-ninth-democratic-debate-las-vegas-n1139546" target="_blank">NBC debate transcript</a>.</p><p>Biden first focused on technical solutions, saying he would invest $47 billion in renewable energy and battery technology. He also said he would reverse President Donald Trump's environmental rollbacks and install 500,000 new electric vehicle charging stations in every highway his administration built or repaired.</p><p>"And I would invest in rail, in rail. Rail can take hundreds of thousands, millions of cars off the road if we have high-speed rail," Biden said.</p>
<div id="e4c0f" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="2S6UK51582207511"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1230333813726814210" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">While calling climate change the existential threat facing humanity, @JoeBiden calls for greater investments in gre… https://t.co/AGBQMGwTiW</div> — LCV – League of Conservation Voters (@LCV – League of Conservation Voters)<a href="https://twitter.com/LCVoters/statuses/1230333813726814210">1582169414.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p><br>Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, meanwhile, touted his success shuttering 304 of 530 <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/coal" target="_self">coal</a> plants in the U.S. as part of his<a href="https://beyondcoal.bloomberg.org/" target="_blank"> Beyond Coal</a> campaign with the <a href="https://www.sierraclub.org/" target="_blank">Sierra Club</a>. He also said he would rejoin the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/paris-agreement" target="_self">Paris agreement</a>.</p><p>Senator <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/elizabeth-warren" target="_self">Elizabeth Warren</a> (D-Mass.) repeated her argument that addressing climate change requires addressing corruption in government.</p><p>"The first thing I want to do in Washington is pass my anti-corruption bill so that we can start making the changes we need to make on climate," she said. "And the second is the filibuster. If you're not willing to roll back the filibuster, then you're giving the fossil fuel industry a veto overall of the work that we need to do."</p>
<h3>Fracking</h3><p>One major point of disagreement between the candidates was on whether or not to ban <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/fracking/" target="_self">fracking</a>.</p><p>Both Sen. Amy Klobuchar, (D-Minn.) and Bloomberg argued that <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/natural-gas" target="_self">natural gas</a> is a "transitional fuel" between dirtier fuels like coal and renewable energy. Klobuchar said she would review every natural gas permit on a case-by-case basis and only approve them if they were safe. Bloomberg also said it was important to make sure natural gas extraction was done properly to not release excess methane. But he said it was not possible to abandon the fuel.</p><p>"We want to go to all renewables. But that's still many years from now," Bloomberg said.</p><p>Sen. <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/bernie-sanders" target="_self">Bernie Sanders</a> (I-Vt.), on the other hand, has called for a fracking ban within the next five years, and addressed concerns that such a ban would hurt jobs. Sanders said the moment was too urgent not to act, and that the Green New Deal he supports would create as many as 20 million well-paying jobs.</p><p>"This is a moral issue, my friends. We have to take the responsibility of making sure that the planet we leave our children and grandchildren is a planet that is healthy and habitable," he said. "That is more important than the profits of the fossil fuel industry."</p>
<div id="eb565" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="9M13JK1582207511"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1230337328205488128" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">"We are fighting for the future of this planet," said @BernieSanders. "And the #GreenNewDeal, which I support by th… https://t.co/kTosBHGPCM</div> — LCV – League of Conservation Voters (@LCV – League of Conservation Voters)<a href="https://twitter.com/LCVoters/statuses/1230337328205488128">1582170252.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>Also on the issue of jobs, Warren was challenged on her plan to ban mining and drilling on public lands, which is an important industry in Nevada. Public lands are also potential sources of minerals like lithium and copper necessary for renewable energy technology.</p><p>Warren said she would make an exception for minerals that are needed to transition away from fossil fuels.</p><p>"If we need to make exceptions because there are specific minerals that we've got to have access to, then we locate those and we do it not in a way that just is about the profits of giant industries, but in a way that is sustainable for the environment," she said.</p>
<h3>China</h3><p>Another point of disagreement was how to respond to <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/china" target="_self">China</a>, which is currently the world's No. 1 emitter of greenhouse gases.</p><p>Bloomberg argued that it was important not to "go to war" with China on emissions but rather to negotiate.</p><p>"What you have to do is convince the Chinese that it is in their interest, as well. Their people are going to die just as our people are going to die. And we'll work together," he said.</p><p>But Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg argued for the need for "hard tools" to ensure emissions fell worldwide.</p><p>"I'm a little skeptical of the idea that convincing is going to do the trick when it comes to working with China," he said. "America has repeatedly overestimated our ability to shape Chinese ambitions."</p>
<h3>Environmental Justice</h3><p>Both Biden and Warren, unprompted, raised the issue of environmental justice.</p><p>"[M]inority communities are the communities that are being most badly hurt by the way in which we deal with climate change," Biden said while answering a question about his plans to hold fossil fuel executives accountable for their pollution. "They are the ones that become the victims. That's where the asthma is, that's where the groundwater supply has been polluted. That's where, in fact, people, in fact, do not have the opportunity to be able to get away from everything from asbestos in the walls of our schools."</p><p>Warren later spoke up to "make sure that the question of environmental justice gets more than a glancing blow in this debate."</p>
<div id="55a80" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="COU72T1582207511"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1230333782579871748" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">.@ewarren was the first candidate on the stage to bring up the impact of racist environmental policies on communiti… https://t.co/YPTK6WgYiI</div> — Indivisible Guide (@Indivisible Guide)<a href="https://twitter.com/IndivisibleTeam/statuses/1230333782579871748">1582169406.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>She touted her $1 trillion dollar plan to repair the environmental damage that had already been done to communities of color.</p><p>"We have to own up to our responsibility," she said. "We cannot simply talk about climate change in big, global terms. We need to talk about it in terms of rescuing the communities that have been damaged."</p>
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Democratic Candidates Face off on Climate in the Last Debate Before Primary Voting Begins
15 January
Politics
Tom Steyer (L-R), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) listen as former Vice President Joe Biden (3rd L) speaks during the Democratic presidential primary debate at Drake University on Jan. 14 in Des Moines, Iowa. Scott Olson / Getty Images
Six Democratic presidential candidates squared off Tuesday night in Des Moines, Iowa for the seventh primary debate of the season and the last before voting begins with the Iowa caucuses Feb. 3. The climate crisis tied with health care for the No. 1 issue important to Iowa voters when choosing a candidate, according to the latest Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll. So how much attention did it get during the debate?
<p>A fair amount, <a href="https://grist.org/politics/at-the-7th-democratic-debate-candidates-took-every-opportunity-to-talk-climate/" target="_blank">Grist reported</a>. While CNN and Des Moines Register moderators didn't bring it up until the last half hour, the candidates themselves incorporated it into their answers early and often.</p><p>"Debate moderators may take ages to get around to climate change in these debates," Zoya Teirstein wrote for Grist, "but the candidates have gotten increasingly adept at weaving the issue into their answers to other questions. This time around, Wolf Blitzer, Abby Phillip, and the Register's Brianne Pfannenstiel could barely keep a lid on the climate action in the first half of the debate."</p>
<div id="9978e" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="J08DNB1579096231"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1217291431544360960" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">10:39pm on the east coast, people are tuning out, parents are tucking their kids into bed...
@CNN: "Alright, let's… https://t.co/nSVYhqb4Tv</div> — Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@Sunrise Movement 🌅)<a href="https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt/statuses/1217291431544360960">1579059868.0</a></blockquote></div><p>So how did the candidates stand on various climate-related issues?</p>
National Security
<p>The first climate mentions came in response to the first question, about which candidate was best prepared to be commander-in-chief.</p><p>Both former South Bend, Indiana Mayor <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/Pete-Buttigieg" rel="noopener noreferrer">Pete Buttigieg</a> and Sen. <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/elizabeth-warren" target="_self">Elizabeth Warren</a> (D-Mass.) listed the climate crisis among new national security issues they would tackle as president, according to a transcript provided by the <a href="https://eu.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presidential/caucus/2020/01/14/democratic-debate-transcript-what-the-candidates-said-quotes/4460789002/" target="_blank">Des Moines Register</a>.</p><p>Philanthropist Tom Steyer brought up the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/australia-wildfire-deaths-2644394434.html" target="_self">wildfires in Australia</a> when asked how he would use military force as a president, suggesting that the climate crisis might require large international mobilizations.</p><p>"[T]here's a gigantic climate issue in Australia, which also requires the same kind of value-driven coalition-building that we actually should be using in the Middle East," he said.</p>Trade
<p>The next time the candidates brought up climate was during the discussion of a new trade deal struck by President Donald Trump with Mexico and Canada. Sen. <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/bernie-sanders" target="_self">Bernie Sanders</a> (I-Vt.) came out strongly against it, largely because it does not mention climate change.<br></p><p>"[E]very major environmental organization has said no to this new trade agreement because it does not even have the phrase 'climate change' in it. And given the fact that climate change is right now the greatest threat facing this planet, I will not vote for a trade agreement that does not incorporate very, very strong principles to significantly lower fossil fuel emissions in the world," he said.</p><p>Democratic lawmakers had pushed for a commitment to the Paris agreement to be included in the deal, but that did not make it into the final draft, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/14/us/politics/fact-check-january-debate.html" target="_blank">The New York Times pointed out</a>.</p><p>Sanders also fought back when Pfannenstiel tried to shift his answer from climate to trade more narrowly.</p><p>"Well, they are the same in this issue," he said, according to the transcript.</p><p>Steyer joined Sanders in saying that he would not sign the deal because it failed to mention climate.</p><div id="9a8a3" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="8OU2EK1579096232"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1217275336251015175" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">We can do much better than a Trump-led trade deal that does not even have the phrase “climate change” in it.… https://t.co/t3iNjmP5WP</div> — Bernie Sanders (@Bernie Sanders)<a href="https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/statuses/1217275336251015175">1579056030.0</a></blockquote></div>
'Managed Retreat'
<p>The first question directly raised by the moderators about the climate crisis brought up last spring's <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/flooding-nebraska-bomb-cyclone-2631998694.html" target="_self">disastrous flooding</a> in the Midwest and focused on what candidates would do about farms and factories that could not be relocated.</p><p>The question first went to Buttigieg, who spoke generally about the need to act on climate until the moderators repeated the question.</p><p>"We are going to have to use federal funds to make sure that we are supporting those whose lives will inevitably be impacted further by the increased severity and the increased frequency," he said.</p><p>The question then went to Steyer.</p><p>"Look, what you're talking about is what's called managed retreat," Steyer answered. "It's basically saying we're going to have to move things because this crisis is out of control. And it's unbelievably expensive. And of course we'll come to the rescue of Americans who are in trouble."</p>Fracking
<p>Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) received some pushback from climate activists when she defended her decision not to call for an all-out ban on <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/fracking/" target="_self">fracking</a>.</p><p>"When it comes to the issue of fracking, I actually see natural gas as a transition fuel. It's a transition fuel to where we get to carbon neutral," Klobuchar said.</p><p>Her remarks come less than a week after a <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/us-oil-gas-emissions-2644654513.html?rebelltitem=3#rebelltitem3" target="_self">study</a> found that new oil and gas emissions projected for the next five years could nearly cancel out the decline in coal emissions, partly enabled by the fracking boom and the falling price of natural gas.</p><p>"I cannot believe I am listening to<a href="https://twitter.com/amyklobuchar" target="_blank"> @amyklobuchar</a> talking about fracked gas as a bridge fuel in 2020," Sunrise Movement co-founder Varshini Prakash tweeted in response.</p><div id="dce9f" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="BYCNS21579096232"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1217291975226986497" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">I cannot believe I am listening to @amyklobuchar talking about fracked gas as a bridge fuel in 2020.
#DemDebate</div> — Varshini Prakash 🌅 (@Varshini Prakash 🌅)<a href="https://twitter.com/VarshPrakash/statuses/1217291975226986497">1579059997.0</a></blockquote></div>
Climate Credentials
<p>Over the course of the debate, the candidates attempted to position themselves as the best person to take on the climate crisis in office.</p><p>Steyer emphasized that climate was his top priority.</p><p>"And I'm still shocked that I'm the only person on this stage who will say this. I would declare a state of emergency on day one on climate," he said.</p><p>Warren, meanwhile, painted herself as the best person to get to the root cause of decades of climate inaction.</p><p>"Mr. Steyer talks about it being problem number one," she said. "Understand this, we have known about this climate crisis for decades. Back in the 1990s we were calling it global warming, but we knew what it was. Democrats and Republicans back then were working together because no one wanted a problem. But you know what happened? The industry came in and said, we can make big money if we keep them divided and make no change. Priority number one has to be taking back our government from the corruption. That is the only way we will make progress on climate, on gun safety, on health care, on all of the issues that matter to us."</p><p>Sanders, for his part, pointed to his plan for a <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/green-new-deal" target="_self">Green New Deal</a> to transition to 100 percent renewable energy in 10 years.</p><p>"If we as a nation do not transform our energy system away from fossil fuel, not by 2050, not by 2040, but unless we lead the world right now — not easy stuff— the planet we are leaving our kids will be uninhabitable and unhealthy," he said.</p><p>Former Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, pointed to his legacy.</p><p>"[B]ack in 1986, I introduced the first climate change bill — and check PolitiFacts (sic); they said it was a game-changer. I've been fighting this for a long time. I headed up the Recovery Act, which put more money into moving away from fossil fuels to — to solar and wind energy than ever has occurred in the history of America," he said.</p>From Your Site Articles
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