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Leaders worry about GND

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Labor Unions are warning that the "Green New Deal" proposed by Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is vague and potentially dangerous, signaling that the progressive proposal may be in for even more turbulence following a rocky rollout last week.

While conservatives have fiercely criticized the Green New Deal resolution for promising a job to "all people of the United States" -- including those "unwilling to work," according to an accompanying document published, and later disavowed, by Ocasio-Cortez's office -- the pushback from union leaders indicates that the progressive proposal has not won over a core element of the liberal base.

Speaking to Reuters, a spokesman for the coal industry union United Mine Workers (UMWA) characterized Ocasio-Cortez's goals as lofty and potentially dangerous to rank-and-file blue collar workers.

In particular, union officials took umbrage at the resolution's call for a "fair and just transition for all communities and workers" in order to "achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions" in the span of just ten years.
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"We've heard words like 'just transition' before, but what does that really mean?" the spokesman, Phil Smith, said in an interview. "Our members are worried about putting food on the table."

UMWA, which includes approximately 80,000 members, represents not only coal miners and clean coal technicians, but also manufacturing workers, health care workers, and corrections officers in both the U.S. and Canada.

Added Yvette Pena O'Sullivan, the executive director of the Laborers' International Union of North America (LIUNA): "We will never settle for 'just transition' language as a solution to the job losses that will surely come from some of the policies in the resolution."

LIUNA, a construction union, has about 500,000 members, including 80,000 in Canada. And executives at another construction union, the North America's Building Trades Union (NABTU), raised similar concerns.
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Union members "working in the oil and gas sector can make a middle-class living, whereas renewable energy firms have been less generous," Sean McGarvey, NABTU's president, said last week.

Representatives for UMWA, LIUNA, and NABTU did not immediately respond to Fox News' request for comment.

Some top Democratic politicians have similarly sought to pump the breaks on the Green New Deal. For example, Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, appeared unimpressed when asked about the plan's aspirations to replace planes with high-speed rail.

That would be pretty hard for Hawaii," she laughed.

And last Wednesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared to dismiss the plan.

"It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive," Pelosi told Politico. The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they're for it right?"
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The proposal's rollout was overshadowed by confusion and uncertainty last week. A top adviser to Ocasio-Cortez admitted over the weekend that an official document posted by Ocasio-Cortez's office contained a guarantee of economic security even for those "unwilling to work" -- but not before he went viral in progressive circles for claiming the exact opposite, repeatedly, in an interview Friday with Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight."

Cornell University Law School Professor Robert Hockett initially denied that an FAQ and background materials from Ocasio-Cortez's website stated that the Green New Deal will provide "Economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work." An FAQ sent by Ocasio-Cortez's team to NPR also noted, "We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren't sure that we'll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast."

Ocasio-Cortez's office removed the documents from her website amid an online backlash. A version of the FAQ that referred to "farting cows" is still available on NPR's website, and a similar version that was posted to Ocasio-Cortez's website is currently viewable on an Internet archiving service. Both versions of the documents describe providing economic security for those "unwilling to work," and state, "This is a massive transformation of our society with clear goals and a timeline" at a "scale not seen since World War 2."

Despite the confusion as to its precise contents, key 2020 Democratic presidential contenders have enthusiastically embraced the Green New Deal. Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Cory Booker, D-N.J. all co-sponosred the legislation.

"Our history is a testimony to the achievement of what some think is impossible - we must take bold action now," Booker tweeted.

The White House, meanwhile, appeared heartened by the Democratic contenders' support for the sweeping program.

"I think half the announced presidential candidates that are Democrats have supported this, although they aren't really sure what it is," Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told "Fox News Sunday."
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Mulvaney added: "The other half -- I don't know where the Democrat Party is on this, I know where the Republican Party is, and by the way, it's fun to be in a party that is united while the other is divided."

The Republican National Committee dubbed the Green New Deal a "Socialist wish list" that would kill at least 1 million jobs and disrupt global trade -- while costing trillions.

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Union leaders warn Green New Deal may lead to poverty: 'Members are worried about putting food on the table'

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Labor Unions are voicing skepticism that the "Green New Deal" proposed by Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is workable in practice, signaling that the progressive proposal may be in for even more turbulence following a rocky rollout last week.

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What is Green New Deal

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Despite being labelled as a "socialist manifesto", the Green New Deal (GND) on climate change and jobs has sparked a lively debate in US politics. So what's in the deal and what will be its likely impact? President Trump was quick to thrash the Democrats' new approach to tackling rising temperatures.

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Green New Deal will pay off

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After years of failing to pass a carbon tax, climate hawks are now rallying behind a bold new proposal for tackling global warming. Known as the Green New Deal, this economic stimulus package for the planet promises to dramatically cut carbon emissions through government spending on clean energy jobs, technologies, and infrastructure. The main selling point of the Green New Deal has been its politics. While carbon pricing has long been touted as the most cost effective policy for reducing emissions, it has struggled to gain legislative traction. By contrast, advocates of the Green New Deal believe their proposal can build a winning coalition by reframing climate policy as a story of economic growth and opportunity.

A Green New Deal is not just good politics. It is good economics. Society can combat climate change by using existing clean technologies to cut emissions today or by innovating new clean technologies to cut emissions in the future. We need both strategies to address global warming. Every second that we delay in reducing our carbon footprint imposes costs on ourselves and on countless future generations. If we want to avoid climate catastrophe, we need to make deep cuts in emissions soon. On the other hand, the challenges and costs of relying solely on current technologies to address climate change are prohibitively high. We need investments in clean innovation to make it cheaper to reduce emissions in the future.

We could achieve the twin goals of slashing emissions and spurring innovation by putting a very high price on greenhouse gases. Carbon taxes can encourage industries to both reduce their footprints and develop cheaper clean technologies. However, carbon pricing by itself is not the most efficient climate policy. As we explain in a recent paper, the cheaper and faster approach for our society is to combine a moderately sized carbon tax with significant federal spending on the development and deployment of clean technologies. While carbon pricing is the most cost effective way to reduce emissions today, government subsidies are the most cost effective way to advance clean technologies tomorrow.

The intuition behind all this is simple. Policies work best when they are narrowly tailored to the behavior that they seek to alter. Thus, if we want markets to produce more clean innovation, we should reward innovators rather than penalize polluters in the hopes that doing so will indirectly induce them to produce innovation. The benefits of directly encouraging clean innovation are striking. Economists have estimated our society can save more than $1.4 trillion a year if governments used a combination of taxes and subsidies, rather than taxes only, to address climate change.

In short, good economics calls for the type of broad federal spending on clean innovation that the Green New Deal promises to deliver. Of course, the effectiveness of the proposal at spurring innovation will depend on its design, the exact details of which have yet to be ironed out. The package should increase funding for early stage clean energy research, as this kind of basic science is usually too risky to attract private investors. The Green New Deal should also include subsidies for the adoption and deployment of clean technologies, such as tax credits for clean energy investment and manufacturing. These types of policies that help emerging technologies scale up and mature can be powerful drivers of clean energy innovation.

Critics will undoubtedly argue that we cannot afford the Green New Deal. This line of attack, however, ignores the costs of inaction. While the Green New Deal will not be cheap, its price pales in comparison to the damage that unchecked climate change will inflict on the economy. This argument also ignores the savings that will result from the push toward clean energy innovation under the Green New Deal. The development of cheaper clean technologies should more than offset the costs of the stimulus package.

Opponents will also claim that the government is a bad venture capitalist, and that a Green New Deal will pour taxpayer dollars into clean energy boondoggles. While concerns about government waste are certainly real, they can be avoided through smart policy design. The government can encourage innovation without favoring particular clean technologies or companies by enacting neutral research and development tax credits.

The ideal economic climate policy does include carbon pricing. But we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Even if the government cannot enact the best policy for cutting emissions today, it can still use the best policy for advancing clean innovation tomorrow. The Green New Deal pushes climate policy into uncharted political waters, but it does so based on sound economic theories. If we want to save the planet for the least amount of money, we need the Green New Deal, and we need it now.
Quentin Karpilow is a law clerk in the federal judiciary. Zachary Liscow is an economist and a professor at Yale Law School who has served on the staff of the White House Council of Economic Advisors. The views are their own.

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After years of failing to pass a carbon tax, climate hawks are now rallying behind a bold new proposal for tackling global warming. Known as the Green New Deal, this economic stimulus package for the planet promises to dramatically cut carbon emissions through government spending on clean energy jobs, technologies, and infrastructure.

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Green New Deal will be costly

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The Green New Deal is the big new thing among progressive Democrats. Until today, it has been little more than four words (much like Medicare for All, which tried to describe that big new thing in three words). Today, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced a 14-page resolution that begins to describe their vision of the GND. It is...big. Really big.

The resolution starts by enumerating the authors' concerns about climate change: warning of the dire consequences if the earth continues to warm and the dangers of increased economic inequality. But it quickly takes a turn and, by the end, becomes an ambitious manifesto demanding-among many other things-- a massive infrastructure initiative, a guaranteed job with a "family-sustaining wage," and universal access to high-quality health care, affordable housing, economic security, high-quality education, and healthy food.

It also calls for increased government support for family farming, economic development in vulnerable communities, research and development, and environmental cleanup. And it would meet the goals of 100 percent renewable power production and no net increase in greenhouse gas emissions. All of this would occur through a 10-year "national mobilization."

Because this is only a framework (not unlike some early versions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act), it leaves out key details about how any of these ambitious goals would be accomplished or how they would be funded. But the cost would be staggering. Bigger, perhaps, than anything the US has undertaken since World War II.

In an NPR Morning Edition interview, Ocasio-Cortez was unfazed by the cost. Yes, she acknowledged, the GND would be expensive and require lots of government spending. But she insisted there is no need to worry about its long-term effects on the already-massive budget deficit because this initiative would pay for itself through economic growth.

While her prediction echoed precisely the claim by President Trump and Hill Republicans that the 2017 TCJA would pay for itself through growth, she made her prediction without apparent irony. Unlike taxes, she insisted, her new spending really would pay for itself through growth. She could prove it.

I suspect that some of her ideas-especially incentives for new technology and jobs-would generate some growth. But many of the ideas-while well-intentioned-could well slow the economy. For instance, imposing environmental or labor mandates on domestic employers may drive many of these new jobs overseas. Without vastly more details it is impossible to even guess at the net economic effects of it all.

The GND is big and bold, and many Democrats see it as a valuable antidote to what they believe has been decades of policy passivity. But the resolution's ambitious promises will add trillions of dollars to the nation's debt. And that itself could slow the economy. Its sponsors eventually will have to tell us how they will pay for it. Relying on a promise of economic growth is no more a credible for them than it was for the supporters of the TCJA.
I am a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center as well as an analyst on aging and retirement policy. I'm the author of the book "Caring for Our Parents."

I am author of the book "Caring for Our Parents" and resident fellow at The Urban Institute, where I am affiliated with the Tax Policy Center and the Program on Retirement Policy. I also write a tax and budget policy blog, TaxVox, which you may read at Forbes.com or at http...

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The Green New Deal Would Cost A Lot Of Green

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The Green New Deal is the big new thing among progressive Democrats. Until today, it has been little more than four words (much like Medicare for All, which tried to describe that big new thing in three words). Today, Rep.

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Oil giants knew 40 years ago

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Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world's largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation-an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn't stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.

Experts, however, aren't terribly surprised. "It's never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science," says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University. But as it turns out, Exxon didn't just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research.

In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents. They found that the company's knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic. "In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black told Exxon's management committee. A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees-a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today. He continued to warn that "present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical." In other words, Exxon needed to act.

But ExxonMobil disagrees that any of its early statements were so stark, let alone conclusive at all. "We didn't reach those conclusions, nor did we try to bury itlike they suggest," ExxonMobil spokesperson Allan Jeffers tells Scientific American. "The thing that shocks me the most is that we've been saying this for years, that we have been involved in climate research. These guys go down and pull some documents that we made available publicly in the archives and portray them as some kind of bombshell whistle-blower exposé because of the loaded language and the selective use of materials."

One thing is certain: in June 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen told a congressional hearing that the planet was already warming, Exxon remained publicly convinced that the science was still controversial. Furthermore, experts agree that Exxon became a leader in campaigns of confusion. By 1989 the company had helped create the Global Climate Coalition (disbanded in 2002) to question the scientific basis for concern about climate change. It also helped to prevent the U.S. from signing the international treaty on climate known as the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 to control greenhouse gases. Exxon's tactic not only worked on the U.S. but also stopped other countries, such as China and India, from signing the treaty. At that point, "a lot of things unraveled," Oreskes says.

But experts are still piecing together Exxon's misconception puzzle. Last summer the Union of Concerned Scientists released a complementary investigation to the one by InsideClimate News, known as the Climate Deception Dossiers (pdf). "We included a memo of a coalition of fossil-fuel companies where they pledge basically to launch a big communications effort to sow doubt," says union president Kenneth Kimmel. "There's even a quote in it that says something like 'Victory will be achieved when the average person is uncertain about climate science.' So it's pretty stark."

Since then, Exxon has spent more than $30 million on think tanks that promote climate denial, according to Greenpeace. Although experts will never be able to quantify the damage Exxon's misinformation has caused, "one thing for certain is we've lost a lot of ground," Kimmell says. Half of the greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere were released after 1988. "I have to think if the fossil-fuel companies had been upfront about this and had been part of the solution instead of the problem, we would have made a lot of progress [today] instead of doubling our greenhouse gas emissions."

Experts agree that the damage is huge, which is why they are likening Exxon's deception to the lies spread by the tobacco industry. "I think there are a lot of parallels," Kimmell says. Both sowed doubt about the science for their own means, and both worked with the same consultants to help develop a communications strategy. He notes, however, that the two diverge in the type of harm done. Tobacco companies threatened human health, but the oil companies threatened the planet's health. "It's a harm that is global in its reach," Kimmel says.

To prove this, Bob Ward-who on behalf of the U.K.'s Royal Academy sent a letter to Exxon in 2006 claiming its science was "inaccurate and misleading"-thinks a thorough investigation is necessary. "Because frankly the episode with tobacco was probably the most disgraceful episode one could ever imagine," Ward says. Kimmell agrees. These reasons "really highlight the responsibility that these companies have to come clean, acknowledge this, and work with everyone else to cut out emissions and pay for some of the cost we're going to bear as soon as possible," Kimmell says.

It doesn't appear, however, that Kimmell will get his retribution. Jeffers claims the investigation's finds are "just patently untrue, misleading, and we reject them completely"-words that match Ward's claims against them nearly a decade ago.

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Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago

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A new investigation shows the oil company understood the science before it became a public issue and spent millions to promote misinformation

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Who wants the Green New Deal?

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Update, 3/30/2019: Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced a Green New Deal resolution on February 7 that lays out the goals, aspirations, and specifics of the program in a more definitive way. Read about it here, and read about the criticism that followed here and here. The Senate voted the resolution down on March 26, but Ocasio-Cortez is now drafting a series of smaller, related bills. Our initial explainer, first published on December 21, follows.

If the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to be believed, humanity has just over a decade to get carbon emissions under control before catastrophic climate change impacts become unavoidable.

The Republican Party generally ignores or denies that problem. But the Democratic Party claims to accept and understand it.

It is odd, then, that Democrats do not have a plan to address climate change.

Their last big plan - the American Clean Energy and Security Act - passed the House in 2009 but went on to die an unceremonious death before reaching the Senate floor. Since then, there's been nothing to replace it.

Plenty of Democratic politicians support policies that would reduce climate pollution - renewable energy tax credits, fuel economy standards, and the like - but those policies do not add up to a comprehensive solution, certainly nothing like what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests is necessary.

Young activists, who will be forced to live with the ravages of climate change, find this upsetting. So they have proposed a plan of their own. It's called the Green New Deal (GND) - a term purposefully reminiscent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's original New Deal in the 1930s - and it has become the talk of the town. Here are Google searches from the past few months:

For this story, I talked to wonks and political activists who are working on the GND, and without exception, they expressed surprise at the speed and intensity with which both media attention and activist energy have centered on it. There is a sense among those involved that they have caught a tiger by the tail.

The GND push has thrust climate change into the national conversation, put House Democrats on notice, and created an intense and escalating bandwagon effect. Politicians (most recently 2020 presidential aspirant Cory Booker), advocates (most recently Al Gore), wonks, and activists - everyone involved in green politics is talking about the GND.

But ... WTF is it?

As we will see, the exact details of the GND remain to be worked out, but the broad thrust is fairly simple. It refers, in the loosest sense, to a massive program of investments in clean-energy jobs and infrastructure, meant to transform not just the energy sector, but the entire economy. It is meant both to decarbonize the economy and to make it fairer and more just.

But the policy is only part of the picture. Just as striking are the politics, which seem to have tapped into an enormous, untapped demand for climate ambition.

When I think about the social status of the GND, I am struck by an analogy: It's a bit like concentrated solar power. (I'm an energy nerd. Sue me.) In a concentrated solar power plant, large arrays of mirrors reflect sunlight onto a single tower, heating the fluid inside it. The fluid transfers heat to water, the steam from the boiling fluid drives a turbine, and the turbine generates electrical power.

The GND is the tower, and all the sudden, all the mirrors are aligned, focused on it. The heat is building, the water is rapidly reaching a boil. Meanwhile, its owners are racing to build a turbine.

There is immense potential energy in the GND, a concentration of social attention and intensity. But converting that heat to power - to real results on the ground - will involve a great deal of political and policy engineering, almost all of which lies ahead.

The GND has great potential, but then, American political history is a long story of wasted potential, of waves of progressive enthusiasm breaking on the rocky shores of Washington, DC, to no lasting effect. Whether that fate awaits the GND depends on many things, among them whether President Donald Trump - the culmination of a history of total Republican intransigence and ugliness the stretches over young activists' entire adult lives - has changed the political landscape enough that Democrats might leave behind their long defensive crouch and voice some ambition.

Before jumping in, it's worth noting that a number of great journalists have blazed the trail on this story already. See, in particular: Kate Aronoff's work, here and here but especially, for the big picture, here; Hannah Northey and the crew at E&E are all over the daily developments; Alexander Kaufman at Huffington Post keeps track of the politics; and Rob Meyer at the Atlantic always has good thoughts. (There are no doubt many others I'm forgetting.)

To get a handle on the GND, let's take a spin through its history, the role it's playing in current politics, the effort to back it up with a real policy program, and the many, many challenges facing it before it can become legislation.

The GND concept is not new

The first use of the term "GND" in the US may trace to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who called for one in a 2007 column (and in his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded) as a kind of green globalism. (Funny thing, politics.) As Kaufman notes in a story on this history, none other than Barack Obama was taken by Friedman's idea and included a GND in his 2008 platform. (It can also be argued that Obama's stimulus bill was a proto-GND in itself.)

Around the same time, in 2007, British economist Richard Murphy began discussing a GND and founded the Green New Deal Group, which funneled some ideas to the Labour Party. The UN also took up the idea, calling for a global GND in 2009.

But then Tories won in the UK in 2009, the Republicans swept the 2010 midterms, and the idea mostly went quiescent, at least among politicians.

In 2016, a GND became the centerpiece of the Green Party presidential campaign of Jill Stein; indeed, a GND has been part of the US Green Party's platform for over a decade. (It is also central to the platform of the European Greens - see this study from the Wuppertal Institute.)

Bernie Sanders's 2016 campaign included a GND. And then, in the 2018 midterms, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now a representative-elect, took it up.

But that capsule history of the term itself, the brand, somewhat sells short the intellectual lineage. Many pieces of the GND have been worked on by many people over the years. The constituent ideas - 100 percent clean energy; a just transition to a new, better economy; massive public sector investments - are not new.

Talk of a "blue-green alliance" between labor and environmentalists, built around public infrastructure investments and new jobs, goes all the way back to 2000 presidential candidate Ralph Nader; real work has been underway at least since 2006, when the, er, Blue-Green Alliance was established. The AFL-CIO has its own big infrastructure plan.

Van Jones wrote a book about green jobs back in 2008 and even worked briefly as an Obama green jobs adviser, before a right-wing smear campaign drove him from the administration. The whole green-economy frame almost took root, but once the Dems went on the defensive in 2010, it faded to the background.

In Washington state this year, activists ran a ballot initiative that coupled a carbon tax with a GND-style program of investments, but, in the face of $30 million of oil money, it went down to defeat.

Nonetheless, the basic GND ideas have persisted. And their appeal only grew as climate warnings became more dire. They were in the collective water, like an oversaturated solution, just waiting for a particle around which to crystallize.

That particle came in November.

The GND comes to Washington

After the 2016 race, some of the folks who worked on the Sanders campaign started an organization called Brand New Congress, with the audacious (some might say insane) goal of recruiting 400 fresh new faces to run for, and take over, Congress. Part of the shared platform was an ambitious, WWII-style mobilization on climate change (though not yet branded GND).

That effort did not result in a congressional takeover, but it was not without fruits. Brand New Congress spun off a group called Justice Democrats that went on to recruit several winning candidates like Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley.

Among them was Ocasio-Cortez, the young bartender who ran against incumbent centrist Democrat Joe Crowley in the New York's 14th District primary. The co-founder of Brand New Congress, Saikat Chakrabarti, became Ocasio-Cortez's co-campaign manager. (As of January, he will be her chief of staff.) And Ocasio-Cortez, who was already committed to putting climate change at the top of her agenda, eagerly embraced the green mobilization plan and began using the GND branding.

Then came the first week of orientation for new members of Congress.

Several things came together that week. Shortly prior, the IPCC had released its latest report, with the ominous news that humanity has just over a decade to peak and begin rapidly reducing global carbon emissions if there is to be any hope of hitting the (already inadequate) international target of limiting global temperature rise to no more than 2 degrees Celsius.

There was already enormous energy and mobilization on the left, thanks to the election, and young activists were keen to push climate change to the top of the agenda.

Then a piece in the Hill reported that House Democrats had no plans to move on climate change, which appeared nowhere in their list of priorities. Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi started talking the day after the election about a " bipartisan marketplace of ideas," which is not exactly what you'd call reading the room.

Pelosi signaled that she planned to revive the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming ( 2007 to 2011, RIP), but activists and the incoming class of social democrats wanted something much bolder.

They didn't see any point in pursuing cooperation with Republicans, a strategy that has proven fruitless for a decade. And they didn't want climate policy tucked away in a committee that would do nothing but hold hearings and discuss how real global warming is (spoiler: so real).

But it gave them something to ask for. They couldn't very well demand the full GND before the new Congress was even sworn in. But they could ask for a commitment.

So the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led organization organizing around a GND, planned a sit-in in Pelosi's office, to demand a committee with teeth - a committee that would be charged with actually developing a plan to meet the ambitious targets implied by the IPCC report.

Sunrise approached Ocasio-Cortez to ask if she might help publicize the event, perhaps with a tweet. Instead, she vowed to show up. She and her team had been casting around for some early way to push the GND into the public consciousness and onto the Democratic agenda.

Working together, Sunrise, Ocasio-Cortez, and the Justice Democrats quickly hashed out a proposal for a Select Committee on a Green New Deal, outlining their vision for the kind of plan such a committee would produce.

Sunrise brought close to 200 young activists to Pelosi's office on November 13. Ocasio-Cortez, taking a break from orientation, stopped by to rally them and show her support. The media swarmed.

In retrospect, though it came together on the fly, the timing was fortuitous. The elections were over; there was no presidential election yet; Trump hadn't tweeted in a few whole minutes; the political press was bored. The IPCC had put climate change in the news. And the prospect of a young, newly elected, not-yet-sworn-in progressive representative leading a youth protest against her leader-to-be proved irresistible.

In the ensuing weeks, Ocasio-Cortez and Sunrise pushed incoming members of Congress to sign on to the GND Select Committee plan. On December 10, there was another sit-in in Pelosi's office, this time with activists stretched out the door. By the end, 40 members of Congress - including several notable senators like Booker, Sanders, and Jeff Merkley, each a potential 2020 presidential candidate - signed on to support the committee.

40 Representatives now back the Select Committee for a #GreenNewDeal -- one of the most ambitious economic and climate policies ever discussed in Congress.

Our organizing is working. We're changing politics in America.

✊ ✊ ✊ ✊ ✊ pic.twitter.com/31noqJMCB3
- Sunrise Movement (@sunrisemvmt) December 19, 2018

It was an activist campaign building momentum for serious climate action, and it was making headlines.

Dem leadership gives activists the stiff arm

Nonetheless, it seems Democratic leadership was not particularly happy about a group of upstarts laying claim to a major issue and instructing the caucus how to approach it. Pelosi largely gave Ocasio-Cortez and activists the cold shoulder. They were not warned before Steny Hoyer announced on Wednesday that the committee will not have subpoena power. And they were not warned before it leaked on Thursday that Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida had been chosen to head the committee, which would in fact be the same old select committee on climate change.

As for the GND? "I think they have some terrific ideas," Castor said, all but patting activists on the head. "But that's not going to be our sole focus."

What about the activists' other major demand, that no one who accepts fossil fuel money be allowed on the committee? "I don't think you can do that under the First Amendment, really," she said.

She later admitted to Kaufman at the Huffington Post that this peculiar bit of constitutional interpretation was "inartful," and she just doesn't know if she can do that as chair of the committee. She says maybe she'll talk it over with the caucus.

This is a clear rebuke from Pelosi and Hoyer, not only cutting short a growing activist campaign, without warning, on the eve of the holidays, but also appointing a committee chair who isn't briefed on the debate around the committee, is reliable but undistinguished on environmental issues, and clearly hasn't been prepared for the activist fury that awaits her. (It doesn't seem particularly fair to Castor, either.)

"They're not willing to go out on a limb unless they're confident that they have the full support of the caucus," says Evan Weber, a co-founder of Sunrise, "which for us is disappointing but not all that surprising."

"What we thought was, let's try to get the smallest possible thing done, which is get all Democrats to agree that we should make a plan," says Chakrabarti, but even that "isn't so easy."

Here's a revealing fact about this clash.

Though Chakrabarti may consider it the "smallest possible thing," anyone who glances at Ocasio-Cortez's document will realize that it is far from small or easy. It doesn't just call for a committee. It says that no one who receives any fossil fuel funding may serve on the committee (which would rule out a good swath of senior Democrats).

It requires that the committee produce a plan that fully decarbonizes the economy, invests trillions of dollars, and provides a federal job guarantee, while addressing and mitigating historical inequalities. (Oh, and it might also include such "additional measures such as basic income programs [or] universal health care programs.")

In short, it charges the committee with developing a plan of vaulting ambition and complexity. If representatives were mainly focused on policy, some might have raised cautions along these lines.

But neither Chakrabarti and Weber has heard any policy objections. No one has asked about, say, the federal jobs guarantee. Rather, the objections have been almost entirely about turf.

As Weber says, "certain politicians who were not excited about any select committee" claimed that the committee's jurisdiction would override the jurisdiction and authority of existing committees.

Our ultimate end goal isn't a Select Committee.

Our goal is to treat Climate Change like the serious, existential threat it is by drafting an ambitious solution on the scale necessary - aka a Green New Deal - to get it done.

A weak committee misses the point & endangers people. https://t.co/LIMkPru6wU
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) December 19, 2018

The proposal never meant to assign the select committee the power to introduce legislation, Weber says, but to make members more comfortable, language was added clarifying as much. The committee could only produce a plan, as draft legislation for other committees to take up or not as they see fit. "For us," Weber says, "the more important thing for the draft legislation was always to have a platform for candidates to run on in 2020."

But in the end, the dispute was less about concrete issues of jurisdiction than a message to newcomers. As E&E reports, "many Democratic lawmakers say the panel could be a landing place for many of the freshmen members who have said they'd like to be on Energy and Commerce." The youngsters can have a committee to hold hearings and make headlines. As for legislation, we adults have got that covered.

Would Ocasio-Cortez accept a spot on the committee? "She doesn't want to be on a committee just for the sake of being on a committee," says Chakrabarti.

What's next for the GND

Though the committee fight was discouraging (and not everyone agrees about its tactical wisdom), its reverberations reached well beyond DC. It produced an enormous jolt for the movement.

All the sudden, the left has found something it had lacked for years: an ambitious, positive climate program, something as bold and catchy as " Medicare-for-all " in health care. Advocates and activists are on board and wonks are thinking about the mechanics.

"We thought it would take a year" to get a movement going around the GND, Chakrabarti says. Instead, "it took weeks."

Leaders have a few ideas about what to do next, including the possibility of a GND caucus in the House (after all, the membership has already mostly identified itself) and continued direct action.

But the top priority after the holidays is to begin the process of putting real policy meat on the GND bones - hammering out an actual policy platform.

"If they're not going to develop the plan," Weber says. "We will. We'll get together the scientists, the engineers, the community leaders, the mayors and city councilors, create the plan ourselves, and go out and build the public and political support to make it happen over the next two years."

As Weber concedes, "GND" can mean just about anything at the moment. Now the race is on to make it mean something in particular - to produce something that activists and wonks can agree on, that politicians can run on, and that the public can rally around.

A new think tank will transform the GND into a policy platform

As of now, the movement's only "official" version of the GND is the Ocasio-Cortez document. As sweeping and ambitious as it is, it is less a policy platform than a set of high-level goals. Each one (e.g., "decarbonizing, repairing, and improving transportation and other infrastructure") would entail dozens of policies, at different levels of government.

The first and thus far only serious effort to fill out the policy side came in a report from Greg Carlock at the upstart think tank Data For Progress. But even that report is less a specific set of policy choices than an extensive policy menu - a set of options for each of the program's large-scale goals, everything from building standards to new techniques in agriculture to investments in transit. It is something like a detailed snapshot of the policy landscape, from which an architect could bricolage together a plan.

It is also a narrative tying those goals together, and its central theme - the central theme of all contemporary GND work - is that the GND is not just a climate change policy. It is a vision for a new kind of economy, built around a new set of social and economic relationships. It is not merely a way to reduce emissions, but also to ameliorate the other symptoms and dysfunctions of a late capitalist economy: growing inequality and concentration of power at the top.

"Climate change is an emergent property of a bad economic system," Carlock says. That outmoded economic system - the nebulous set of assumptions and power relationships that goes under the name "neoliberalism" - is the real target of the GND.

The GND is, at its heart, a form of social-democratic populism. Its intent is to involve the entire citizenry in the shared project of adapting to the 21st century, and in so doing materially improve the quality of life of the poor and middle class. It is an attempt to rebalance the economy and the political system, away from a monomaniacal focus on private goods, toward a more generous view of public goods and public purpose.

At least that's the idea. But getting from that idea to concrete policy platform that diverse constituencies can rally around (and a broad array of Democrats can endorse) will be a delicate and charged undertaking. Making those fraught policy choices is largely going to fall on the shoulders of a young policy analyst whose name I suspect you will be hearing much more of: Rhiana Gunn-Wright.

Gunn-Wright, who served as policy director on the insurgent gubernatorial campaign of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, works for a relatively new policy shop called New Consensus, which spun off as the policy arm of Justice Democrats. At least through 2020, its sole focus is to put together a policy platform that Democrats could, in theory, pass into law in 2020. (Northey has a good story on New Consensus.)

Organizer Demond Drummer will serve as the executive director, but Gunn-Wright will lead the GND effort.

Obviously, figuring out how to fundamentally transform the world's largest economy is a lot for one person to take on. When I asked Gunn-Wright if she knows what she's gotten into, she laughs. "It's really exciting!"

I heard grumbling here and there about the responsibility for policy being given over to a new shop, rather than to the many people and organizations that have been working on these issues, but Gunn-Wright is at pains to explain that she is not setting out to write a GND on her own.

"This requires an incredible amount of policy knowledge, more than one group, definitely more than one person can bring to bear," she says, "so the hope is that it can be a foundation for supporting research."

The idea is to convene experts and activists to hash out a shared vision, prescriptive on some matters, but offering a menu of options on others. The result will be a platform, a way of using "policymaking as a form of organizing," so that even wonks doing deep work on a particular piece or activists rallying around an individual battle can be "connected to the larger framework and plan," she says.

Above all, she says, New Consensus is eager to "move forward in communication and in alignment."

When I noted that the transportation goals in the GND so far have been pretty broad and aspirational, Gunn-Wright made it clear that these issues have been on her mind lately.

"What does it mean for light-duty electric vehicles?" she asked. "How are we dealing with aviation? How are we dealing with shipping? Where do hydrogen fuel cells fit in? How are we getting states to get together and get fleets big enough to do these deployments? How are we dealing with school buses?" (This went on for several minutes.)

Or how about electricity? Currently, Gunn-Wright said, New Consensus is "partnering with some analysts to model what it looks like if you have a national [ renewable portfolio standard] and a carbon tax. How do those two things interact? What's the effect on emissions? What is the economic effect?" (This too went on for several minutes.)

I delighted in the wonkery, but Gunn-Wright also returned the conversation again and again to the effects of the program on ordinary people, especially the poor and vulnerable. "I spent a little bit of time as a [user experience] researcher," she says, "so my team also thinks about the end user." How does the average citizen find a suitable job, or get help putting solar panels on their roof?

"If you have more money or access to power, you can either opt out or pay to make it simpler," she says. "The people who will have to go through all the mess are generally poorer people, with the least access to power."

Gunn-Wright's command of the issues, coupled with her unapologetic belief in the public sector to "shape markets and direct innovation," coupled with her evident concern for the low-income and working classes, make me excited to see what New Consensus produces.

Yet it remains an almost outlandishly ambitious undertaking: to coordinate and develop a coherent policy platform that can guide a transformation of the economy, decarbonize every economic sector, guarantee every American a well-paying job with good benefits, strengthen the resilience of the country's most vulnerable communities, command the support of politicians from every region of the country, and inspire enthusiasm and action among activists.

But Gunn-Wright is optimistic. "I've never worked on a policy issue where I was met with so much good will, people who will share information, people willing to leverage their talents and have conversations," she says. "That gives me a lot of hope."

So it still remains to hammer out a specific GND. But that doesn't mean there's no substance to it at all. At least among the movement around Sunrise and Ocasio-Cortez, there is a substantial degree of consensus about the core elements.

The three core principles of the GND: decarbonization, jobs, and justice

I asked the same question of everyone I talked to: What are your bottom lines? What must be in a policy platform for it to earn the name GND? Answers varied considerably in their details and emphasis, but they clustered around three basic principles.
1) The plan must decarbonize the economy.
The young people who will have to live with the effects of climate change want a plan that begins with what is necessary rather than what is deemed politically possible. "We want the policy to match the findings in the IPCC report - to match the scale of the problem," says Waleed Shahid of Justice Democrats. Or as Gunn-Wright puts it, "We need to go all the way."

That means decarbonizing the US economy: getting the electricity sector to zero carbon as soon as possible and other sectors shortly thereafter. That is a gargantuan undertaking that will touch every American life.

Ocasio-Cortez's platform calls for 100 percent renewable electricity within 10 years, but very few policy experts believe that is possible. Carlock, along with most other wonks in the field, thinks it's preferable to shoot for 100 percent "clean and renewable energy," to make room for non-renewable carbon-free options like existing nuclear plants or any new developments in nuclear, biomass, or carbon capture and sequestration. And they also think it's best to push the target out a bit. (Carlock has it at 2035.)

Finding feasible and cost-effective paths to a carbon-free grid is as important as ever! For guidance, @max_energy @samthernstrom & I reviewed 40 academic studies charting course to a decarbonized power system & synthesized findings in a paper just published in the journal Joule. pic.twitter.com/RbxOTQ0yHb
- JesseJenkins (@JesseJenkins) December 11, 2018

Other energy applications will be even more challenging than electricity. Decarbonizing transportation will involve radically accelerating the spread of electric vehicles, possibly by banning gasoline and diesel vehicle sales by 2030, and figuring out what to do with aviation and heavy transport.

Buildings produce about 40 percent of annual US carbon emissions. Decarbonizing buildings will involve implementing zero-carbon standards for all new buildings and funding the wholesale retrofitting of existing buildings, millions of which use fossil fuels like natural gas for heating and cooling.

Then there's heavy industry, where decarbonization remains something of a mystery, the work barely begun.

And on and on. Ocasio-Cortez's plan actually calls for decarbonizing not just electricity but the entire US economy in 10 years, which is almost certainly impossible absent radical reductions in Americans' energy consumption, something like imposed austerity - and nobody thinks Americans are that scared of climate change. Even decarbonizing the economy by 2050, as Carlock's report calls for, is an extraordinarily daunting challenge, involving hundreds of discrete policy problems, each facing their own dilemmas and entrenched interests.
2) The plan must include a federal jobs guarantee and large-scale public investments.
Again, the GND is not just climate policy. It's about transforming the economy, lifting the up the poor and middle class, and creating a more muscular, active public sector.

The GND "opens an opportunity to renegotiate power relationships between the public sector, the private sector, and the people," says Gunn-Wright. "We are interested in solutions that create more democratic structures in our economy."

Weber says that the key is to "connect [the GND] inextricably to the economic pain that so many Americans still feel, and show people that there's a way to build a better economy and improve their lives through action on climate change."

To that end, the GND would involve large-scale investments, on the order of trillions of dollars over 10 years, alongside a federal jobs guarantee. A job paying at least $15 an hour, with good benefits, would be available to anyone who wanted one.

Politically, this is the key to the GND. It's a program that can involve everyone and help everyone - and, theoretically, gain support from everyone, even those in red states who do not care about climate change. The investments and the job guarantee take the GND out of the realm of environmental policy and move it into the realm of transformational economic policy.

But policy-wise, this is also, in many ways, the least cooked piece. The federal job guarantee has substantial support among wonks (here's an argument in favor from scholars at the Levy Economics Institute), but also a good bit of opposition. (Matt Bruenig runs through some of the objections; Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute argues for other ways of reaching full employment.)

The way to think about the basic problem is: You're attempting to train and employ everyone who happens to want a job at the moment - a constantly fluctuating flow of people with differing skills, who will need jobs for differing periods of time. You're trying to provide those jobs through a massive program of investments. But what sorts of investments provide work for a job force of perpetually shifting skills and composition? Specifically, what subset of those investments are both "green" and suitable for a morphing, countercyclical job force?

It's not as easy to spend money and employ people as it might seem. Carlock has numerous investment ideas in his report (stuff like brownfield restoration and tree-planting), but even if enough ideas can be found, administration, which would be spread out in state offices and community centers across the country, remains daunting.

"The idea that thousands of administrations across the country will be able to usefully employ random flows of labor with random sets of skills in random durations is fairly implausible," argues Bruenig.

Gunn-Wright notes that there are many paths to a jobs guarantee, some incremental. Both the jobs and investment pieces could be phased in, expanded through testing and experimentation. "Pilot and scale," Carlock says.

Still, at the very least, there's a good bit of policy work ahead for this (politically central) element of the plan to become practicable legislation.

3) The plan must include a just transition.
Several people I talked to stressed that they want to avoid the mistakes of the original New Deal, many elements of which entrenched or exacerbated racial inequalities. Everyone wants to make sure that the plan includes protections for those hardest hit by historical discrimination and those set to suffer most from the effects of climate change - in Ocasio-Cortez's document, "low-income communities, communities of color, indigenous communities, [and] the front-line communities most affected by climate change, pollution, and other environmental harm."

Part of that is workforce training and the job guarantee, part of it is ensuring that all those jobs come with strong labor, environmental, and nondiscrimination standards, part of it is investments in those communities to fund programs like lead remediation, and part of it is making sure that all the investments - that all parts of the GND - follow strong environmental-justice standards.

Beyond these three core principles, the GND is still capacious enough to include a wide variety of preferences and perspectives. Journalist Aronoff best expresses the maximum, self-avowedly socialist version, painting an idyllic picture of a family provisioned with publicly funded work, child care benefits, and elder care. The Sierra Club has a somewhat more modest version.

As the GND brand spreads, traditional advocacy and policy groups are likely to break off more manageable chunks under the same rubric. After all, the GND is so sweeping that virtually any climate policy can claim to be part of it.

The delicate dance is to keep the GND fuzzy enough to allow a broad coalition of people and interests to see themselves in it - which is, somewhat miraculously, what seems to have happened so far - while specifying it enough to avoid having it watered down into a feel-good buzzword.

And that has to be done while navigating all the prodigious challenges ahead.

The top three challenges facing the GND: paying for it, convincing the public, and winning over Democrats

As you've probably gathered by now, the GND is much more ambitious than most policy ideas that have been bouncing around Washington, DC, the past few decades. Moving it from idea to legislation will involve overcoming obstacles almost too numerous to list.

Because the GND is, at its core, an argument for radical change, it is certain to inspire reaction - a defense of the status quo. And as Albert Hirschman wrote in his 1991 book The Rhetoric of Reaction, the arguments will cluster around the three core reactionary themes ( quoting Hirschman): " futility - the claim that all attempts at social engineering are powerless to alter the natural order of things; perversity - the argument that interventions will actually backfire and have the opposite of their intended effect; and jeopardy - the idea that a new, possibly more radical reform will threaten older, hard won liberal reforms."

Those arguments will take innumerable forms. I will focus on one key question the movement must answer and two key constituencies it must win over.
1) "How are you going to pay for it?"
The first and most persistent question facing any social reform in the US is how it will pay for itself. The right has spent more than half a century in the US waging a propaganda campaign intended to convince Americans of a few key things: 1) the federal budget must be balanced, with every dollar spent "paid for" with a dollar of revenue raised, lest inflation destroy us all; 2) taxes are high and burdensome and any effort to raise taxes is, de facto, bad; 3) government is incompetent and its spending is always wasteful; and 4) America is broke, in debt, with crippling liabilities coming due soon.

To be clear, all four are false. They are pernicious myths, motivated by the desire to prevent progressive social reform. They are, to use a technical term, bullshit.

But they are, nonetheless, widely accepted bullshit that shapes the US political economy. Indeed, they have been repeated so often, for so long, that they have permeated the establishments of both parties and shaped the folk political theories of the average American. Stop a random person on the street and they might not know much about politics, but they will be certain that the country is in debt and can't afford nice things.

Countering the "pay for it" question can be done in several ways. One, which Ocasio-Cortez has practiced herself, is to point out the hypocrisy. When Congress funnels trillions to the military or cuts taxes for the wealthy, no one asks how they will pay for it. Pay-for demands seem only to apply to Democrats, and only for social spending.

The second is to point out that climate change impacts are going to cost more than climate mitigation anyway. The GND is big, but "big things will happen," says Chakrabarti. "The two options are, either we're going to intentionally do the big things we want, or big things we don't want will happen to us."

The third is to point out that there are options for raising revenue. There's a carbon tax, obviously - the GND movement is opposed to carbon pricing-only strategies, but they all acknowledge a role for pricing - but Gunn-Wright also mentions a financial transactions tax and pulling some of the returns of large government investments back in as revenue. More recently, in an interview with 60 Minutes, Ocasio-Cortez mentioned restoring income tax rates of up to 70 percent on the ultra-wealthy as a way of raising revenue. "That doesn't mean all $10 million are taxed at an extremely high rate, but it means that as you climb up this ladder you should be contributing more," she told Anderson Cooper.

The fourth, and boldest, is to reject the question entirely.

There is great enthusiasm on the left right now for Modern Monetary Theory and related ideas and scholars. (Vox's Dylan Matthews wrote a great explainer on Modern Monetary Theory a few years ago, and another more recently about Bernie Sanders's adoption of the idea.) The core ideas are fairly simple.

If the question is what the US can afford to invest, the way to think about it is not in terms of how much money the country has. It literally has as much money as it wants. It prints its own money! (The US has a " fiat currency," in the lingo.)

The US government can spend all the money it wants. What ultimately sets the limits on America's ability to invest are its resources. It has so much labor potential, so much natural resources, so much manufacturing capacity, etc. By paying for stuff, injecting money into the economy, the government puts those resources to work.

If the economy overheats, one or more of those resources nears its limits, scarcity drives prices up and inflation ensues. To stop short of that, the government can pull some money out, by scaling back programs or raising taxes. Taxes are simply a way of extracting money from the economy.

Stony Brook University professor Stephanie Kelton (a Modern Monetary Theory guru, Sanders adviser, and likely GND adviser in some capacity, at some point) calls it an economy's natural speed limit. As long as the economy stays under that limit and avoids inflation, the government can spend more money. A deficit isn't a bad thing, it's just a foot on the accelerator.

The notion of balanced federal budgets - which Democrats adopted as their own under Obama through the absurd "PayGo" rules, and look likely to adopt again next session - amounts, Kelton says, to a promise: "I'm going to take a dollar out of the economy, usually in taxes, for every dollar I plan to put in."

But why would you do that? Why would you slow the economy a bit for every bit you boosted it?

"If the deficit has to be 4.7 percent of GDP to create the economy we want, with full employment, low inflation, and poverty going down," she says, "who cares? If we can create the economy we want with a deficit of 2.1 percent, that's fine too. The budget outcome isn't the thing that matters, it's the real economic conditions."

The way to approach a GND, she says, is to adopt the method of economist John Maynard Keynes in his book How to Pay for the War: Model the economy's available resources; figure out what you can deploy and still avoid inflation; figure out how much private consumption spending you have to displace to make room for the necessary war spending; and finally, ensure a just transition, i.e., make sure that the poor and middle class, the ones deferring their private consumption spending, are rewarded for their sacrifice. (That's what US War Bonds were about.)

Winning that argument - convincing Americans that it's the economy, not the budget, that needs to be balanced - is an uphill battle, to say the least, lifting a lot of historical baggage.

One way or another, GND proponents will relentlessly face, from both sides of the aisle, the question: How will you pay for it? Whatever their answer, they had better get it worked out, because the attacks are already incoming.
2) Winning over the public
GND proponents tout polling showing that majorities of the public support a green job guarantee and other elements of the GND.

Data for Progress has done extensive polling on a green jobs guarantee. It has found that a green jobs guarantee outpolls a straight jobs guarantee, especially among young people. It even brings Trump voters almost (but not quite) up to majority approval.

More recently, the movement has been excited about a recent survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communications, which shows that a GND commands majority support even from Republicans.

"Green jobs are overwhelmingly popular with voters. This is the future," says Data for Progress co-founder Sean McElwee. "The question is not if we get a Green New Deal. We will have a Green New Deal. The question is how much beautiful socialist bullshit we get out of it after we wrestle with the Blue Dogs."

It is true: In terms of public opinion, this is an incredibly strong position from which to start. The headline features of a GND sound bold and forward-looking and people generally react well to them.

Nonetheless, having seen countless polls come and go over the years, I have a few rules of thumb. First, people like good things and will react positively to them in polls. Look at the Yale survey question: "produce," "strengthen," "upgrade," "provide." Those are good things. Of course people want them! They want more health, more benefits, better wages, cleaner energy.

Conversely, if you poll bad things, like taxes, increased costs, bureaucracy, government control over private decisions, and wasteful spending, people react badly. (Data for Progress says it is in the process of testing the green jobs guarantee against negative framing language.)

People don't have deep or settled views on most things and generally respond to identity cues, associations, and above all, messengers. In a poll, you take the messenger out of the equation and provide carefully curated cues. That tells you almost nothing about how people will get information or make decisions in the real world.

In the real world, if the GND looks like it has any chance of becoming a reality, it will face a giant right-wing smear campaign, coordinated across conservative media, think tanks, and politicians, funded by effectively unlimited fossil fuel wealth. The right will rush to define the GND as a silly, ridiculous, naive, unaffordable government boondoggle meant to destroy your way of life and funnel your taxpayer money to Democratic constituencies like illegal immigrants.

And keep in mind, the right-wing machine does not have to win that messaging battle. It just has to fight it, furiously, enough to make the GND controversial, to polarize the issue and freeze it in the same paralysis that grips the rest of US politics.

As Joe Romm of ClimateProgress points out, the most important finding in the survey is this one:

Virtually no one has heard of the GND. Right now, in the minds of the vast majority of Americans, "GND" signifies almost nothing. The task of defining it for them lies entirely ahead.

Advocates will work to define it with positive imagery. But they will not have the field to themselves. And they will likely never have access to the kind of money fossil fuels can spend to crush them. If they win the messaging battles to come, it will be with people power and media savvy.
3) Winning over Democrats
Veteran Democrats like Pelosi and Hoyer came of age in an era in which Democrats were on the defensive. Bill Clinton won with a "third way," pledging fealty to markets and an end to big government. Ever since, Democrats have been backing into progress, moving incrementally, accepting basic conservative critiques of muscular social democracy.

And as the Republican Party has become more rabidly conservative and corrupt, congressional Democrats have developed a particular culture. They see themselves as the Good Guys, the ones who still care about good government, fiscal responsibility, and bipartisanship. They are loathe to break norms the way the GOP routinely has. They don't want to fight dirty.

More than anything, it is that culture of caution and manners with which GND proponents must contend. The idea of adopting bold policy pledges with no care as to whether they draw any bipartisan support is deeply alien to congressional Democrats. They live in fear of Republican attacks, which are faithfully echoed throughout DC media. They don't want to "stick their heads up" or "give Republicans ammunition." They are hoping, on some level, that if they keep their heads down and don't distract anyone, voters will focus on how much they don't like Trump.

"Even the most progressive of the progressives suffer from a certain Stockholm syndrome from living under neoliberalism for 40 years," says Chakrabarti.

But there is no way to soft-pedal something like the GND. There is no way to pretend that it is incremental or fully "paid for." There is no way to pretend that GOP leadership, so deeply in hock to fossil fuel funding, is going to offer any kind of support for any part of it.

The GND offers Americans a bracing new alternative, not a hesitant step forward - a rejection of Republican dogma and fossil fuel energy, not a compromise with them. To rally Americans behind it, Democrats will have to "paint the picture and the vision," Chakrabarti says. "You have to sell the American people that this is possible to make it possible."

More than any process or jurisdictional issue, this is the choice that will face Democrats in coming years: to respond to Trump by promising a return to ordinary politics, or to respond to Trump by promising to strive for something genuinely new and better.

"What does America get if Dems take power in 2020?" Chakrabarti asks. "Either that can be a boring, crappy vision that no one's going to get excited by, or it's going to be an exciting vision that people will want to come out and vote for."

The activists who have kickstarted this unlikely movement are well aware that they are the underdogs in this fight. The GND "would be a direct blow to some of the wealthiest and most powerful interests in the world," says Weber, "and they're not going to accept it lying down."

He knows that tons of fossil fuel money is gearing up to descend on the movement. And he knows that Democrats will be difficult to rouse. He knows that even if Dems take power in 2020, any legislation will eventually have to contend with the Senate, where the Energy and Natural Resources Committee will be run by West Virginia's Joe Manchin, who literally shot the last climate bill (which was a hell of a lot less ambitious than a GND).

"Even if we get the politics right, I still think that we're going to need sustained mass protest, extended labor shutdowns, and general strikes to begin as soon as possible after Election Day 2020," says Weber. "That's going to take convincing the American people that this is an absolute moral and economic necessity, and the only thing standing in the way of it happening is the political class."

It is a long shot. But as the IPCC has made clear, long shots are the only shots left. It is not the elderly members of Congress who will live with the havoc forecast by climate scientists, it is the young activists who are amassing on their doorsteps and in their offices. Those young activists are looking ahead further than the next election cycle. Their families will suffer the consequences of these choices.

But they believe that history is on their side. "The most powerful force known to humans is ideology," says McElwee. Republicans have pushed through "radically unpopular policies because of their commitment to ideology." But today, he says, "young people have the ideas that people want to be associated with. We shape ideology and that's incredibly fucking powerful."

Climate politics is, now as ever, a choice between changes that seem impossible and a future that seems unthinkable. For years, US politics has denied and avoided that choice. In their own way, Democrats - the "adults" who want to reserve the power to make these decisions - have avoided it just like Republicans.

Facing it squarely means radicalism. Now, a real response to climate change, a response on the scale of what the crisis demands, is on the table. It is an option. It has a name.

Whether America can work its way past polarization, paralysis, and structural barriers to change to actually grasp that option, to take a leap into a new future, very much remains to be seen. But there can be no more ignoring the choice.

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Update, 3/30/2019: Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced a Green New Deal resolution on February 7 that lays out the goals, aspirations, and specifics of the program in a more definitive way. Read about it here, and read about the criticism that followed here and here.

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Optimism about Green New Deal

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It's the spring of 2043, and Gina is graduating college with the rest of her class. She had a relatively stable childhood. Her parents availed themselves of some of the year of paid family leave they were entitled to, and after that she was dropped off at a free child care program.

Pre-K and K-12 were also free, of course, but so was her time at college, which she began after a year of public service, during which she spent six months restoring wetlands and another six volunteering at a day care much like the one she had gone to.

Now that she's graduated, it's time to think about what to do with her life. Without student debt, the options are broad. She also won't have to worry about health insurance costs, since everyone is now eligible for Medicare. Like most people, she isn't extraordinarily wealthy, so she can live in public, rent-controlled housing - not in the underfunded, neglected units we're accustomed to seeing in the United States, but in one of any number of buildings that the country's top architects have competed for the privilege to design, featuring lush green spaces, child care centers, and even bars and restaurants. Utilities won't be an issue, either. Broadband and clean water are both free and publicly provisioned, and the solar array that is spread atop the roofs of her housing complex generates all the power it needs and more.

For work, she trained to become a high-level engineer at a solar panel manufacturer, though some of her friends are going into nursing and teaching. All are well-paid, unionized positions, and are considered an essential part of the transition away from fossil fuels, updates about which are broadcast over the nightly news. In any case, she won't have to spend long looking for a job. At any number of American Job Centers around the country, she can walk in and work with a counselor to find a well-paid position on projects that help make her city better able to deal with rising tides and more severe storms, or oral history projects, or switch careers altogether and receive training toward a union job in the booming clean energy sector.

The AJCs are a small part of the Green New Deal Act of 2021, a compromise plan that was only strengthened in the years that followed. For a brief moment, it looked as if the Supreme Court might strike down large elements of it, but as a plan to expand the size of the court gained popularity with the public, the justices backed down.

Gina might also open her own business. Without having to worry about the cost of day care or health insurance, she can invest everything into making her dream a reality. And the cost of labor for business owners, who no longer have to pick up the health care tab, is reasonable enough that she can afford to pay good wages for the staff that she needs to meet demand.

Whichever she chooses, she'll work no more than 40 hours a week, and likely far less, leaving ample time to travel via high speed, zero-carbon rail to visit friends elsewhere and go hiking or to the beach; enjoy long, leisurely meals of locally sourced food and drink; and attend concerts in the park, featuring musicians whose careers have been supported by generous public arts grants. As she gets older, paying for health care won't be a concern, with everything from routine doctor's visits and screenings, to prescription drugs, to home health aides covered under the public system, as social security continues to furnish her rent, expenses, and entertainment through the end of her life.

That's the world a "Green New Deal" could build, and what a number of representatives and activists are pushing Congress to help set into motion. Led by Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., 17 representatives and counting have signed on to a measure that would create a select House committee tasked with crafting, over the course of a year, a comprehensive plan to move the U.S. away from fossil fuels by 2030 and accomplish seven goals related to decarbonizing the economy.

On Friday, Ocasio-Cortez and her collaborators gathered outside the Capitol to talk about the increasingly popular program. "The push for a Green New Deal is about more than just natural resources and jobs," said Rep.-elect Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass. "It's about our most precious commodity: people, families, children, our future. It's about moving to 100 percent renewable energy and the elimination of greenhouse gases. It's about ensuring that our coastal communities have the resources and tools to build sustainable infrastructure that will counteract rising sea levels, beat back untenable natural disasters, and mitigate the effects of extreme temperature."

On Monday evening, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., hosted a town hall on the issue with Ocasio-Cortez inside the Capitol.

All of this raises a question: What, exactly, would a Green New Deal entail?

Like its 1930s counterpart, the "Green New Deal" isn't a specific set of programs so much as an umbrella under which various policies might fit, ranging from technocratic to transformative. The sheer scale of change needed to deal effectively with climate change is massive, as the scientific consensus is making increasingly clear, requiring an economy-wide mobilization of the sort that the United States hasn't really undertaken since World War II. While the Green New Deal imaginary evokes images of strapping young men pulling up their sleeves to hoist up wind turbines (in the mold of realist Civilian Conservation Corps ads), its actual scope is far broader than the narrow set of activities typically housed under the green jobs umbrella, or even in the original New Deal.

"People talk often about the infrastructure investment that has to happen, and new technology," Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, told me. "But there's also an industrial plan that needs to happen to build entirely new industries. It's sort of like the moonshot. When JFK said America was going to go to the moon, none of the things we needed to get to the moon at that point existed. But we tried and we did it." The Green New Deal, he added, "touches everything - it's basically a massive system upgrade for the economy."

In a broad sense, that's what policymakers in other countries refer to as industrial policy, whereby the government plays a decisive role in shaping the direction of the economy to accomplish specific aims. That doesn't mean that the state controls every industry, as in the Soviet system; instead, it would be closer to the kind of economic planning that the U.S. practiced during the economic mobilization around World War II, and that is practiced internally today by many of the world's biggest corporations. Should Ocasio-Cortez's resolution pass muster, the select committee will convene policymakers, academics, and representatives from the private sector and civil society to hash out next steps. How widely or narrowly that groups defines a Green New Deal - and whether it'll ever be given space to meet on Capitol Hill - remains to be seen, as supportive lawmakers huddle in Washington this week to try and gain support for writing it into the rulebook for the next Congress. Ultimately, it will be that committee that fleshes out what a Green New Deal looks like. But the proposal itself, American history, and existing research give us a sense for what all it might look like in practice.

The plan itself - or rather, the plan to make the plan - lays out seven goals, starting with generating 100 percent of power in the U.S. from renewable sources and updating the country's power grid.

As the first two points of the resolution suggest, one of the main goals of any Green New Deal that spurs a complete switch to renewables will be dialing up the amount of total energy demand represented by electricity, by switching combustion-based activities like heating systems, air conditioners, and automobiles over to electric power. The Energy Transitions Commission estimates that 60 percent of energy will need to be distributed via electricity by mid-century, up from just 20 percent today. Making that possible means developing new technology, and also overhauling today's grid, making it easier for homes and businesses that generate their own power to feed it back into the system. A modern grid - or "smart" grid, per Ocasio-Cortez's proposal - would also make way for microgrids, which are self-contained renewable energy generation systems that allow small neighborhoods and hospitals, for instance, to continue making their own power even if there are disruptions (say, hurricane-force winds or a wildfire) upstream. Assuming it won't be entirely sustainable to import all of that capacity, scaling up renewables will also likely mean expanding the country's renewables manufacturing sector to produce more solar and wind infrastructure, components for which are today sourced largely from abroad.

"We build things here in Detroit, and across Michigan, and we've got a lot of people here with manufacturing skills who are being left behind by the corporate greed," incoming Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D- Mich., among the first supporters of the resolution and who campaigned on a Green New Deal, said via email. "Just this week we heard about how GM, a company that has received billions and billions from taxpayers, is planning to cut thousands of jobs here. So it's really exciting to be talking about rapidly building up our green, renewable energy infrastructure, because these are jobs that can and should go to our workers here in Michigan.

"We were the Arsenal of Democracy and helped save the planet from real darkness decades ago, and there's no reason why we couldn't be one of the regions to build America's green energy infrastructure and help save the planet again in the process."

Bringing more clean energy online could entail expanding the types of programs that already exist at the state level, too, though they seldom come with much teeth. Renewable portfolio standards require utilities to source a certain amount of their power from wind and solar. New York state, for instance, set a renewable portfolio standard of 29 percent by 2015. The deadline came and went quietly, without much talk of how it would pick up the slack to reach its next goal of 50 percent renewables by 2030.

Those targets would have to be much stricter to get off fossil fuels by 2035. "You say, you hit the target and you reduce emissions 10 percent every year or you go to jail," says Robert Pollin, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Political Economy Research Institute. "That would get their attention."

That may sound aggressive by today's standards, but has been par for the course at other points in American history when the country has faced existential threats. During World War II, for instance, the government was largely responsible for administering prices, wages, and sourcing in sectors deemed vital to the Allies. Corporate productivity and profits boomed with demand for tankers and munitions, but companies that refused to go along with mandates sent down from the War Production Board and associated economic planning bodies faced a federal takeover. Among the most iconic images of these changed power relationships was a widely circulated image of Sewell Avery, the president of Montgomery Ward. During World War II, Montgomery Ward, a mail-order corporation, produced everything from uniforms to bullets for soldiers abroad. In 1944, the National War Labor Board ordered Avery, a Nazi sympathizer, to let his employees unionize to ward off a strike, and the ensuing disruption in war production. When he refused, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the National Guard to haul him off, chair and all, and seize the company's main plant in Chicago. The government took over operations at the company's factories in several other cities by the year's end. And by the end of the war, around a quarter of all domestic manufacturing had been nationalized for the sake of the war effort.

Notably, Green New Deal proponents aren't pushing for such drastic action. Yet given the collision course between the fossil fuel industry's business model and a livable future, simply building up more renewable power will almost certainly need to be paired with constraints on the fossil fuel industry. Waleed Shahid, communications director for Justice Democrats, which is backing the Green New Deal proposal, told me, "Given the fossil fuel industry's role in creating an untenable situation for billions of people around the world, the government should step up and promote winners and create losers, which has happened before in the United States." Among the provisions of the committee resolution, fittingly, is that politicians who accept donations from coal, oil, and gas companies can't be appointed to it.

At a press conference announcing additional support for the resolution, Ocasio-Cortez spelled out the conflict of interest: "This is about the fact that if we continue to allow power to concentrate with corporations to dictate the quality of our air, to ... tell us that we can keep burning fossil fuels - to dupe us - people will die," she said, "and people are dying."

Evan Weber, of the Sunrise Movement, put it in similar terms. "Dealing with climate change in the way that we need to is not just about passing a suite of policies that will transform our society to both end the causes of climate change and prepare society for the climate change that is already baked in," he said. "It's also changing our conception of what government is and who its for."

Especially under the Trump administration, plenty of government policy has been written for the benefit of the fossil fuel industry. According to a 2018 analysis by Oil Change International, the U.S. government annually spends about $20 billion on direct and indirect subsidies to the fossil fuel industry; the richest "G7" nations overall spend about $100 billion. This in itself is a kind of industrial policy already in place, and a Green New Deal might at the very least remove those subsidies and redirect them toward the clean energy sector, where wind and solar already enjoy a much smaller degree of subsidization through the production and investment tax credits, respectively.

While winding down fossil fuel production and scaling up renewables will of course be a considerable part of any Green New Deal, so too will investing in the research, development, and manufacturing capacities to get especially difficult-to-decarbonize sectors, like airlines and steel, off fossil fuels over the next several decades, as Ocasio-Cortez's proposal notes. The latter requires a still largely experimental process called electrolysis, which targeted investments could subsidize research into. In Sanders's town hall Monday night, Ocasio-Cortez appeared to reference economist Mariana Mazzucato's work, which lays out the existing progress and potential of using public investment to finance early-stage research that venture capital funds are too risk-averse to support. (Ocasio-Cortez and other members of her team have met with Mazzacuto.)

"For far too long," she said, "we gave money to Tesla - to a lot of people - and we got no return on the investment that the public made in new technologies. It's the public that financed innovative new technologies."

Such a policy umbrella, though, could be just as much about decarbonization as about building out sectors of the economy which simply aren't carbon-intensive, but are essential to a healthy economy, such as teaching and nursing. A federal job guarantee, which is cited in the draft resolution and a hot topic among 2020 presidential hopefuls, might put people to work remediating wetlands and tending community gardens while providing an alternative to low-paid work bound up in hugely carbon-intensive supply chains. Walmart, for instance, is the biggest employer in 22 states, paying an entry-level wage of $11 per hour. McDonald's, another major employer, is estimated to have at some point employed 1 in 8 American workers and has consistently resisted calls to institute a $15 minimum wage. A federal jobs guarantee that paying that much, as outlined by several proposals, would effectively create a national wage floor, compelling retail and fast food chains to either raise their wages or risk having their employees enticed into better-paid jobs that improve their communities and make them more resilient against climate impacts.

For extractive industry workers, whose wages are traditionally high thanks to decades of labor militancy, $15 an hour may not be too big of a draw, meaning other programs could be needed to finance what's widely referred to as a just transition, making sure that workers in sectors that need to be phased out - like coal, oil, and gas - are well taken care of and that communities which have historically revolved around those industries can diversify their economies. Spain's social democratic government recently sponsored a small-scale version of this, investing the relatively tiny sum of $282 million, with the support of trade unions, to help coal workers transition into other work while shuttering the last of the country's coal mines.

With the right investment, new jobs won't be hard to come by. Research from the International Labour Organization finds that while a concerted transition to renewable energy could cost as many as 6 million jobs around the world in carbon-intensive sectors, it could create 24 million jobs, or a net gain of 18 million, and far more than the profound job loss that would stem from unchecked climate change.

It's not hard to imagine cries from Republicans and Democrats alike about how much such a program might cost, and of the dangers of blowing up the deficit. Worth noting is the cost that 13 federal agencies have said are likely if we do nothing, according to the National Climate Assessment quietly released on Black Friday. By 2100, heat-related deaths could cost the U.S. $141 billion. Sea-level rise could rack up a $118 billion bill, and infrastructure damages could cost up to $32 billion. Along the same timeline, the report's authors found, the financial damages of climate change to the U.S. could double those caused by the Great Recession.

By comparison, the 1 to 2 percent of gross domestic product that Pollin has said a Green New Deal would cost seems pretty cheap, never mind the fact that putting millions of people to work would bolster tax revenues and consumer spending. Pollin calls it "equitable green growth," coupled with "degrowth down to zero of the fossil fuel industry." Incumbent fuel sources, and coal in particular, aren't exactly saving anyone money. A recent analysis from the group Carbon Tracker has found that 42 percent of coal capacity worldwide is already unprofitable, and that figure could spiked to 72 percent by 2030.

"The question is, 'What policy do you use to build up the public investment and incentivize private investment?'" Pollin said. "You can't just have these private sector incentive programs. That's just not going to get it."

As several proponents have pointed out, though, so-called pay-for questions are rarely asked of public spending programs designed to further national interests, be that getting out of a recession or fighting a war. "If we were threatened by an invader, we would mobilize all the resources we have at our disposal to deal with that security threat," says U.K.-based economist Ann Pettifor. "As in those circumstances, you cannot rely entirely on the private sector."

Pettifor was among the first people to start thinking seriously about a Green New Deal just after the financial crisis. Then working at the New Economics Foundation, a progressive think tank, she helped convene a series of meetings in her living room that would eventually coalesce into the Green New Deal group. The group produced several reports on the subject. But with European sovereign debt crisis about to plunge the continent's lawmakers into full-blown austerity hysteria, any public discussion of a big, expansionary spending package faded. Jeremy Corbyn's election to Labour Party leadership helped change that. And this past March, Chakrabarti, working on Ocasio-Cortez's campaign at the time, showed up on her doorstep wanting to hear more.

For Pettifor, as for many Green New Deal advocates on this side of the pond, the funding question is less about how to reconcile line items than about reconfiguring what goals the economy is working toward - that is, to make it do something other than simply grow GDP by some fixed percentage each year.

Economists' and policymakers' fixation on unlimited economic growth as the metric for measuring economic prosperity is a really recent invention, developed in large part by the exponential returns that were being brought in by a ballooning financial sector-and not to that point factored into economic accounts. "If I work hard every day and night I have a weekly wage. If i gamble and win a load of money, I get rich quick," she explains. "And the finance sector has moved its focus into making money in that way and not in investing in productive activity." That shift toward measuring growth above all else started to displace an earlier focus on full employment in the 1960s, making multiplying profits and consumption the goal rather than ensuring people's basic needs were met. As a result, carbon emissions spiked.

It's why Pettifor largely rejects the premise of debates among environmentalists about growth and degrowth. For the green movement to talk about growth at all, she says, "is to adapt that OECD framing of what the economy should be about" and "to adopt the framing of a neoliberal idea of the economy. I would prefer to us to talk about full employment."

That's not to suggest there aren't nuts and bolts funding issues that can be easily worked out. In contrast to state governments, which rely in large part on tax revenues, the federal government has plenty of tools at its disposal for financing a Green New Deal - tools it deployed to great effect during the financial crisis. It could also set up a National Investment Bank to furnish lines of credit for green investment. A polluter fee or carbon tax could provide some revenue, as well, but perhaps more importantly would punish bad behavior in the energy sector. Loan guarantees of the sort used in the stimulus package could help to build out clean energy as they did then, before getting scrapped when Republicans took control of the House in 2010. (While Solyndra, the most infamous of those loan recipients, failed, the program overall made a return on investment greater than those enjoyed by most venture capital funds.)

In a piece co-authored by Greg Carlock, author of a Green New Deal prospectus for the upstart think tank Data for Progress; and Andres Bernal, an adviser to Ocasio-Cortez; and Stephanie Kelton, former chief economist on the Senate Budget Committee, the writers explain, "When Congress authorizes spending, it sets off a sequence of actions. Federal agencies ... enter into contracts and begin spending. As the checks go out, the government's bank - the Federal Reserve - clears the payments by crediting the seller's bank account with digital dollars. In other words, Congress can pass any budget it chooses, and our government already pays for everything by creating new money."

A Green New Deal, moreover, "will actually help the economy by stimulating productivity, job growth and consumer spending, as government spending has often done," Kelton, Bernal, and Carlock add. "In fact, a Green New Deal can create good-paying jobs while redressing economic and environmental inequities."

Green New Deal advocates also have no illusions about just how flawed the original New Deal was in terms of inequities, given that it largely left Jim Crow in place. "It threw black and brown people under the bus," Chakrabarti said, noting that Roosevelt gave up on enshrining civil rights into its programs in order to win the support of white supremacist southern Democrats. Among the most infamous examples of this dynamic was the Federal Housing Administration, which guaranteed mortgages and subsidized large housing developments for whites on the condition that African-Americans couldn't live there. African-Americans who applied for assistance to buy homes in predominantly white neighborhoods were refused. It's from these same policies that the term redlining first emerged, a reference to New Deal-era planning maps which used literal red lines to designate areas where the federally backed Home Owners' Loan Corporation would and would not insure mortgages.

"Right off the bat," Chakrabarti says of the Green New Deal plan, "we've put trying to fix the injustices that have been perpetrated on black and brown communities front and center. Unless you have targeted investments in communities that have had their wealth stripped from them for generations, it's going to be very difficult for communities that have faced redlining to enjoy economic prosperity."

The detritus of FHA-style discrimination serves to make a transition harder, and will need to be overcome to make any new New Deal a success. Dense, transit-connected cities are on the whole more sustainable than the car-centric suburban sprawl encouraged by a mix of mid-century development schemes, segregationist policies and white flight. Yet the home solar market is oriented largely around rooftop installations, which creates obvious barriers to entry for renters in multi-unit buildings, where landlords have little incentive to upgrade. The New York City Housing Authority, accounting for about a fifth of the country's public housing, could be a model for retrofitting public and affordable housing in cities around the country, but is currently sitting in about $17 billion of debt and remains in dire need of basic updates and repairs.

As sociologist Daniel Aldana Cohen points out, density alone doesn't make a city low-carbon. While they pride themselves as green for buying organic and taking the train, luxury high-rise inhabitants - with their taste for carbon-intensive imports, summer homes, and first-class business trips - have the largest footprints in their cities, which account for around three-quarters of carbon emissions worldwide. "When it comes to the carbon emissions of New York's individual residents, as calculated in terms of consumption, Manhattan is the worst borough. Because it's the richest," he writes. "Crowded but well-to-do West Villagers' carbon footprints are comparable to sprawling suburbanites' all over the country." Beyond Manhattan, Oxfam International has found that the world's richest 10 percent produce about half of its carbon emissions. "It is only residents of Manhattan's less-gentrified neighborhoods," Aldana Cohen continues, "who have really low carbon footprints. They reside by the island's northwest and southeast tips, in zip codes anchored by public housing. ... Public housing, well-stocked libraries, accessible transit, gorgeous parks: these are democratic low-carbon amenities. And they're the political achievements of working-class New York."

Dense, affordable housing is the key to making a low-carbon city. And with the right investments, NYCHA could cut its emissions by three-quarters or more, "while using the renovation process to clean out mold, seal the cracks and crevices where pests now thrive, and increase leaf canopy. With these and other measures, NYCHA could become the world's largest-albeit decentralized-green city," Aldana Cohen adds. A Green New Deal could sponsor similar improvements in towns and cities around the country, rendering cities greener, more equitable, and infinitely more livable.

Beyond redressing some of the ills of the original New Deal, those pushing for its redux are also keenly focused on the people who could be on the losing end of both climate policy and the climate crisis itself. "We know that if we are really going to make it out of the years and decades ahead, we need a government that cares for people and is of, by and for the people and acts to protect the most marginalized amongst us," Weber, of Sunrise, says. "When we have things like extreme weather events and increased migration because of climate change, we take a more humanitarian approach to responding to those than what we're seeing from our federal government, which is saying we need to build walls and lock people in cages."

In the coming decades, climate change is likely to bring about the largest mass migration in human history, both within and between countries. Already, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center estimates that as many as 21.5 million people have been displaced thanks to climate-related impacts, and the civil war in Syria that has led many refugees to flee that country is owed at least partially to climate-induced drought and agricultural crisis. Largely, governments in the global north have treated these flows as a problem. But the Green New Deal could adopt a different approach.

"We're going to need tens or hundreds of millions of jobs," Chakrabarti said, projecting that there could even be a labor shortage. "What that's going to result in is that, yes, we're going to have to retrain and invest in the current American workforce. But we're probably going to be begging for more immigration." He referenced the influx of labor needed to build up the interstate highway system in the 1950s. "It's not just that we had an open immigration policy. We were actively recruiting." Chakrabarti's father, he said, immigrated after visiting an American recruitment center in West Bengal. "They were pitching them on the American dream to try to get them to come to America and build the country together."

As the immigration question highlights, climate change isn't an issue that confines itself narrowly to borders. The US represents about 15 percent of global emissions, so acting alone won't get us too far. Coal is on a steady decline here, but Asia accounts for around three-quarters of global coal consumption, which has actually risen overall in the last 2 years. And while China has backed what might be the world's most ambitious green spending package, it's also continuing to finance coal plants domestically and throughout the global south, encouraging other countries to pursue a path to economic development based on a fuel source that climate science is increasingly clear should be zeroed out. Ocasio-Cortez's proposal frames this problem delicately, setting out an intention to make green "technology, industry, expertise, products and services a major export of the United States, with the aim of becoming the undisputed international leader in helping other countries transition to completely carbon neutral economies and bringing about a global Green New Deal."

Aside from turning the US into a major exporter of clean energy - rather than, say, oil - that might involve US capital opening up a path to development for other countries that's based on renewable energy and not coal or gas, in ways similar to the Marshall Plan shaped the course of economic rebuilding and development in post-war development. The approach wouldn't be all that dramatic of a departure from current U.S. energy policy in the U.S.; the Trump Administration has repeatedly stated its intent to help bring coal to the rest of the world, including at last year's UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany, and almost certainly at their event this year at COP 24. But extending the Green New Deal beyond the narrow confines of U.S. borders would also involve upending the traditionally obstructive role the U.S. has played in international climate talks, stymying ambition and binding pledges. As Naomi Klein noted last week, the U.S. taking the climate crisis seriously - adopting what could be the world's most ambitious decarbonization plan, in its most dominant economy - would have a tremendous ripple effect throughout the rest of the world, and more narrowly in the talks themselves as countries figure out how to ratchet up their commitments to the Paris agreement in the coming years.

All of the above is only the tip of the iceberg. Here's a brief and entirely non-exhaustive list of some other issues that might fall under a Green New Deal: farm and agricultural policy; reforming the National Flood Insurance Program and developing a coherent plan for relocating coastal communities away from flood zones; formally honoring indigenous sovereignty and tribal land rights; ensuring democratic participation in clean energy planning and ending eminent domain; a universal basic income; wildfire management; trade policy; building up infrastructure to sequester carbon; fully extending broadband wireless to rural communities; rare earths and mineral procurement; overhauling FEMA; sweeping campaign finance reform; and "Medicare for All" - to name just a few.

Needless to say, the Green New Deal faces an uphill battle on the Hill. Aside from complaints about feasibility, the pushback from other Democrats so far has been largely procedural, Weber says, citing a fear voiced by some House members that should the select committee be empowered to draft legislation, it would undermine the authority of other established committees. As he points out, the resolution outlines only that the committee be allowed to draft legislation, and wouldn't pre-empt that legislation first going through another body before moving to a floor vote. Moreover, Weber added, "We actually do need a committee that goes beyond the very narrow focus of the existing ones. What we're talking about is something that effects every aspect of society. A select committee that can have the purview over the issues that all of these existing committees and more is exactly the type of vehicle that Congress - if it want to take climate change seriously - should be creating."

I contacted several incoming members of Congress that were outspoken in their campaigns about climate change but have not yet signed on to the Green New Deal resolution to ask about their positions. As of yet, no one has responded, although one - Rep.-elect Mike Levin, D-Calif. - announced his support last week.

In the coming days and weeks, House Democrats are expected to release the first version of their rules package for the next Congress, in which supporters hope that a version of the select committee on the Green New Deal will appear. "Whether we get it or we don't get it, the biggest thing we need to have is a movement backing this stuff," Chakrabarti said. "The movement needs to keep pushing it and making a plan to go all the way. If we don't get the committee, it's up to us to figure out how to do it."

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With a Green New Deal, Here's What the World Could Look Like for the Next Generation

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It's the spring of 2043, and Gina is graduating college with the rest of her class. She had a relatively stable childhood. Her parents availed themselves of some of the year of paid family leave they were entitled to, and after that she was dropped off at a free child care program.

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Green New Deal too Extreme?

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'A Little Extreme': University Of Miami Students Were For Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal Until They Found Out What's In It

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Neetu Chandak | Education and Politics Reporter

University of Miami students were supportive of Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal, but when they learned about the specifics of the proposal, their attitudes went in a different direction.

Campus Reform asked students whether they were for or against the deal, which aims to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

One student's initial perception of the deal was that it was "progressive" and would help "push the world forward."

"Just from knowing who's endorsed it and just, like, some little things, it sounds great," another student said.

"I think if we didn't do that, then we're gonna be killing ourselves basically, so we need to take care of ourselves," a different student said.

The Green New Deal includes goals like bringing greenhouse gas emissions down to net-zero within a decade and taking reliance off energy sources that are non-renewable or produce emissions.

Many students said the plan's timeliness was unfeasible, with one student adding the deal "sounds like a reach." (RELATED: Trump Tells Democrats To Embrace Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal)

"I think 10 years is a little extreme," another student said. "I feel like there's such a big, global market and economic impact of oil businesses, albeit it might not be good for the environment, but you can't deny there's a big economic impact to these companies."

They also answered questions about economic security for those not willing to work, which reportedly was originally in the deal's FAQ document, leaked by Ocasio-Cortez staffers. The document, however, was taken down and the resolution does not contain this provision.

Ocasio-Cortez has a major following among young voters, as well as a substantial social media presence. She garnered the second-most amount of media buzz within a month, coming in after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, according to Axios.
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'A Little Extreme': University Of Miami Students Were For Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal Until They Found Out What's In It

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Neetu Chandak | Education and Politics Reporter University of Miami students were supportive of Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal, but when they learned about the specifics of the proposal, their attitudes went in a different direction. Campus Reform asked students whether they were for or against the deal, which aims to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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Actual things Trump said

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Read the Transcript of Trump's Oval Office Address on the Border Wall

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President Donald Trump gave his first address from the Oval Office to pitch his border wall to the American public. Read the transcript of his speech.

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Response to Trump's Address

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Six key things to know about Trump's border wall speech

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Fact check: what the US president got wrong in his primetime address on the border wall

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Facts about wall progress

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A tentative deal reached on Monday to prevent another federal shutdown would include 55 miles of fencing along the United States border with Mexico. As of January, no new miles of barriers had been built so far under President Trump, though some construction is expected to begin this month.

Construction is slated to begin on 14 miles of new barriers in February, which would be the first extension of the current barriers.

Mr. Trump has said several times that the United States has constructed new walls. In January, he said that the administration had built a " brand new wall in San Diego." While several replacement barriers are being installed in Southern California, Customs and Border Protection had not announced any extensions of the current barriers there at the time.

So far, the most common design for recent construction on the border is steel slats that are 18- to 30-feet tall. This is often taller than the barriers they are replacing, which are also sometimes in disrepair. Mr. Trump has varied on his vision for the wall. In December, he promoted the steel slat-style barrier, while also saying parts of the wall would be all concrete.

The Congressional bill that funded recent wall construction states that only existing designs, such as the slat-style barrier, can be used. That means no money has been allotted for any construction based on Mr. Trump's prototypes of the new wall.

Sources: United States Customs and Border Protection, Department of Homeland Security and Government Accountability Office. | Note: Illustrations of wall types are diagrammatic and not to scale.

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The Border Wall: What Has Trump Built So Far?

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A tentative deal reached on Monday to prevent another federal shutdown would include 55 miles of fencing along the United States border with Mexico. As of January, no new miles of barriers had been built so far under President Trump, though some construction is expected to begin this month.

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Wall may hurt children

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The government shutdown has dragged on for two weeks due to President Donald Trump's insistence on border wall funding. And while Trump is characterizing the barrier as a non-negotiable tenet of border security, immigrant experts told HuffPost it's an ineffective solution that will endanger migrant families.

Advocates say the wall could force people to take dangerous journeys to cross the border or threaten parents and children's health by making them languish in unsanitary shelters near ports of entry. Experts are especially concerned about the well-being of migrant kids after a boy and a girl recently died in Border Patrol custody.

"Fortifying the border is just going to lead to more deaths," said Elissa Steglich, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin who teaches a clinic for immigrant families. "[It's] giving business to sophisticated smugglers who are going to be taking migrants through more perilous and life-threatening circumstances."

The number of migrant families being apprehended at the border reached record-high levels of more than 25,000 last month ― a number that's risen by more than 13 percent since 2013.

Experts say Trump's wall, which the Department Of Homeland Security estimated would amount to more than 330 miles of fencing, won't deter families from trying to cross the border even as it makes their journeys more dangerous.

"You can't deter away a refugee flow," said Jennifer Podkul, the director of policy for Kids in Need of Defense. "If someone thinks they are not going to live if they stay in their country of origin, they will go and try to find safety somewhere else."

In the '90s, the government built fences in border cities such as San Diego, California, and El Paso, Texas, which forced immigrants to make more perilous journeys through the mountains and desert. The number of migrants who died trying to reach the U.S. has skyrocketed and the bodies of nearly 3,000 migrants have been found in southern Arizona since 2000, according to the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner.

The number of families apprehended by Border Patrol while traveling through the El Paso sector, which includes a part of the Chihuahuan Desert, has risen by more than 1,500 percent over the past year because of policies that dissuade immigrants from using legal ports of entry and an increased military presence at the border. Advocates worry a border wall will only exacerbate the problem and lead to more health issues for children traveling through remote regions that lack access to medical services.

In December, 7-year-old Jackelin Caal Maquin traveled from Guatemala through the New Mexico desert with her father before dying from dehydration and shock in Border Patrol custody. After turning themselves in to Border Patrol agents, Caal and her father traveled three hours by bus to the nearest Border Patrol station in Lordsburg, New Mexico. Jackelin was later transported by helicopter to a children's hospital after having seizures.

"The U.S. government has made a strategic decision to force people to only cross in areas where death is more likely," said David Bier, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. "[A wall] will create more deaths in the desert and more people suffering on their way here."

Fortifying the border is just going to lead to more deaths. Elissa Steglich, University of Texas at Austin

Immigration experts say a border wall will also drive migrant families to use smugglers to navigate precarious border crossing routes. Some smugglers are involved in human trafficking or the drug trade, putting children in extremely dangerous situations. Steglich's child clients have told her stories of being forced into prostitution, made to carry drugs across the border or being locked in hotel rooms for weeks.

"Anytime you make it more difficult to cross, you empower cartel and smugglers and organized criminals who control the crossing points and the border," said Bier.

Experts also worry that a wall will cause to legally cross the border. further backlogs at legal ports of entry, where some migrants have been waiting for months to cross the border due to the Trump administration's crackdown on asylum-seekers. As a result, thousands of immigrants who arrived in Tijuana, Mexico, with a migrant caravan last month are languishing in sometimes unsanitary shelters for

Others have tried to enter the U.S. between ports of entry, which can be especially dangerous for children. Last month, two Guatemalan teens injured themselves after climbing the border wall separating Arizona from Mexico and falling 18 feet . Other migrants, including children, have been tear-gassed or hit with rubber bullets while trying to cross the border illegally.

Immigration experts say the money Trump is requesting to build a wall would be better spent on more Border Patrol agents to process migrants, a more efficient immigration court system and technology to detect drugs and weapons at the border.

Steglich says that in addition to forcing people into physically dangerous situations, the wall enforces a dangerous mentality that migrants should be treated like criminals instead of humans.

"If you are looking at a migrant as a national security threat, you're going to be more callous," she said. "You're not going to be as attentive to the humanitarian needs of a mother or child before you."

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Trump's Border Wall Could Result In More Child Deaths, Advocates Worry

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The government shutdown has dragged on for two weeks due to President Donald Trump's insistence on border wall funding. And while Trump is characterizing the barrier as a non-negotiable tenet of border security, immigrant experts told HuffPost it's an ineffective solution that will endanger migrant families.

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Trump's wall makes kids safer

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President Donald Trump is now blaming Democrats for the deaths of two migrant children who died in federal custody earlier this month.

In his first public comment on the two tragedies Saturday, Trump tied the deaths to the political impasse over funding for the federal government, saying in a series of tweets that Democrats are to blame for refusing his $5-billion pet project to build new walls along the southern border.

The two young children died in Border Patrol custody over the span of just a few weeks. The latest was an 8-year-old from Guatemala who died on Christmas Eve. Medical examiners say the boy, Felipe Gomez Alonzo, tested positive for influenza. Weeks earlier, 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin died of dehydration after being detained in New Mexico with her father.

Trump's comments come as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen finishes up a two-day tour of the border to inspect the conditions at processing and detention facilities for migrants in both El Paso, Texas, and Yuma, Arizona.

Any deaths of children or others at the Border are strictly the fault of the Democrats and their pathetic immigration policies that allow people to make the long trek thinking they can enter our country illegally. They can't. If we had a Wall, they wouldn't even try! The two.....
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 29, 2018

...children in question were very sick before they were given over to Border Patrol. The father of the young girl said it was not their fault, he hadn't given her water in days. Border Patrol needs the Wall and it will all end. They are working so hard & getting so little credit!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 29, 2018

Already Border Patrol has moved to step up medical screenings for children since the two deaths.

And amid the growing scrutiny,CBP has also shifted its policy of holding families until Immigration and Customs Enforcement takes over custody, as Vox's Dara Lind reports. The new plan allows agents at the border to release families directly if they've been held for more than a few days, which could leave hundreds of families dropped around El Paso and around the Rio Grande Valley.

Deaths along the border have been a problem for a long time

The tragedy of the two children's deaths only amplifies what has been true along the border for a long time: The journeys that families take are often extremely dangerous, and deaths along the border are not at all uncommon.

By official counts, more than 7,000 migrants have died trying to cross the southwest border since 1998,but it's likely those statistics are dramatically lower than the reality.

And for years, advocates have complained of the conditions at Border Patrol facilities, where they say migrants are forced into excessively cold holding cells. In the last year alone, six adults have died in Border Patrol custody, the Washington Post report.

But as Lind notes, the two children's deaths are the latest signal that the immigration system isn't designed to deal with families crossing into the US:

That goes double for Customs and Border Protection, which oversees Border Patrol as well as ports of entry. CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan told the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month that "the infrastructure is not compatible with the reality" of who is getting apprehended - essentially admitting that his agency was ill-equipped to take care of the people currently entering the US.

Meanwhile, administration officials, as well as the president's allies, have tried to spin the sting of deaths as a rare occurrence. DHS counters that before the two migrant deaths this month, no child has died in Border Patrol custody in nearly a decade. On Fox News Friday, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) went as far as praising Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for its treatment of immigrants.

"These are the only two children that have died, certainly in recent memory," he said. "Considering what does happen in housing projects ... I think ICE has an excellent record."

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Trump is using the deaths of 2 migrant children to push for his border wall

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President Donald Trump is now blaming Democrats for the deaths of two migrant children who died in federal custody earlier this month. In his first public comment on the two tragedies Saturday, Trump tied the deaths to the political impasse over funding for the federal government, saying in a series of tweets that Democrats are to blame for refusing his $5-billion pet project to build new walls along the southern border.

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Coyotes and children

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"They call me the Wolf," said the 25-year-old human smuggler sitting in front of me, sipping a Coke and stepping away for frequent cellphone calls.

"Everybody says we're the problem, but it's the reverse. The gringos don't want to get their hands dirty. So I bring them the Mexicans and Central Americans to do the dirty work for them," he says, smiling.

U.S. authorities claim that human smugglers like El Lobo (the wolf) are at the heart of the current border crisis because they have facilitated the travels of the 57,000 unaccompanied immigrant children who've been apprehended in South Texas since October.

"We cross them in inner tubes. If they're 3 or 4 years old, I have to cross them myself. I can't let them drown," he says.

The Wolf wears Reeboks with pink soles, a black polo shirt and a thin mustache. He's handsome in a bad-boy sort of way. We sit in an open-air lunchroom on a back street in Matamoros, across the river from Brownsville, Texas. He's explaining his rates: $2,500 from Chetumal, Mexico, all the way to Matamoros - 1,200 miles. The actual river crossing is another $500 to $1,000, "depending on the size of the kid."

The Wolf says he used to smuggle adults, but now he specializes in children because it's easier and just as profitable. First, his organization can take a group of Central American children in a bus through Mexico and more easily evade Mexican authorities, who are looking for adult immigrants to deport.

Second, once he crosses the Rio Grande he doesn't have to continue with the group to San Antonio or Houston - the most perilous part of the journey. "Children just give themselves up [to the Border Patrol]," he explains. "Adults have to flee."

In low tones, he confides that he is not part of the Gulf Cartel or Los Zetas, which control all river access on the Mexican side of the lower Rio Grande Valley. Like all freelance smugglers, to use the river he has to pay the cartel un derecho de piso, a user's fee, of 10 percent of the contract.

Federal border authorities demonize coyotes as ruthless criminals who kidnap, rape and abandon their clients. But it's more complicated than that. There are, to be sure, bad coyotes who do abuse their clients. But, as in any business, not everyone is the same.

Five years ago, I interviewed a petite, 29-year-old female coyote who worked out of Piedras Negras, Mexico, who was in high demand for her considerate treatment of her clients. This came to me from a local priest, who counted her among his congregation.

"Being known in the communities and having a good reputation matters," says David Spener, a sociologist at Trinity University in San Antonio, who has studied human smuggling networks along the U.S.-Mexico border. "I mean, would any parent in their right mind want to leave their child in the hands of Los Zetas?"

I ask El Lobo about the terrible reputation coyotes have in the media.

"We specialize in smuggling young kids - 13 and below," he explains. "The youngest we've smuggled was 2 years old. We have to make sure nothing happens to them, that they eat, that they're protected and they arrive well."

He continues, "We try to treat our clients well, and this helps to get us repeat business. If you have a good reputation, you get more work."

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Who Is Smuggling Immigrant Children Across The Border?

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"They call me the Wolf," said the 25-year-old human smuggler sitting in front of me, sipping a Coke and stepping away for frequent cellphone calls. "Everybody says we're the problem, but it's the reverse. The gringos don't want to get their hands dirty.

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Historical info about walls

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Why humans build walls to keep people out—or in

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Humans have built walls to keep others out, or in, for at least 12,000 years. Why is wall building coming back into fashion now?